Poemranker [Replying] Sat Apr 20 01:24:42 PDT 2024

Replying to a comment on:

There is a roadmap face in hiding (velvet and nameless) There are unpainted moments, a movie called hope

20-May-04/6:29 AM

"i leave a lot up to interpretation" is the buncombe dodge of an inveterate guffer. The only way you could say something like that and expect to keep even a shred of dignity would be to actually deliberately include a lot of things to be interpreted in your poem. And let's be up-front about this: it's as obvious as my own left buttock that you haven't. You've plopped down the first dozen words that occurred to you and told yourself you're being clever and ambiguous. Bow'ls. Hey, you wanna learn some new concepts? How about the interworking of different parts of a poem, maybe? Some consistency of imagery and/or metaphor?

"i leave a lot up to interpretation." Bow'ls! say I. I get all flummoxed and constipated just trying to imagine where you learned to parrot such a useless phrase. Yes, a poet can leave a lot up to interpretation, and some very famous poets (i.e., W.C.Williams) made whole careers out of this sort of addleheaded guffing. But first you need to be a halfway decent poet, which means if you start your poem with an image like a roadmap, it has to go somewhere. Your "velvet" might work, if you gave more of a hint that the roadmap is worn down to vellum-softness by use - but you won't; you'll expect me to do all the associative work that you haven't done. And then I'll run into "nameless", "unpainted", and "a movie" right after that, none of them building on each other or even fitting very well with each other, and I'll reach the correct conclusion, as I have, that you have no idea what you're talking about. In short, _______.

Hey, and thanks for not talking down to me about what poetry is and isn't in the future! Have a nice one!

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