Simplicity in Poetry

[milo]

honesty I tried to figure out  WHAT WAS GOING ON in the posts above but I couldn't quite figure it out... something about motivations for poetry.... well, I will say this. A lot of people write poems that no one will ever read. I wrote many before deciding to share them, and I have some that I've chosen not to share.... so there are many reasons to write poetry.... but writing just to write certainly is one.


and, even I like breadsticks.

I firmly believe most write just to write. After its written is a different story as there really is no end game for poetry so many who have been writing long enough do explore the question of what comes after this but the writing precedes it.

[rowens]

I prefer complex poetry. But you can take a class in Complex Poetry and come out writing complex poetry. It's not as impressive. I prefer solitary reading and personal epiphanies and outbursts. I'm not against reading everyone and everything. I just prefer no guidelines when I'm reading and writing. I want to be attracted and repulsed on my own, based on my own levels of understanding, for good or for ill. There's no literary establishment I'm rebelling against, or trying to buddy up with or impress. If I don't write well nobody will want to read what I write. But I write as though they will.

[next]

...
 my hypothetical [which was only a hypothetical] was just to indicate that there is a certain binary system [minimally] to writing poems and that the other part of the binary isn't an abstract thing made objective, but rather an inter-subjectivity. what i actually find more interesting is the question of why there is such a fight against the idea that we write for others?
...

As has been said: You're your own audience because you read what you are writing.

There are always words that get stuck in your head that don't make it to the paper. In a day or a week you'll see some of them. 
You need others to see the rest. You think about that as you write.

A week from now you find a flaw, a month from then you change it back, a year from then you ask:  why did I put that back?
An audience of future selves you can't help but think about.

Say you're a lesbian, you're writing a love poem,  and it's 30 years ago (or now).  A woman writing a love poem to another woman... 
so you decide to use the genderless second tense, to omit purses, blouses, and labia. You think about your classmates, your school principle,
your mom.

Say you're Pablo Neruda in Chile writing political poetry... you choose to encrypt your words in metaphor until you escape.  Then you write freely,
then you return, then you are murdered.

Or you're writing  a poem with metric feet and you notice you've used "garage". And remember that in Britain the accent falls on the other syllable. 
So you use another word.

Deciding to write a poem about a pedophile in the 1st person.

Whether (or how many times) to use "fuck".

Picking an "interesting" title.


------------------------------
Jane Hirshfield:

" There is also the matter of connection. You can’t write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world,
without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other. You can’t read a poem—a good poem, at least—
by someone else, and not recognize in their experience your own face. This is a continual reminder of amplitude, intimacy, and tenderness. The slightest
dust-mote of the psyche altered is felt... there is magnitude in an altered comma. Art is a field glass for concentrating the knowledge and music of
connection. It allows us to feel more acutely and accurately and more tenderly what is already present. And then it expands that, expands us. "

[Lizzie]

"Simplicity" is like "good"; both terms are too subjective and too abstract to be useful.

What's simple to some people isn't to others. It comes down to your choice of audience.

If your intended audience is familiar with Greek mythology, Greek gods can vastly simplify your poetry.
The single word "Sisyphus" (which still works) easily takes the place of 10 to 30 other words.

Using uncommon terminology limits your audience, appealing to everyone narrows your subject matter.
Can't have it all.

Well, you've got me there, I did use Sisyphean in one of my poems here, didn't I? But, you're right that I did have this forum in mind as an audience, and I knew it would be easily understood.

I think it's true that what's common to one person wouldn't be to another.

Words can be such paltry things, eh?

[next]

"Simplicity" is like "good"; both terms are too subjective and too abstract to be useful.

What's simple to some people isn't to others. It comes down to your choice of audience.

If your intended audience is familiar with Greek mythology, Greek gods can vastly simplify your poetry.
The single word "Sisyphus" (which still works) easily takes the place of 10 to 30 other words.

Using uncommon terminology limits your audience, appealing to everyone narrows your subject matter.
Can't have it all.

Well, you've got me there, I did use Sisyphean in one of my poems here, didn't I? But, you're right that I did have this forum in mind as an audience, and I knew it would be easily understood.

I think it's true that what's common to one person wouldn't be to another.

Words can be such paltry things, eh?

   The fault, dear lizziep, is not in our words;
   But in ourselves, that we are unaware.

[shemthepenman]

indeed [i think]. each subjectivity, or 'individual', already hides a multiplicity. one need never be read and yet still write to be read. or, to put it a better way, one will write 'as if' the poem is, or is going to be, read. it may not be a dramatically conscious choice, hardly conscious at all. . . one can always say to oneself "i don't care if anyone reads this"; but not caring is not the same. even if i were to write a poem down in a hole at the end of the garden, burning it on completion, it doesn't mean that i have abandoned all concept of communication. i will have, after all, and at the most basic level, used letters identifiable to 'others'. these letters have the potential to be transferred, communicated. and to be sure, the mere fact that the language i use to translate raw sense data into coherent thoughts is fundamentally gregarious means that my individual thoughts are gregarious in nature. for one to genuinely write for oneself, one would have to be unaware that the marks one was making on the paper [or screen] had this potential. but this is at the most basic level, and in this area there may be some room for manoeuvre; but once one acknowledges a complex system [language/poetry], and plugs into that system, one has no more recourse to "i'm on my own". . . not only that, but one cannot then say "the system, itself, is unitary", i.e. it's just me and the system. the best one can say, in terms of writing, is "i personally enjoy the process, but the process would never get going without the concept of potential communication. . . i cannot think without it". enjoyment may be my primary experience of the process but there are value judgements within that system: "that's good", and as soon as there are value judgements based around a communal system, the enjoyment is already multiplied. i suppose, in a way, what this is describing is a kind of Freudian super-ego crossed with a Sartrean Other, with a bit of Deleuzean over-coding, for good measure.
sometimes i sit alone and strum on my guitar [oh dear, how sad]; if i hit a bum note i hear it, but i hear it through The Other's ear. When i read a typo i've made, i read it on behalf of The Other. this doesn't mean that experimentation is out the window. this doesn't mean i cannot write some strange nonsense that no one likes or understands, and yet still like what i've written, myself. it doesn't mean one cannot be creative or create something within, or along the edge of, the system—or even outside in relation to it. it simply, and somewhat ironically, means "know thyself" [in the Hobbesian sense]. our poetry can only improve knowing that our relationship with poetry is a symbiotic* relationship between ourselves and everyone else. and, as with any symbiotic relationship there are three types: mutualism, commensalism, and parasitic. i think, although we would like our poetry to be based on mutualism, it is more often than not commensalism; furthermore, the notion that one is separate from the symbiosis is parasitical in nature. yep, i'm suggesting that those who say "i write for myself" or ". . .for poetry" are parasites that's a bit harsh. and not strictly true. they benefit from feeding on a communal language while denying credit to the community.
but what is this "for myself"? surely, we all understand language has the potential to be "for others", but this isn't how we are using the statement "i write for myself". when we say "i write for myself" we mean that when we write 1) we do it for the personal pleasure of writing, and 2) we are unconcerned if what we write is appreciated by others. i'd say, it's too late for all that. you're already a cog in a much larger machine the moment you decide to write a poem, regardless how you feel about it. but at least those who say "i write for myself" could have some "for themselves" benefit—we understand 'for' differently, here—in the therapeutic sense. "i write for myself. it helps me relax. it gets it off my chest. i feel better." etc. but to say "i write for poetry" is equal to saying "i consciously and explicitly write for others and just can't bring myself to admit it in so many words." to write 'for poetry' is writing for the most specific audience, i.e. those that actually read poetry [i think they're all on this site. . . about 20 at most] this position is psychologically fascinating. what is it about writing for others that is so shameful? simplistically, it seems like a holding on to the romantic and mystical ideas about art. that somehow the artist is a sealed unit of abstract creativity. the truth is, the abstract is the least creative thing about art. because, as before, the subject is already a multiplicity. the physical is individual the abstract is communal.
how does complexity vs. simplicity fit into all this? so, on the side of simplicity, we have explicit communication. on the complexity side, a going towards writing for oneself. we have, however, established that we cannot expect to use a communal system of language and write exclusively for ourselves [no matter how we romanticise the process]. even if we say "it is only for me to read"—therapeutically—we have to still admit a psychological state [the subject qua multiplicity] whereby the potential to be read by others is already part of the assemblage of writing. therefore, we might say, the degrees of complexity merely narrow the practical potential—not potential per se—for communication. the trouble is, up to now, we have used communication in a very vague way. are all poems really about communicating ideas? code poems are somewhat unique in so far as they are written with the intention to communicate something very clear and definite. good poems, on the other hand, communicate a sense, or even, a sensation. there is a beauty in simplicity. the phrase "i love you", well placed, can communicate so much—even the sense of the beauty of simplicity, itself.
one of my favourite poems is 'echo's bones' [personally, i think Beckett is one of the most underrated poets and overrated playwrights] and 'the vulture' begins it all with:

dragging his hunger through the sky
of my skull shell of sky and earth

stooping to the prone who must
soon take up their life and walk

mocked by a tissue that may not serve
till hunger earth and sky be offal

here we have a beautiful and simple poem. there is no code, or cipher. it doesn't use obscure words or references. is Beckett writing for himself? one should hope not because it looks like a skill. he knows exactly what he is doing to/for the reader with laser precision. like a painter knows how to paint something beautiful [or ugly]. it'll irritate the poetry logicians, not least because he knows it will. it's simple but not shallow or blunt. it is conscious of an audience because it doesn't patronise the audience. just because it has an audience in mind doesn't mean that it isn't honest or true or expressive. and just because it acknowledges 'being read' doesn't mean it is any less creative and unique. in fact, one will often find that poets who claim to write for themselves actually write terrible poetry, interesting, but terrible. and the other ones, the one's that write the crack, lie about it and say "i write for poetry"

[Lizzie]

I prefer complex poetry. But you can take a class in Complex Poetry and come out writing complex poetry. It's not as impressive. I prefer solitary reading and personal epiphanies and outbursts. I'm not against reading everyone and everything. I just prefer no guidelines when I'm reading and writing. I want to be attracted and repulsed on my own, based on my own levels of understanding, for good or for ill. There's no literary establishment I'm rebelling against, or trying to buddy up with or impress. If I don't write well nobody will want to read what I write. But I write as though they will.

What's so horrible about having to learn to write poetry and learning from other people? If you're reading poetry, you're learning how to write it -- you're learning what you like and don't like. Personally, I pick up styles from others easily and often mimic people, if only subconsciously. I've read books that explicitly tell young writers to copy poems that they like in order to learn how to write in their style. I think that imitation is a part of learning, and we're always learning. I read things and I think, "That's a good idea. I'm going to do that too." I think that's part of building your own style, gleaning a bit here and a bit there. Certainly, I try to think things up on my own, but that's usually just the content, the style I rely on those who have gone before to teach me. 

I hear you saying that you want to build your own style, and I think that's very ambitious of you. There's a certain elegance to an idea like that, almost the ideal of the rugged individual making his own way in life without needing things from others, entirely self-sufficient. I cannot write like that and expect to be any good. Maybe that's the difference between us, I want to "be good" and you're more willing to take risks and scrape your knees a bit? But, then, if I take notes from you on that, am I not making my own way in the poetry world? I'm confusing myself now.

[rowens]

I take poetry seriously. Like I'm writing directly to God. Say God is your 40 year old girlfriend, and some nights while she's at work, you get drunk and fuck her 19 year old daughter. To me writing poetry is trying to explain to God why I fucked his 19 year old daughter while I was drunk. Nobody can do this thing for me. I have to do it myself.

[rowens]

I don't care about language or the mathematics of poetic quality. I care about four things: God, Death, Fucking, and the various degrees of being able to Shit. I don't even care much about eating, it's the digestive spark that affects me most. My poetry is various degrees of my digestion. Me digesting things. I'm not giving birth to angels, I'm digesting things. If I don't want anybody to help me write my poems, who really cares in the long run?

[ellajam]

OMG, Rowen. Long live the King of the Overshare. i

ha, he's got plenty of princes ad princesses in his realm.

I don't care about language or the mathematics of poetic quality. I care about four things: God, Death, Fucking, and the various degrees of being able to Shit.

I don't even care much about eating, it's the digestive spark that affects me most. My poetry is various degrees of my digestion. Me digesting things. I'm not giving birth to angels, I'm digesting things. If I don't want anybody to help me write my poems, who really cares in the long run?

I agree with you about the digesting.

[Lizzie]

 If I don't want anybody to help me write my poems, who really cares in the long run?

I don't ever have a problem with other peoples' writing process.