Sometimes I Bleed

[Todd]

"but no more so than when I read most of the poetry written by others here without having a damn clue what you are all writing about."

My question would be, if that is what you thought, why would you emulate it? Poetry is not meant to be written in a vague and obscure way, simply for the sake of being vague and obscure. Sometimes poetry appears that way because of the difficulty of the concept being dealt with, and the lack in the writer of the skills necessary to make those concepts clear. I know one of the pieces to which you refer, and it was probably an error to give it a pass as we did. I thought about critiquing it further, but the author was so aggressive in defending it, I didn't see the point. So even when we appear to give something a pass, though it makes no sense at all, it may simply be a case of seeing no point in doing so. So it is like, "OK, whatever".

Also, please feel free to point out anytime I write something that appears pointless or senseless. I can only speak for myself, but I am not here to pretend to depth through being obscure. If what I write is not clear, then I have failed, and that is on me, not the reader.

Dale

Agree Dale. A lot of good points.

Sometimes things aren't clear because the reader doesn't get what you're doing most of the time the execution has failed. I do think most people do try to workshop their poems which means no matter how far along they might be they are usually trying new things (otherwise it's boring). That implies risk. It's better to commit to producing good work and realizing that a lot of what we do is false starts.

I know that's a hard thing for the ego, but it's healthy (IMO)