Are you a good judge of your poetry

[Todd]

I've noticed in the last few years I've written some poems and thought man this one is going to be really good. I've written others and nearly thrown them away thinking they were awful. Here's the thing, the reaction to these poems has been the opposite of what my expectations were. The "good" ones were met with a lukewarm response, and the "bad" ones were received enthusiastically.

To me that presents a couple of possibilities:

1) I'm a poor judge of my work.
2) The poems that i write and connect with best are not the ones I'm best equipped to write. Meaning, maybe I'm a different type of writer than I think I am and I should explore different content.

Just some thoughts. Does anyone else experience anything like this?

[cidermaid]

Deffinatly agree with this one.
I find it incredibly hard to self monitor the quality of my work and I would 100% say that both of the possibliities
you present would be aplicable to my experiances so far. The poems I most feel connected too...or I think I've worked, many clever little extras into are the ones which are flops and the ones I've slungdown in a almost flippant and casual way, are the one that excite others....It would seam that the more work I put into something the more likely it is to be rubbish. I'm beggining to think that I am killing them with over attention. Like a parent that smothers a child and over protects it and that what i need to do is be less precious and more relaxed with my poetry.

I notice a similar principle at work when I am reading the work of others, in that the type of poem that i most readily identify (and get) are often not remotly like the leanings of my own style.
Do you think it is a case of opposites attract?...

[rowens]

I don't think of my poetry as art. I don't think of myself as an artist. I use poetic tools to make poems, but that's incidental. That's why when someone criticizes one of my poems, I try to explain what I'm trying to do, as opposed to what I'm supposed to do. I don't get much out of structuring a poem in any traditional form; when I'm doing it, I get bored; and I usually only finish a poem like that if someone I like says they like that kind of poem. There is 'verse' poetry, or 'prose' poetry, and so on. And there is 'poetry', encompassing all of those things. Critics have creative power of their own: They can create opinions and perspectives to influence how others read something. Critics can keep popular poems relevant and in circulation, or can put famous poems out of favor. The wars of opinions between critics and critics, poets and critics, and poets and poets are what intellectuals enjoy. It's part of the spirit. We could just as well say that everyone's welcome to their opinions and practices; but we don't. By "intellectuals", I mean people "in the know", whatever that means. It is philosophy, that's what it amounts to. Like political, social, artistic, religious philosophy. You form your own, and you work with what you believe, and you counter others' opinions with your own. I think it's very simple. I like some of my poems better than others, but those are for purely personal reasons. I have no real opinions about whether my poems are any good or not. You have to have a strong instinct, when you're doing something like making a poem. If you're in the know about the schools of thought and opinion of the philosophy of poetry, then you're going to know who's going to hate what and why. So you can write for your audience. But if you are writing for no particular audience, there's no use beating your head against the wall trying to please everyone. Just educate yourself as much as you can, realize how and why you are affected by the poetry you read, and use your instincts to write for yourself. Then let people critique it.

[Leanne]

Short answer, Todd: no.

I pretty much despise everything I write, but I've managed to train myself to a point where I can at least accept that not everyone agrees with me about that. Still, sometimes I'm shocked by what people actually think is decent -- and fairly often, I'm confused when something I think might not be utter crap turns out to be, in fact, utter garbage in the minds of the discerning public

[rowens]

The way I see it, I construct myself in poems that are autobiographical. The "I" is always a persona. And I often do construct feelings contrary to what I believe to be "my own", and actually experience them. For me, poetry is far deeper, and more vast an area than what just goes on paper. I guess the easiest way to say it here is that I take Shelley's "legislators of the world" painfully seriously, and literally. I prefer lyric poems to dramatic ones. Though I do like fiction, and the creation of characters. I like to write fiction, and with poems I'm more prone to use the first-person "I" than I am in stories or novels. There's a lot you can learn from yourself, whether you're using the "I", or conjuring other characters. As much as I'd like to believe in Platonic forms, I don't take any reality for granted, and that gives me a lot of work to do when constructing realities for poems, or anything else.

[billy]

i think most of my stuff is crap but secretly want it to be great
like others. stuff i like is usually slated and stuff i see as bad is usually liked.
i'm thinking of aiming at being mediocre
i put lots of my experiences into some of my poems but they're not who i am.

[Todd]

Deffinatly agree with this one.
I find it incredibly hard to self monitor the quality of my work and I would 100% say that both of the possibliities
you present would be aplicable to my experiances so far. The poems I most feel connected too...or I think I've worked, many clever little extras into are the ones which are flops and the ones I've slungdown in a almost flippant and casual way, are the one that excite others....It would seam that the more work I put into something the more likely it is to be rubbish. I'm beggining to think that I am killing them with over attention. Like a parent that smothers a child and over protects it and that what i need to do is be less precious and more relaxed with my poetry.

I notice a similar principle at work when I am reading the work of others, in that the type of poem that i most readily identify (and get) are often not remotly like the leanings of my own style.
Do you think it is a case of opposites attract?...

cidermaid: I like the comparison to over parenting. I think that's pretty true. And yes for me and other's work I have a little bit of the opposites attract thing going. When people make something I struggle with seem effortless or when I wish I'd written the poem I tend to be drawn to it.

Like Leanne I do still start with a lot of skepticism when I write something, but occasionally I start to believe and it's usually misplaced and I'm wrong.

Sometimes it isn't over parenting its I think that I'm asking the readers to make too many leaps...I do this one poem for instance where I blend Lolita with Red Riding Hood and the wolf with Humbert H. So, I'm already asking my readers to do a lot. Here's the opening:

Hunger is a breathless dance of teeth—
the smell of bricks—
I stink of it.

So, here's where I might have went overboard. The wolf is the speaker and I allude to bricks in line two. I had a reader friend scream at me after struggling with it for awhile: "Are you alluding to the three little pigs?" I was. She told me I can't do that I'm asking the readers to go too far. I'm not sure if that's true but it could be one of my issues the poems may be too layered for clarity, or I may be executing the idea poorly.

[cidermaid]

Hunger is a breathless dance of teeth—
the smell of bricks—
I stink of it.

See here we go again...I really like that and totally get the wolf / piggy thing.
If you had not mentioned it I would probably have taken it as haveing a deeper under thing going on...perhaps a metaphor for a financial institution.
I'm not sure my brain is wired quite right though

[Todd]

I doubt any of our brains are wired right.

[Bronte]

yes I know when I write a good one ..


about five in the last three thousand, and even then the fools out there never knew greatness when I stuffed it under their noses rotf--

[billy]

we could be poetry twins, cos thats me.

hi bronte