[Nick McRae]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

I think we can all come up with examples of both good and bad poems rooted in personal experience, as well as good and bad poems not rooted in personal experience. Where a poem falls on the "personal experience" spectrum, I would suggest, has little or nothing to do with whether the poem is any good. I agree, though, that writing from personal experience (by which I mean specific biographical or familial situations that many or most readers have not experienced themselves) has its own pitfalls. Perhaps it's no different than normal conversation. Sometimes we are fascinated by hearing another person tell us his experiences, sometimes we are bored. All the fun's in how you say a thing?

Yea, I guess my point was more a long the lines of the self being the starting point for poets. What people actually enjoy reading isn't always immediately obvious, and in some cases might not even be a concern as the poems are more akin to a journal.

To pick up a sense of what actually reads well takes some level of experience, and time. And in some cases the right inspiration just isn't there at all, if it can't be derived from one's own knowledge and experience.

[Shaun J. Russell]

Just chiming in for a little clarification. As mentioned, I have no problem with Plath herself or her poetry. Truly. I bought a copy of Ariel when I was a teenager first getting into poetry and loved it then, and can still appreciate her work now. My point is that her style is often imitated, and poets who do often strive for the grandiosity of the personal and fall short because they're not Plath. Just an important addendum to my too-vague comments above.

[John Riley]

Roger’s point is obviously true. My point isn’t that good poems can’t be drawn directly from personal life but that now, at this moment, there is a heavy, even gigantic, number of poems that attempt to do so. I don’t see much of a mixture.

[Nick McRae]

I wonder if we're seeing more of it these days because becoming a published poet is much more accessible than it was in the past.

We only come across great work from the past because there's survivorship bias at play. The only poetry that still exists from prior eras is quality work.

[Gail White]

I've enjoyed this thread very much. The only comment I have to make is that a poet going on and on about his own life in blank verse (I'm looking at you, Wordsworth) wears out my interest early on.

[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by Nick McRae

We only come across great work from the past because there's survivorship bias at play. The only poetry that still exists from prior eras is quality work.

I disagree. The vast majority of the poems in the Greek Anthology are, frankly, mediocre. Ditto for the reams and reams of boring medieval and Renaissance religious stuff, especially in Spanish.

I remember having to slog through certain poems from classical and post-classical authors that drove me to the heretical thought that maybe, just maybe, not enough libraries had burned. That's why the normative time for a PhD in Classics at UC Berkeley (if you don't already have a master's degree) is 14 semesters, while a PhD in English takes 12. Enough classical material survived that PhD candidates are expected to be at least vaguely familiar with all of it.

"99% of everything is crap" still holds, I think, even for the old stuff. Some of it survived not because it was good, but because it was inoffensive enough that censors didn't bother to destroy it (unlike Sappho's work).

[Roger Slater]

But remember that the world's population was only abot 3% of what it is now, and less than 10% of that smaller population was literate. Even if 99% of what was written both then and now was crap, that means we have a hundreds of times more crap being written today than was written back then.

[Nick McRae]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

I disagree. The vast majority of the poems in the Greek Anthology are, frankly, mediocre. Ditto for the reams and reams of boring medieval and Renaissance religious stuff, especially in Spanish.

I remember having to slog through certain poems from classical and post-classical authors that drove me to the heretical thought that maybe, just maybe, not enough libraries had burned. That's why the normative time for a PhD in Classics at UC Berkeley (if you don't already have a master's degree) is 14 semesters, while a PhD in English takes 12. Enough classical material survived that PhD candidates are expected to be at least vaguely familiar with all of it.

"99% of everything is crap" still holds, I think, even for the old stuff. Some of it survived not because it was good, but because it was inoffensive enough that censors didn't bother to destroy it (unlike Sappho's work).

That's fair. I wonder if some qualification is needed. By quality maybe we're actually talking about 'passable' poetry, which is hard to produce in it's own right.

And standards are a lot higher these days. You're not going to expect Shakespeare out of the Canadian Haida.

Maybe exceptional poetry is a very best case scenario and most of it falls closer to average or mediocre.

[John Riley]

Our lives are good for one telling regardless of how different or outrageous or painful it’s been. What is impossible to drain is what I’m going to call the awe of our existence. What Keats would have called Beauty. But that’s more difficult to create poetry or any art from, and that’s why that work lives longer. Baudelaire comes to mind. His life in Paris is embedded and referred to but isn’t what his poem are about. They are his imagination and thought and the dream of escape and on and on. Today’s literature, imo, is all experiential and political.

My damn dogs are barking! Why do I have three dogs? That is one of those unanswerable questions I’m talking about.