I was in Creative Writing class, in prof. Manfred Malzahn’s class. He told us that poetry is not about expressing yourself, cause as he said if everyone will be talking then no one will be listening. He added that a good poet will always find the connection between things s/he talks about that will still captures the readers. He concluded poetry is found, not created!
I went back home and started writing and this is what I came up with.
P.s he said don’t ask a writer what does his/her work mean because he usually does not know! ; )
P.s. all kind of correction, regarding language, ideas, and meaning are welcome. A star, a duck, a storm, and a heel
I myself once with fear my hands I clapped
You may wonder how a mouse should feel
When with a piece of cheese he found himself trapped
If the ear wanted for a change to speak
And the spoon tried to laugh
Then the grass will start to leak
And your hair will have no choice but to cough
When you walk holding a bag you are inside
And fish go wile in bird-hunting
Then what’s the point if I’ll ask the sky to hide
And what difference will be if earth stopped vomiting?
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Written by Phil (6713 comments posted) 14th January 2007 | Sorry DS. Poetry isn't found, it's created. If it were found, any fool could write as well as Yeats - or whoever.
'Don't ask a writer what it means - because he won't know.' - He ought to, he wrote it. Good poets don't write any old crap, call it poetry and leave the reader to guess. I don't think your professor is earning his money. Sounds like he's trotting out a load of old rubbish, putting his feet up and having a laugh. I suppose he thinks he shouldn't mark your work either.
Sorry, your poem: I think you hung yourself in the introduction before you even started. There are some interesting ideas here in a kind of drugged up psychodelic way. Taken as a whole it does nothing for me. There's no connection.
Get a different professor.
Phil. |
Written by Phil (6713 comments posted) 14th January 2007 | Sorry, meant to point out a couple of things regarding language use as you corrected.
When with a piece of cheese he found himself trapped
When he found himself trapped with a piece of cheese
or just
trapped with a piece of cheese
If the ear wanted for a change to speak
If the ear wanted to speak for a change
or, to keep the rhyme
Or, for a change, if the ear wanted to speak
Hope this is of use.
Phil. |
Written by ellipinnock (1753 comments posted) 14th January 2007 | You can say that there is often more in a poem than the poet thought about when writing it - often people can tell you things about your work that you never realised. However, if you have no direction or idea then you aren't going to communicate anything which kind of defies the point of writing for an audience at all...so I'm with Phil on this one.
For me this was pretty much just random ideas strung together - imho poetry doesn't have to be deep to be good nor is it necessarily good just because it's deep but it does have to mean something somewhere along the line. Didn't do it for me, sorry.
Elli
ps. as with Phil - some odd structures in here to force the rhymes - makes for an awkward read |
Written by deathstillness (13 comments posted) 11th February 2007 | Yeah, I agree with what you all said. I think that he meant that as a writer you should not direct your readers toward a specific idea it is better to let them discover it themselves. I had an idea with this poem. I wanted to point out to the chaos lived be human beings. I am going to change few things according to the corrections suggested by one of my teachers. I will then see if anything should be done later on.
Thanks for your comments I do appreciate them, I really do. |
Written by Merioneth (79 comments posted) 20th April 2008 | Your poem seemed to take your professor's (questionable) advice to heart, and it seemed like you were casting about, trying to find your poem rather than write it.
Poetry and prose exists in the abstract, yes. They're possibilities, just as a statue exists, as a possibility, inside a block of marble. There's a finite pool of words and billions upon billions upon billions of potential combinations and sequences in which they might be strung together. In that sense your professor is sort of right.
It sounds to me like he was trying to seem edgy and unorthodox, like a real free-thinker, and in the process he came off as a bloviating twat. If you're blindly plucking words out of the ether in the hopes of lucking out and "finding" a really brilliant one, you're limiting your possibilities immensely. Disregarding your innate creative instincts is like going camping without any supplies, hoping you'll have the good fortune to find clean water suitable for drinking, mushrooms and berries that won't make you sick, and natural shelter that will shield you adequately from the elements.
I'm not sure how his advice about a good poet finding a connection between the things he/she talks about that captures the reader conflates with his assertion that writers usually don't know what their work means. A Rorshach blotting will mean something different to anyone who looks at it, but I doubt many people would find much inspiration in one, and it certainly won't establish a connection between the viewer and the person who made the blotting.
Poetry isn't about expressing yourself, exactly, but (in my opinion) about taking something insular and expressing it in a way that will communicate to the reader and inspire in them a sense of empathy. Expressing yourself and connecting with the reader do not have to be mutually exclusive. A good poet will take something singular to them, an emotion or an experience, and express it in a way that allows someone else to understand and empathize with it.
I'm going to go ahead and defy your professor's advice and ask; what does this poem mean to you?
~Merioneth |
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