[Dick Morgan]

Kevin, there is so much good red meat here I'll have to answer it later. The point you proved is that you consider the "Sphere" your personal thing.

Later. dear,

Dick

I’m trying to follow the arguments here, and I find it difficult. Someone made a joke about how Billy Collins’ poetry being simple enough for Bush to read was what led to his being appointed, someone extended that to Rumsfeld, someone rejoindered with Clinton references, someone implied that Bush and not the librarian of the Library of Congress appointed Collins (or at least influenced him or her), and the thread appears to be spiraling away from the original topic faster than…[insert your favorite speed metaphor here]. The restaurant analogy, while apt, also can lead to diversion. Since this seems to be a thread about poetry, it would be nice to not degenerate into political tit for tat.

I’m not sure I understand the original premise, except that it appears to be that poetry should be both accessible and well crafted. I suppose corollary arguments could be that inaccessible poetry is not necessarily well-crafted, and accessible poetry is not necessarily poorly-crafted. If this is what the original poster was trying to say, and perhaps did not say in the most well-crafted and accessible prose, I don’t think anyone can argue against it. If this is not what he meant to say, perhaps some clarification is in order.

I sense in this, however, something that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while concerning how poetry develops within a relatively closed poetry community, be it on line or in real life. I hope the thoughts that follow don’t serve to further pull the thread astray. Dick Morgan’s comments about the “mummification process” leads me to believe he is somewhat saying that, in the small or closed poetry community, as the poets work, discuss, revise, comment, and finalize, everyone’s poems will with time move toward a common product. This is probably not done consciously, but will happen as the same type comments are made by the same reviewers from poem to poem to poem. The poets may hold those reviewers in high esteem, consider their comments as valid, and move their poems more toward the common product over time. It begins with revisions to poems, and moves to first drafts of later poems. Thus, for any small poetry community where there is critique and revision, a sort of “house poem” arises. With time, they all seem the same. I suspect this would be equally true of a creative writing program when the professor is a dominant personality and is not careful enough to recognize and avoid the problem.

Actually, I have not noticed that happening at Eratosphere so much as I have at a couple of other sites I participate in or monitor. At one site, where the moderators and key expert critters are very strong on-line personalities, it is a real problem. All poems that are by consensus of the experts considered good, to my ear, tend to sound the same. I am also new enough to poetry to realize the problem with that site may be one of my perception rather than poetry practice. At the ‘Sphere, I think there are enough good critters (well, and poets), and there are not just a few dominant personalities, that I haven’t seen the “house poem” develop.

Now, Dick, if I’ve put words in your mouth, or if I’ve interpreted your mummification comment incorrectly, please let me know.

Or, if I’m all wet about this being a problem of the small poetry community in general, I’m sure the ‘Spherians will let me know.

Best Regards,
DAT

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

David,

Thanks for getting us back on track.

If we could perhaps cork the politics genie, or at least move it to the General thread, that would be good too.

I agree with you about there not being a house poem here, though there certainly may be at other sites.

With the accessability issue, let me relate an anecdote -- unrelated to cooking or politics -- about my sister, and poetry night at the beauty pageant....

Some years ago, my sister (now a doctor) decided that she was going to enter the Miss Santa Clara County Beauty Pageant. The reasoning behind this is the stuff of another anecdote, but suffice it to say she did. One night, the contestants were asked to bring in a couple of their favorite inspirational poems to share with the other girls, for bonding and understanding where everyone was coming from and so forth. My sister mentioned that most of the other girls were kind of dumb (in some cases, very) and that she didn't want to bring in anything too much over their heads, so I suggested that anything suitable for a high school textbook would probably be simple enough for them but still not embarrassing for her, and she settled on Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken." She came back later and told me in horrified tones about the blank looks on the other girls' faces as she read the poems, about only one of them hesitantly figuring out the meanings, and everyone else reading this insipid syrupy greeting card stuff.

The point? Accessible does not mean good, and there are varying levels of accessible. Most folk here, while agreeing that the two by Frost are great poems, would also agree that they're pretty damn obvious as to their meaning and would likely consider them a gold standard of accessible -- though this was not the case backstage at the beauty pageant rehearsal.

I think it much more practical to write as wide a range of poems as possible and when someone comes into the library, hand them something to their taste, rather than falsely assume that understood by everyone is enjoyed by everyone.

[Dick Morgan]

David:

An excellent summation. The bottom line is the "Sphere" (or any poetry site) must have new members in order to survive because it relies on "member numbers for income from advertisers" --unless this is totally philanthropic endeavor. New writers are a very fragile lot and easily squashed and I think some provision should be made to bring them along. New writers are not nearly as sophisticated as the very advanced but are still looking for tools to get better and they shouldn't be hammered at first. However I agree with you --the 'Sphere has the least of it that I have found. I was partnered for a while with a mod from another site and he used to tell me of the viscious e-mail back channel conspiring "to get certain posters". He quit and so did I. Now as far as the politcal thing is concerned, Kevin made an ad-hom attack on Bush and I responded. However, I will retire from that fray and leave him to declare victory --even though I spent five days with a reporter on the ground at OKC and know a lot more about it than the average person.

Dick

[This message has been edited by Dick Morgan (edited March 02, 2005).]

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Originally posted by Dick Morgan:
--even though I spent five days with a reporter on the ground at OKC and know a lot more about it than the average person.

(Queue X-Files theme music....)

I think Alex can give us the statistics, but I think this goes under "largely philanthropic" meets "member supported." There's a bookstore link and not much else in the way of advertising; besides which, banner ads are not paying what they used to be.

That said, everyone at some point is a new member. I am, you are, everyone. And since you've been around for 500+ posts and a year, you're hardly new.

Making provisions for new members, or for new writers? What do you want, specifically? Many new members are experienced writers. And with the fragile egos.... Well, there is a solution for that: the PFFA 's sister board, the Pink Palace of Poetitude , where everything that's posted is done for display and admiration, and if you don't care for a particular piece, you simply don't say anything. And there's now even an extra-lite critique forum.

I was at the PFFA for a number of years, mostly using the Scansion Mansion, until someone tipped me off to the happy shark tank of The Deep End, and the only reason I'm not still actively using the PFFA is that I'm getting all the critique I need at the moment between here and my physical world writer's group.

There's also Sonnet Central which Erato even shares a moderator with (hi David), as well as several members, and I sometimes jump over there if I have a major sonnet project and want the specialization or fresh ears.

And then there are several other boards out there. But much of Erato's strength comes from the fact that there's a policy of the critiquer saying whatever it is they feel about a piece.



[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited March 02, 2005).]

[Mark Allinson]

On the topic of accessibility, which I take to be the central strand to this thread, here is what professor John Carey of Oxford university has to say about Donne's total lack of desire for it.


Donne's fastidious withdrawal from the great mass of English people is reflected, too, in the style of his poems. Superior, difficult, designed for circulation among a few kindred spirit, they make no concessions to the barbarous clods and half-wits he had the ill luck to be living among. - John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind & Art, p 19.


Having studied the man and his work closely, I can vouch for the accuracy of this assessment. There are a few quite accessible pieces, like the two "Song" poems. But mostly he wanted to get the thing as dense and knotty as he could, with lot's of syntactic compression and elision. Not to mention the extra degree of difficulty in the halting, staggering rhythms giving weird sentences. Getting all the goodies from a Donne poem, especially the Holy Sonnets, requires frontal lobes that can bench-press 180kg. Donne's is certainly an elitist art.

Not french fries for the masses, but caviar for the general.



------------------
Mark Allinson

[Bill Dyes]

Let me try this one more time, without any sarcasm or cynicism. Have we concluded by saying that any poet in pursuit of excellence will necessarily be moving away from
accessibility. I don't believe that. Any poet with a determined disrespect for accessiblity has split his motivation between the pursuit of excellence and something else.

[This message has been edited by Bill Dyes (edited March 03, 2005).]

[Dick Morgan]

Ditto Bill!

I've already made two sugestions to help newer writers back in the thread. Most of my posts have been in the art forum where I try to help newer artists realize their vision--if what they are doing falls within my area of expertise.

Dick

[Jerry Glenn Hartwig]

Dick

This forum was based onthe concept that it was a senior forum, not a place for new writers to learn a-b-c's. It is also a literary forum.

There are thousands of 'literary angel' sites out there. If you want to be accessible to them, have at it. When I found the Sphere, it felt great. People who actually knew what they were talking about - not a site for 'Internet' poetry. Ooooh, that's so true!

Actually, Dick, there is accessible poetry out there. It's called music. Heavy emphasis on 'called'.

I live in da street
and I got two feet
my shorty's sweet
and my gun is neat!

So, I should make my poetry accessible by sticking to mono-sy... I mean, words that aren't very long and easy to say. I should forget about everything that makes poetry what it is, just so it can be accessible (I read as 'understandable') so I can market it in the store, which you make the Sphere into.

Not interested. The main goal of a writer is to develop his / her own voice. You'd have every poet change their voice. I'd have every person educate themselves to understand what a voice is - what a poem is - not devolve poetry into something less just to get more people interested in poetry.

I don't write for other people. I write for me. So does every writer, whatever their personal motivations may be.

If a bunch of ignorami want to write crap and call it poetry, because it would attract more people to their Internet site, let them.

Ooops...they already are.

Let's keep this one site above that, please. We don't need another 'accessible' site. There are people who need this one just as it is.

Yes, I'm one of them and I have my own interests at heart. Self-interest is not a bad thing.



[This message has been edited by Jerry Glenn Hartwig (edited March 03, 2005).]

[Dick Morgan]

Jerry, with all due respect and affection, you've set up a false premise. Try answering Bill's question. I'd be interested in your answer because Kevin apparently can't answer without being sarcistic.

Dick