[Yves S L]

Hello Julie,

I will respond later, but, really, I am not self-deprecating. I do not put the effort into literature that I interpret serious people, like Keats, put in. I would like to write more iambic pentamenter but it is difficult to get enough content, because I am not that inspired these days. Here I can sort of conceive an entire world that gives me enough content to write enough iambic pentameter that I can better understand how it works. Iambic pentameter is only something you can understand when you are forced to keep on finding lines and phrases again and again and again, and you are trying to avoid monotony of texture and sound and mood. There are levels of skill to everything. I compare myself against folk in anthologies, because they provide a consistent standard of achievement. For example, Auden's sestina, “Paysage Moralisé”, is astonishing to me for how he managed to conceive of it in the first place, and then pull it off. I imagine that the man just absorbed so much literature that he had the most gigantic bag of poetic tropes ever.

Maybe other people think they are writing gold everytime they post a poem, but I am really not that impressed by msyelf (though sometimes I think my technique is glorious before I hit the anthologies again). My Elvis sonnet, though, that was a proper poem, a sonnet that I would match with any sonnet anywhere, anytime. I happily beat my chest to that effort. I think this poem could do something interesting, but also I would understand if folk thought that it was not very good. I imagine reactions to this verse would vary quite a lot, even reactions to specific passages.

The poems are an experiment in the sense that I am trying to do something different each time, and I have a specific technical focuses with each effort. There was a period of time when I was trying to absorb the feeling of pop songs into poems, which folk generally did not take that seriously, but it taught me a different way to phrase lines, a different way to evoke emotion, gave me another tool in my toolbox. Do folk think poetry is so easy, that you just sit down and write something new, because you want to, without any preparatory work? For myself, I have to constantly be trying different approaches and angles of attack.

Hopefully I have expressed enough ego.