Andrey's questions about poems (split from the intro thread)

[AndreyGaganov]

What exactly did you expect? This topic is simultaneously loaded and fundamental -- again, like shouting out how you don't believe in God in a church, or how you don't believe in evolution in an appropriate convention. And of course, all of us would stick it out to the end: again, simultaneously loaded and fundamental.

I'll leave this one well enough alone before I dig a bigger hole for myself. 

But really, the least of what you could have learned here is this: read. Read, read, read. Read poems, read crits. Read classics, read modern shit. You may not be a "learning by doing" type of guy, but the aspect of poetry you seem so eager to *deny* is a craft, not a science, which can only be learned by doing. My suggestions are this own site's "poems that you love" (and even the spotlit pigs, perhaps), plus a focus on a selection of artists across different periods, places, etc. I've already recommended a ton of artists, so perhaps you should start there -- I think Shakespeare (annotated, since his language and referents and junk are old), Eliot, Plath, Ted Hughes, and Louise Gluck, along with both Gummere's and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf? maybe add to that Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Tennyson's Idylls of the King ----- although overall, others' suggestions may be more open, I'm no professional educator.

I'll do what I can.