Ranger22 Sep 2006

Well you've got to draw a line between actual criticism and sheer rudeness. For sure "this poem is shit" really isn't any good to man nor beast, but I always get confused when I leave a critique and get accused of rudeness (it doesn't happen often, but once in a blue moon someone does). I've never, as far as I can remember, ever said anything outright offensive. But even so, coming up against a really rude and arrogant critic can give a more effective motivational push than anything else. It worked for me - I joined this site years ago and had many an argument with a chap called poetandknowit (whose 'critiques' revolved around laughing at me and anything I said, with a certain degree of justification; I wrote some real crap back then - as opposed to mild crap now) which ultimately resulted in me leaving until I could come up with something good enough to shut him up. Maybe I'm just excessively competitive, but that sort of barracking gave a real humility blow; something many 16 year-olds need (I certainly did).

There isn't a set way to write 'a poem'. If you choose a particular form, it's usually best to stick to it otherwise you'll get smartarses like myself going 'ooh, that's not a sonnet!' ;-) The key is to figure out what you want to say, and then how to say it in a way which is interesting. A good poem, in my view, will be so easy to read aloud that it almost seems as though the words were meant to be said with each other. That's where structure and metre comes into play - and yes, it does take a bit of practise and understanding to get underway, but hey, we're on a public forum; we're all amateurs otherwise we'd be getting published in '101 Of The Nation's Favourite Poems'. If you consider what you write to be poetry, it's poetry. If I don't think it's poetry, I'll call it something else. I have plenty of respect for people who write devotional poetry (like you seem to do) if they can get it write - religious 'praise' poems are difficult to do without making the nonbeliever or the sort-of-believer (like myself) wince. Keep writing :-)