[Yves S L]

Jim,

I don't think you get what I am saying at all, at all.

The thing is, poetry is made out of repeatable, recognisable elements, which means, if a person likes conventional metrical poetry, then one should be able to repeatedly write something that person would recognize as poetry. Sure most folk cannot consciously recognize what those repeatable elements are (there are many patterns I never speak of, because if a lot of folk think they are so good, then they can work them out themselves). Poetry is not magic. Nobody is saying that a poem has to push whatever buttons, more that most poems are constructed of a set of familiar building blocks arranged in familiar ways, and metrical poetry even more so, and sonnets even more so on top of that. Is a song calculated because the chorus occurs at a certain ratio along the song's duration? Is a poem calculated because it has a strong close? Is a sonnet calculated because it modulates emotionally along along the quatrains and octet? As I said before somewhere else, folk think unconscious thought processing is something good because they are not conscious of their own thoughts, which means most folk have no conscious idea of what they are doing while writing poetry, which makes everything a hit and miss affair while folk try to conform to poetry board opinions which are also mostly formed unconsciously/subconsciously.

Most of a person's subconscious thought processing of poetry is based on the things they have read and liked, call it subconscious pattern matching.

It is sort of like someone is being super-authentic and pouring their hearts out while remembering their late mother, and they end up writing a 3 minute pop song, with AABA form. Is that a coincidence? Is it calculated? Is it something else?