i’d like this to be a place where poets can talk honestly, poet to poet, about how a poem works and doesn’t work, why it ended up looking the way it does. i’d like it to be pretty hard-core: able to say when i thought something i wrote in a poem wasn’t totally conscious, wasn’t real — just put in for effect.
i’d like to discuss ‘effect’, and the difference between styling and shaping: following the course of your emotional expression, as against, making a poem seem cool.
sometimes cool is all i want, but i call that writing ‘verse,’ not ‘poetry — ‘verse’ because it’s just chatting for effect in rhythmic or melodic way… ‘saying something.’
poetryandpoet 