Simplicity in Poetry

[milo]

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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This makes perfect reasonable sense to me.

Writing a children's poem is not "knowing your audience" it is writing a type of poem - a children's poem. This includes all the criteria that goes with writing a children's poem.

the assumption is that by not knowing your audience you would simply write the best poem you could. If knowing your audience causes any deviation from this the poem is then inferior. If it doesn't then it was just a distraction. Since you would naturally already write to the best of your ability without knowing your audience, it can only ever produce a negative result. This is why it is terrible advice.

And finally, the concept that you are already writing for an audience no matter what excludes the advice from having any value as well - if you were already doing it unbeknownst to yourself how could knowing it produce any value whatsoever,

What would change your mind about this?

A logical argument showing any benefit to "know your audience"

As I mentioned before, writers do not have actual audiences as writing makes for poor performance art so I am assuming we are talking about consumers.