PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I am told that Alfred de Musset, the great French poet of the nineteenth century, once said he could spend all day. dawm to dusk, agonizing over a single word in a single line of a single poem, while downing an entire bottle of cognac; while his mistress, who wrote novels under the pen name George Sand, slept until midafternoon, stayed up all night consuming three pots of coffee, and could write one sixth of a novel.  No one every accused George Sand iof being a poet, or possessing more than mediocre volcabulary and prose style.  Her plots and characters sold her novels, not her verbal skills.  Poetry is not a democracy into which one is born like, say, the American experiment.  Poetry is a meritocracy in a very demanding republic.  To take a metaphor from ancient history, even thought the entire Roman constitution, both as a republic and an empire, was S P Q R, an abbreviation of a phrase roughly meaning, "The will of the Senate and the People of Rome," guess which part actually made all the practical decisions of governance.  Yep, friends and neighbors, the will of the Senate was far more authoritative than the will of the people of Rome.  Even Christ's crucifixion was carried out under the legal fiction that, because Pontius Pilate had ruled against Him, the penalty was imposed according to the will of the Senate and the People of Rome.  

   I have said all that to say this:  Poetry is an Art, like Music, Astronomy, or Medicine; and as such, it requires a skillset in order to practice properly.  Just stringing words together in attenuated lines that slog like a blog, just to say. "Oh, woe is me, I feel bad today." is not constructing a poem.  It is, unfortunately, a transparent, and repetitious, childish bid for attention.

Starward