zodiac15 Jun 2005

You seem to be under the impression that to make a poem affecting, you just need to write about something terrible and affecting. Or, at least, you seem to think that if you read a poem about, oh, the Challenger explosion and aren't moved, it's because you're just insensate to the tragedy of poor Christie McAuliffe thinking she's just getting this free ride into space and then all of a sudden she's a gas drifting slowly down into the open mouth of some giant Atlantic carp.

In other words, you're not getting it at all.

In other words, the following poem should be the most moving you've ever read:

"ON CRUSHING THE HEADS OF KITTENS INTO THE MOUTHS OF STARVING ORPHANS

....Splat!
.....Ummmm...."

All the rest of your so-called points (not in the poem, you ninny, in your comment immediately above this one) are barely worth discussing. Here's the short version:

1) Nobody's saying they only want to feel sorry for one family or ignore the scope of the tragedy and everything. But also nobody's managing to incorporate their own experiences or do put themselves in the place, or anything else to get a leg up on this poem. And why should they (your customers, as it were,) be required to do all this work anyway? Surely it's worth having people read your poem to put a little bit more effort into it yourself and make it effective on its own?

2) As far as "this poem is written by me for me" goes - well, that's poemranker's commonest lie. Notice you're posting these poems on POEMRANKER and asking (if only by implication) for people to read them and give their opinions.

3) Try to imagine you've never heard of Rwanda or Tutsis or anything else. Actually, I'll make it easier:

"Tlatelolco (free verse) by zodiac

After they bazooka'ed the residencia
we all turned out in the big
Plaza of Three Cultures
in Mexico City to agitate.
The guardia civil was wearing
white gloves to identify themselves.
Afterwards, we rode trains
out to the ocean."

Well? Moved? No, because you don't know or remember what happened at Tlatelolco just before the 68(?) Olympic Games there. What if I told you over three thousand were killed and taken in freight cars and helicopters to the ocean, and that parents still alive in Mexico don't know if their children died that night? If you feel something now, it's from the event, not the poem. If you don't feel something, it's because it's simply not a good poem. You see how that works? Don't you think it was my responsibility as writer to make the poem moving or carry the feeling of Tlatelolco even for people who didn't know about (or appreciate) the actual event? No? Then sorry, there's nothing I can do to help you.