forum for poems/fiction that suck
 

well not really suck.
I'm wondering if there's ever been thought to creating a forum for poems that the writer has become blocked on but wants to continue. A forum for some fresh ideas and perspectives when the poem is in trouble and the poet realizes it but can't figure out what to do. So the crits wouldn't be crits as much fresh directions or angles on how to fix a poem on life support.

Or could a person just add a disclaimer when posting a poem.

Terry

I've used the disclaimer approach, though I find it's much easier for people to say what puts them off about a piece than to offer a completely fresh perspective. I've never seen anyone say outright, "I'm blocked; please give me some completely new ideas," but there's no rule against it.

It does ask for a larger creative "gift" than most on-board critique, IMO. And since the poet would need time to sort out the ideas and couldn't act on them all, it wouldn't lend itself to the model of fairly quick revision that some critters like to see (thought others are more patient).

But why not try it?

It's an intriguing thought. I have any number of half-finished pieces where I thought the idea was good, but what came out was dismal, and they're in such bad shape that I normally wouldn't post them here, even with a disclaimer.

If we go ahaead with this - and it could be interesting - I would argue for a separate Forum, like Fiction or Translations - where it would be understood that the poem would go up accompanied by an explanation from the writer, up front, as to what he/she was trying to do, and the problems encountered. It would be very different from our normal Forums in that the poet would be explaining from the start - normally we try to discourage that, to get a "cleaner" reading - and I would assume that response would be more "essay" type, rather than lists of nits.

I don't think we should encourage this approach in the existing Forums, because it could easily lead to a bastardization of the posting and critting process. We'd see too many lengthy explications before relatively finished poems, too many objections to crits because the reader didn't understand that this was a "problem" piece, there could be confusion and the original function of the Forum could diminish.

Met and non-Met could be combined on the new Intensive Care Forum (okay, be positive if you must and call it Fresh Start), and maybe a three or six month trial period before committing to it should be considered. Another concern is that some of our "gotta post a new poem every week or I'll drown" brethren will use this Forum as a safety valve they don't have anything decent available on Day Seven. Mods might consider limits such as (a) only one poem every two weeks in Intensive Care, and (b) posts here count towards the one-a-week rule. And I would push for a rule that only established members (100 or even 250 total posts) could post for critique in Intensive Care. (My concern is that it doesn't turn into a Beginner's Magnet.)

You know what, friends. I think this is a bad idea. Sometime you just have to know when to leave it and move on.

I see this as a lowering of standards to have a special forum "Poems that Suck". (I love the title though.)

Think about it.

Janice,
I don't think the poem sucks. Meaningless, pretentious, inane chopped prose! What more can we ask? Seems to me any number of premiere literary mags would be glad to publish it.

Well, Janet, that's why I suggested a very high barrier - as many as 250 posts - and a once every two weeks max to weed out the utter crap (although I can think of more than one on-line workshop where at least some participants might praise the one you just posted - love your images - brilliant!) - but I also think that a poem can be essentially well written, not drivel, and yet a failure. Very often this happens because the poet has various segments that resonate independently, but no sense of direction, and no clear direction - and wnat emerges consequently is artificial and forced. A clear viewpoint and some restructuring can make a huge difference. I know I'm personalizing, but I've got several that I wouldn't post here because they're not coming together, and they're forced and self-conscious - but an Intensive Care Unit (I think that works better as a Forum title than Poems that Suck) might help, as long as the situation was understood up front.

feel it, a poem is there somewhere, floating around in my head, pls tell me what I am trying to say, I really want to say it.

"Sleeping bodies turn on tired mattresses.
Outside, scavenger flies begin to gorge
on scraps of fast food, dog dung,
dead moths.

God, an arrogant waiter
in an empty restaurant,
hands over a fly-specked menu
written with curlicued letters
in a fancier language than mine.

old crumb on cold floor
sunbeam falls through window
ant exits darkness,"

Janice, this is a good unpretentious effort. What's it called, "Dream at Daybreak", or some such?

Why? Why would we need this? Just post your bad poem, receive negative crits (or possibly good ones), suck it up, and move on. An Intensive Care forum is basically a I'm Afraid People Will Think I'm a Bad Poet So I'm Going to Post This Bad Poem Here Which Everyone Should Consider Separate from My Real Work forum.

Cross-posted with Orwn.

Marion, thank you for your encouragement. I can always count on you to recognize when a bad poem is good. Why did that fun thread have to end?

Michael. I'm Janice. You usually say such smart things, and I usually understand immediately how smart they are, so I am perplexed why I don't get the wisdom of what you are saying now. Besides which I am not very good at math and I am wondering which Moderator Designate is going to keep track of eligibility and infractions. But don't let me discourage you, on second thought, do let me discourage you.

Skip. Good thinking and I will keep Dream at Daybreak in mind as an alternative title (or possibly Daybreak Dream, or Dreamday Break.

Actually I was thinking about calling it Flarf Barf.

I think the difference is that "bad" poems tend to get the stuffing knocked out of them in the current forums, and a poem in this forum would be looking to be stuffed.

John

My thinking is much like Michael. I have poems that start strong and wither. Or just seem lose their way somehow. However, I really wouldn't want to ask someone to come up with a long explanation of where a poem could go. I think the poet should try to focus on the malfunction, what she's hoping to do - in response I wouldn't expect anything more than a some quick hit ideas, ideas to break the logjam, help the writer think in a different direction. Brainstorming.

If you all think it's a worthwhile idea, I think it should be as easy and quick to use as possible. Real criticism should be reserved for the usual forums.

Terry

I thought that's what our current workshop forums were were for. If I wasn't stuck and wondering what to do, I wouldn't post. I mean, yeah, there are degrees of "stuck." Sometimes I feel finished, but I have worked a thing so long I need "objective" eyes look it over. But just as often I have a piece that just feels like a mess but I feel like there might be something in it somewhere, so I put up the latest draft and see what happens. In both cases the results have never failed to be helpful. Gee...I guess I may be using the forms incorrectly sometimes...?

David R.

Alex is the one who will have to decide whether there's actually a call for a new forum, and how we tell whether there is.

Creating new boards is something we've certainly done before, but there is some work involved. How would we test whether there's enough critical mass to warrant this without doing all the work up front? Can we drum up the additional staff? We've already got several boards that are too quiet for too long.

Those are my reasons for disfavoring the whole-new-board solution.

Well, I'm kind of with Michael (et al.) on this. My biggest problem has been determining what level my poems should be at before I workshop them here, and I seem to guess wrong more often than not... I figure that work one is completely happy with shouldn't be posted, even though there is always value in getting other perspectives. By that same token, work that one thinks is not very good shouldn't be posted either, for obvious reasons. But work that has a spark in it, but needs a lot of coaxing...well, maybe there's merit to the idea of a forum for that kind of work. I know that I, for one, have a shoebox full of those!

For me, I think there can be a fine line between "work that one thinks is not very good" and "work that has a spark in it, but needs a lot of coaxing."

David R.

Gee, me too.

Seriously, I cannot figure out what kind of intensive care is lacking in the forums we have. We give Tough Love on promising but awful texts, we put support bandages on slipped metrics, we give plastic toys and jokes when a shot hurts a lot, and gold stars on your discharge when the poem is real good.

We have Bitter Medicine. And sometimes a well-meaning critter will give you sugar-coated pills.

Come on, let's work on it:


Workshop poets spurn the bums' mattresses
Outside, passenger planes again disgorge
the trapped of bad mood, hog-sounds,
read-wroth:

God, what an airy translator
with her empty doggerel stunt,
comes over like eye-dreck refuse
written in surly-skewed letters,
that the fans feel her anguish in kind.

let's drown the old bore,
or gang-haul through window:
grant light from darkness

My bad, for misleading you, Skip. But Terry has put up a serious request for a serious discussion and his thread is being high-jacked.

Mea culpa. My apologies for being frivolous and leading members astray.

No, no, you are one of the nicest multifaceted ladies on this board. I was just bored with nothing to contribute, and when I give in to that feeling, I get silly and reckless.
Why everyone hasn't finally banded together to protest my inadequacies, is either because I stay away long enough not to bother with, or, like you, the members are just too nice for such drastic remedial action.

I don't think I've ever posted anything BUT this type of poem, on either TDE or Metrical. For the most part, I've been pretty happy with the intensive care received there.

How about a forum for just-born top-of-the-head poems?

There's a sticky saying "no poems in GT". OK How about a forum where spontaneous poetry can develop. Sometimes conversations in poetry. New, fresh poems similar to sketches by a painter? No limit on numbers of posts etc. A genuine scribbling pad?

Actually the sticky title is "About Poems on GT".

But after rereading the sticky, maybe I should add that the spur-of-the-moment text I posted above was intended to jocularly illustrate the difficulties of fixing a poem in any way except the way we do daily in the regular forums. Hopefully only a died-in-the-wool Flarfer or a very kind critter would confuse it with a real poem.

I am starting to feel like a nay-sayer but (sorry, Janet) this idea presents the same problems for me as the "Sucking Poem" forum. It siphons away some of the workshop strength to open a "Kiddies Pool" poem forum beside the "Today's Inspirational Thought" poem forum. In other words it dilutes participation in the creative forums already existing and opens for ego-enhancing fluff and flarf.

It seems to me that spontaneous poetry, sketches and poem development belong to a pre-workshop stage or perhaps in a blog if one wishes to document the rise and flow of their creative powers.

Why open a Repair Shop for things that aren't broken?

Mine is only one opinion though, and I may be an inane voice crying shriily in the poetic wilderness.

I've used other poetry boards for this, and over the years I've seen a number of people do the same. I can also see the sense of the "no kiddie pool" stance. Each of us should take his or her own revising ability as far as it will go, since every posted poem is a request for expenditure of time.

Terry's initial request was for a way to deal with work that we know is troubled. To me, the most interesting thing about the responses on the thread is that some of us don't distinguish between old, blocked, frustrating pieces and everything else. I'd like to ask more questions of those folks. Do you get the answers you feel you need if you simple post those pieces without additional explanation?

I propose that we take the idea to its logical conclusion and let others write our poems for us.

Now, this isn't removing responsibility from authors; we will need to provide surrogate poets with a synopsis and a suggested form, not to mention style guidance and a potted personal philosophy. Moreover, we will still be responsible for contacting publishing houses and arranging readings etc. Altruistic surrogacy is to be encouraged, but this is the real world of course, and so we authors need to be aware that commercial surrogacy may become a viable market in due course. Needs must.

I think I am one of those people, but it isn't that I don't distinguish between levels of quality, messiness, completeness, or whatever, but that I see the workshop as a place for seeking help for the whole range of problems.

Yep. See my current TDE thread. It was a frustrating, overworked mess that I had gone over so often through the years that I couldn't even remember why I had made most of the choices I'd made. I certainly didn't have much of an idea about what was good or bad about it. So I made the best draft of it I could and put it up. Three days, forty posts, five pages, and seven revisions later, I have a much better grip on it. For me, it was an incredibly productive exchange. It doesn't always go quite as well as that, but it does always prove worthwhile and helpful, for me.

David R.

I was assuming that the diligent and serious work on other forums would be the real strength but the necessary exploration by poets whose serious work is known on our other forums would be a creative spark which admitted that poetry exists on other planes as well.

Most of us are published poets. I don't sneer at sketches by known painters. I think that my suggestion is worthy of consideration. Improvisation is an essential part of all art forms including poetry. What would we lose if a dedicated forum existed which clearly was not part of the workshop forums?

We used to have great running poems that inspired all kinds of ideas and were often very funny. Interaction is part of the experience.

RE David's post #25 above concerning his TDE thread School Closure. Yes, that is an excellent example of workshopping a poem of the type Terry , Michael and Shaun seem to be talking about.

I have had many poems which I have almost entirely rewritten in workshops in the Deep End. Surely we already do salvage poems in that way? I know the rules say that "finished poems" should be posted there but many of us have entirely recreated poems there at various times.

That's why I made the other equally serious proposal. I think that fluency is an important aspect of poetry. Easy poetic exchanges may help to lessen the number of stinkers mentioned in other posts.

I hoped that Mike was joking.

Janet, it's very difficult to continue with the original discussion when you continually break in to change the subject and promote a completely different concept. If you're so convinced that this would work, why don't you please start your own thread, and I'll be happy to post there and explain what an awful idea it is.

Sorry Michael. My idea was a response to the idea at the top of the thread. I only enlarged on it in response to the idea that I was proposing a "kiddies pool" which was not my intention at all.

I think the original idea in the thread is terrible. (Sorry Terry.) We already post poems in order to receive responses and help.

The proposal seems to be that we talk a lot about what we meant as well as showing what we haven't achieved. Since much of the best poetry doesn't start off intending to mean something I can't see much light at the end of that particular tunnel. I wouldn't dream of arguing against others having such a forum. I wouldn't trouble them at all.

I'm sure you have excellent arguments against my other idea.
I seem to remember that you were one of the most assiduous posters of spontaneous poems.

We are sometimes too serious to be taken seriously.

Well, I evolved too recently to recall any previous spontaneous poem posts, but, while I have just very recently actually "workshopped" a poem to a bright sheen, it occurs to me that putting up something one is pretty happy with might be a good idea too, since a good no one sees our faults like others do.

On the general subject of his thread, I'm opposed at present.

Allen wrote:
(((By the way --- what's the problem with things going to the top of the stack? I'm not so mechanical that I can't bypass something that reappears once I have determined it's not my kind of thing rhythmically or otherwise. I use my mind.)))

Terry, apologies for another digression, but the question comes up every so often and might as well be answered.

Allen, the thread at the top of the stack on each board is the one highlighted on the main page, and when it's had a lot of posts it's also marked in various ways as something needing/deserving to be looked at. So every additional bump is another bid for attention, and it's considered bad manners for the poet to bump his own poem too often. It's also considered bad manners to push newer poems down while bumping up older ones.

And every additional thread on the board pushes an older one off the front page and into something-like-oblivion. (After a while, that's a good thing, but it needs to be thought about when the boards are very active.)

The problem is that it is contrary to the purpose of workshopping to post something you view as being "complete." That way lies "vanity" posts...

I'm sure that if many of the greatest poems of the past few centuries were posted in a workshop, they'd receive a bevy of suggested changes. Which is fine, of course, but the buck stops with the poet's happiness with his or her work. For the sake of artistic integrity, that has to be the final litmus test.

Maryann, I understand your reply, it's always a judgement call. No problem.
Shaun, I was not speaking of vanity posts --- no way.
Best.

I vote Nay. Terry's idea is what the current forums do; if you're neurotic enough to want to post but not to want any of the rest of us to think you think what you've posted is much good, put a disclaimer up. Janet's idea is what Drills & Amusements is for. Surely Erato ought not to encourage shoddiness when its whole reason for being revolves around quality and polish? If you want to chat in verse, go to D&A and start a thread called Poetic Conversation. I say.

Chris

Spontaneity was the core of my suggestion Chris. I'm sure you don't equate that with "shoddiness". Set topics are not spontaneous. Useful and amusing yes. Spontaneous, no.

While I'm not sure either Terry or Janet intends to "encourage shoddiness," I think Chris articulates the most sensible point of view in this thread, namely that everything proposed in this thread already has a home somewhere in the Sphere.

David R.

See my post above yours David.

I don't want to labour the point though. It seems that spontaneity might lead to ballroom dancing.

Re: shoddiness, you can surely see the very short line from encouraging spontaneity by enshrining it in a forum to the poet who defends his crappy poem on the grounds that every line is spontaneous, i.e., not much thought about, but what he was "feeling at the time." While spontaneity is often lovely and delightful, I think it a bad value on which to bestow our institutional imprimatur.

institutional imprimatur

Ah yes, that.

Actually I just wish we could relax in verse occasionally on GT. I'd hate a special place for it.