_____________________________________________________________ Does Not A Renaissance Make (a lot is just...'a lot') Type the words 'poetry board' into the behemoth search engine Google, and you'll get hundreds of hits: Christian boards, haiku boards, teen boards, Goth sites and every manner of critiquing style and contest, but a proliferation of poetry sites does not herald a new apogee in writing any more than seeing cell phones pressed to the ears of every Dick and Jane means there is improvement in the subtle art of human communication. All that's happened is that technology has insinutated itself into every aspect of our lives, including creativity, but some forms of creativity need time to produce results: writing is one of them. Just as baking bread requires yeast, heat and a measured amount of clock ticks to slowly rise and become dough, so words need a fermentation process beyond inspiration's first heady strike. While it may be instantly gratifying to post a poem on a poetry board, so much is slung there without thinking about other ways it might have been shaped given time- or perhaps what words could have been pared away to show its finest form. Board posting is fast, easy- and soon becomes compulsive in nature. Just look around. Everybody's doing it, but how much of the posted material truly stirs the soul? I have seen very little, but there's such an overwhelming amount of mediocre or even bad writing that after a while, it does seem that it's all the internet has to offer: a cyber version of a 'hobby'--like macrame. My own solution is to keep board posting to a minimum- posting under a different name when I feel I'm really stuck on a particular poem and need the feedback, and I always get out before I'm caught up in the social aspects of the community. I see it as antithetical to writing: it distracts, allows the personality to overshadow the writing and it chases away silence. Here is quote from poet, Jory Graham, that seems to agree with the need for solitary writing:
I've secured a site for myself where I'm able to shape and alter poems much the same as using a notebook: hewing them, editing day to day and giving them the time that's needed to take their final form. I use the computer for poetry writing, mainly because I see my words when on the screen more clearly than I've ever been able to see to their heart before; what looks fine on paper, can sit dead up on screen----I don't know why this is, but I know it to be fact. Yes, there IS too much internet poetry----but be discriminating both in where you post and in what you read: some boards have better writers, drawn to them because they aren't 'easy'. They're places to share craft, but even those places are subject to the uproar that clashing personalites seems to create, so when that happens - get out. Fast. And keep a notebook. Always. In a purse or pocket, on the nightstand--nothing, absolutely nothing is a substitute for being alone in your own head, hearing just the words and the plains of silence that call them forth. So be ready for them, pen- not keyboard in hand. It's primitive but it works. Honest. |
Main Page
