[Serious] Poetry

[LadyForCamus]

I never said anything about Shakespeare, holy hell. I’m saying poetry is an art form just like any other, and to do it well requires skill and practice, and an understanding of the fundamental concepts that make poetry poetry, rather than just personal journal ramblings. When someone is composing a song on the piano, is it a good song if they just start banging on keys? Or, in order to make a song that has the capacity to move the listener, must they have a basic grasp of the fundamentals of music theory; things like dynamics, octaves, harmony, key, pitch, intonation, melody, etc? If you want to just feel good, go bang on keys. If you want to make a song that can affect the person listening to it (that is the goal of all artwork of any form) you need to be familiar and practiced on these concepts. If you want to write for yourself; to get shit off your chest; by all means do whatever you want. If you actually care about how what you write makes other people feel, then you need to go study the fundamentals of how poetry achieves that goal. There’s really no way around that. Art is about creating an emotional experience for the experiencer, not the artist.

I think this pretty much nails it.  Art is the attempt to elicit an emotional response.  To do so successfully is going to require a set of skills.  Great poets have these skills and are very, very good at employing them towards a particular end.  While it is perfectly true that not everyone needs to 'write like Shakespeare', aspiring poets study him for a whole raft of very good reasons.

The whole post-modern notion that 'Art is whatever the artist decides it is' is so much rubbish.

Boru

It really is. That type of attitude denigrates the craft itself. If everything can be art, then why call anything art? If art is something so thoughtless and banal that any chimp can smear their poo on a canvass and voila, then what are we even talking about?