Simplicity in Poetry

[cvanshelton]

I did not mean to insinuate anyone was a money grubber.
Still, I do not believe having an audience (more accurately a consumer) in mind in any way improves a poem?  So what is the benefit?  The goal needs to be to produce a better poem. Then, if you post it on your blog or submit to a journal or (and this is a best case scenario) post it here, if it is great your audience will find it. This brings me right round circle to my original point about knowing your audience being worthless and, perhaps even counterproductive. Certainly poor advice for a poet.

I am so confused. How does having an audience in mind become pandering? Pandering is selling out and usually a despicable thing. How does being thoughtful about your audience lead to writing a bad poem? How can you even use words like "good" and "bad" or "better" without having those values defined by someone outside your self? The very essence of writing a "good" or "bad" poem seems to intrinsically necessitate (a priori) influence outside yourself. So if you are writing to a standard that you did not just come up with outside of any influence whatsoever, you are writing to an audience. That audience is the set of those that share the same poetry value (whether they know it or not). The other thing that just stumps me is how it is in any way limiting for me if I want to write a poem for children (I define my audience), and that leads me to write in a certain voice or meter, to use certain imagery or rhymes or words. If I am writing to kids, I probably won't use the word "ontology". I don't see that as limiting, rather focusing. Please help me see the reason in that. I just can't get from A to B there.

I also don't understand the "your audience will find it" perspective. Maybe that is just me, and if it is, it is. I never found that to be the case with anything in life.

I get that I'm the new guy and inexperienced and don't know my way around here very well. I don't mean to cause more problems or be obtuse. I just don't understand. Maybe that is ok. Cheers!

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I want that work to be accessible and compelling to people.

Why do we post here? It's so that the poetry can be as beautiful as it can be, and that implies a viewer. Why change poems to be anything if there's no reader?

This makes perfect reasonable sense to me.