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Unread 07-01-2014, 02:56 PM
ross hamilton hill ross hamilton hill is offline
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Join Date: May 2013
Location: Sydney, Australia
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Couldn't agree more Julie, enjambment has become the drug of choice on Erato and in my opinion spoils many poems by relegating the meaning/emotional impact of the sentence to second place.
On other forums I post/used to post many people hate rhymes, they are sick of them, sick of all the old forms that people love so much here, one can understand that as almost every word that can be rhymed has been rhymed, but I love songs so I love the power of rhyme, how it unites a poem. Rhymed words produce the same musical note and give a poem a melodic coherence free verse often lacks. But I love free verse for its freedom, why limit oneself?
I don't read books about poetry, except I've read The White Goddess by Robert Graves (twice) to see something of the Celtic/magical/classical roots of poetry and The Vision by Yeats, it's about the occult but I think poetry is often a part of magical practices so it was interesting to me given Yeats is such a great poet, I also read the biography of Dylan Thomas by his wife. I gleaned from it that Dylan Thomas wrote out his poems many times ( up to 70) as a way of polishing them and finding better means of expression. I also learnt that he used a Thesaurus but his wife complained that this practice lead to his poems becoming incomprehensible, he even admitted so himself but said it was justified by the 'sound' of them, I think that's a mistake, if you see poems as more sound than sense you might as well scat sing instead.
Two sayings that come from other disciplines often occur to me when on Erato, one 'form follows function' from architecture, echoes Janice's excerpt, if the form is right the poem is more likely to work, if the form is wrong the poem will never work so think what the function of the poem is, is it to instruct, tell a story, create an emotional response, it is about the contemporary world, this moment or about the past, history or one's memories, etc etc, what ever the function and function is diffferent from content, the form must be appropriate.
The last is a buddhist saying 'first thought, best thought' in relation to my own poetry and those of others I'm often aware that poems can be spoilt by over-working them. I used to paint as much as I wrote and in painting it is even more true, it is very easy to spoil a work by over-doing it, you can go back with poetry if you keep drafts but even so I think you can end up too far away from the original impulse and then you've lost it. This to some extent contradicts what I learned from Dylan Thomas, 'it's all about balance' shall be my contribution to notebook wisdom.
Janice.. I think this may prove a very useful thread to have started.

Last edited by ross hamilton hill; 07-01-2014 at 03:16 PM.
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