Thread: Crystalline
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Old 02-02-2010, 05:44 AM   #10
Apathy's_Child
 
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Join Date: Aug 2007
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It's better (by sheer virtue of not rhyming night with light with all right), but it's too long for how little it says and is still very cliched. Try picking an incident. Abstract musing doesn't work unless you're a very good writer with an original idea or angle on something - it's always bad idea to rehash tired subjects without attaching them to something.

I like writing about memories and concrete incidents (I'm a modernism/imagism kind of guy, personally). Like the fact that the first vagina I ever saw was in a magazine lying in the road when I was a kid, and I thought the woman had been shot with a double-barrelled shotgun. Then moved into representing how fucked up it is that I knew what a shotgun wound looked like before I knew what a vagina was. The meaning's obvious, but it's so short and simply told that it avoids being annoying, AND has a meaning that goes beyond that particular image (our screwed-up approach to sex & violence with kids). Pick something true which has an idea about something inherently attached to it - a person you've met, a place you've been, that time you had to kick that guy's ankles out from under him to assure yourself of a seat on the subway, whatever.

This is a good basic guide, written by one of my idols. It's mostly common sense, and can be applied to any kind of poetry you care to write even if imagism doesn't get your panties moist.
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