[Michael Cantor]

Originally Posted by W.F. Lantry

Take Michael. Now, Michael knows full well that if you run into a poet who has "something to say," the best thing to do is to run in the other direction. As the cliche goes, people who have "something to say" should be writing essays, people who just love the sound of things should be poets. It's an overstatement, of course, but it has at least a crust of truth.

No Bill, that is not it at all, that is not what I meant at all.

What I say is that if you are writing a "message" poem - a strong political or religious or philosophical statement, for example - you had dammed well better say it very well, or it will come across as a lecture, a rant, a simplification. I have never limited poetry to simply "the sound of things", and I certainly don't do that with my own. I just try to write it well enough (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) so that it sounds like something more than a spittle-spattered message. (Unless I'm deliberately trying to sound like a nut for the purposes of the poem - then the spittle is deliberate.)

[Janice D. Soderling]

A rhyme scheme with no content has no esthetic value.

AABB is to ABAB as 4/4/4/2 is to 8/6/2.

Put more succinctly, it is nonsense to ask: What is your most and least preferred rhyme scheme?

Unless, of course, this is simply a popularity poll such as: How many reading this thread are wearing a red tie?

I am tempted to quote from the abovementioned William H. Gass book, from the essay I happen to be reading just now:

The detachment it is sometimes necessary to exercise in order to disentangle esthetic qualities from others is often resented. It is frequently considered a good thing if moral outrage makes imbeciles of us.

[Ed Shacklee]

Originally Posted by Janice D. Soderling

[font=Calibri]
Put more succinctly, it is nonsense to ask: What is your most and least preferred rhyme scheme?

I don't know if I'd call it nonsense, myself -- though it doesn't advance the ball very much, as far as I can tell. However, it may be superfluous if you spend any time at Met or the Deep End, where each poet's favorite (or failed) rhyme schemes become rather obvious.

Ed

[Michael Cantor]

Originally Posted by Ed Shacklee

I don't know if I'd call it nonsense, myself --

Come on, Ed, you can do it - one step at a time - first you decide internally that it really is a silly question (it might help if you focused on the "least favorite" aspect of it, and thought about what you would select, for example as your "least favorite" color, or "least favorite" poem, or "least favorite" person to have at your side in an unknown situation) - then you roll your eyes - next, you take a deep breath...

[R. Nemo Hill]

Well then nonsense sure is occupying a lot of your time, Michael. Is there a superhero name you would prefer, some sort of nonsense-busting epithet? How many times have you posted on this thread? Have you tried long walks? Masturbation? Turning off the computer?

Nemo

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Michael Cantor

Come on, Ed, you can do it - one step at a time - first you decide internally that it really is a silly question (it might help if you focused on the "least favorite" aspect of it, and thought about what you would select, for example as your "least favorite" color, or "least favorite" poem, or "least favorite" person to have at your side in an unknown situation) - then you roll your eyes - next, you take a deep breath...

Hold on, Ed. Its not your form. Michael is being kind. You actually can't do it. Nurture or nature, can't say which to blame, but you are bereft of certain traits that give dismissal its trademark bone structure. I think the problem is in your chest. The ribs are way to shallow. They don't pass through from front to back. It leaves room for an odd thumping instrument that seems to add music to the silencing tendencies of all certainties. Your jacked, Shacklee. A never-will-be.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Ahem, requoting my former quote:


Quote:
The detachment it is sometimes necessary to exercise in order to disentangle esthetic qualities from others is often resented. It is frequently considered a good thing if moral outrage makes imbeciles of us.

I think, fellow Spherians, that this discussion is becoming less about esthetics and reason, and more about old grudges, slights, hurts and paybacks. That does not bode well for a profitable discussion.

Never mind, maybe there were no grounds for a profitable discussion to start with.

So joining in the spirit of the game: What is your favorite word (in the whole world) to use in a poem and what is your least favorite?

[Richard Epstein]

Janice, I find that "the" and "and" are indispensable: they add heft, they honor tradition, and they pad out the metre like styrofoam peanuts. My least favorite word -- so far -- is ""Schweigepflichtsentbindungserklärung," which tends to overload any line in which it appears.

RHE

[Chris Childers]

I don't know about go-to forms, but stephenspower has clearly found his go-to forum, and his go-to posting style of random contextless questions. As for which, I prefer Janice's, and find that my most and least favorite word to use in a poem is the same: gopipinapayodharamardanachanchalakarayugashalin*. That is, it is potentially my most favorite, but the obvious difficulties make it in actual practice a least favorite. Schweigepflichtsentbindungserklärung smacks of Kafka-esque hell.

BTW, would it be conceptual poetry to take a real poem and replace Richard's most favorite words with the above? i.e.,

Western Wind when wilt thou blow?
Schweigepflichtsentbindungserklärung small rain down can rain.
Christ! That my love were in my arms
gopipinapayodharamardanachanchalakarayugashalin I in my bed again.

That has a certain je ne sais quoi.

C

*Sanskrit for "having a pair of hands trembling to knead the swelling breasts of cowgirls."

[stephenspower]

Interesting question re words. In rereading a lot of my old poems, I found I used "flicker" and "blasted" in many of them. Maybe that makes them my favorites, but it also makes them tired en masse.

I try to avoid "water" and "glass" except as details lest a poem become about them. I also have a tendency to overuse "but" and "though," that is, certain sentence structures, so I try to remove them when I can, which, if anything, forces me to reconsider how I said something and usually rewrite it in a better way, not the one I hit upon first and most easily. I do the same with "and" when it starts a line, a pet peeve of mine, to minimize the numbers of times it's used there in a poem.

I'm in the middle of a novel right now, and I find it useful at the end of each chapter to run the text through a word frequency counter to see which words I overused. Turns out I have an affinity for "back" and "start." The list provides a good way to get into revising.