You can catch the first post here! If you happened not to read it. I outlined mostly why I am not a poet myself. Here, however, I'd like to clarify some further ideas as to what actually makes good and bad poetry.
Having spent time on over five writer's websites, I can safely say that I've read my fair share of amature poetry. Some are decent, some downright awful - but there are themes within all poetry and the poetry people seem to remember - or rather, don't. You see poetry comes down to one thing... The writer.
Notice that I said 'writer', and not 'poet'. This is because good poetry requires a good writer, we tend to remember the writer of the poem along with or over the poem itself, due to the poem being a thing from the writer's mind. When you read a poem, you should not be reading a loose piece with an intention or a fuction, you should be reading a section of the poet's thoughts for entertainment.
I once had an older creative writer lady try to tell me that when a piece of writing is written, it is free from the author, free for the reader to read and interpret any way (s)he wants. While I agree with the sentiment of imagination between the lines, I could not disagree more that poetry can stray from the writer and still be a good piece of work.
Any message that is portrayed through the medium of poetry can be made significantly better through some form of prose writing - so to suggest that poetry can be good on it's own is simply pretencious. It's a fact that it is easier than other forms of literature, it's a fact that meaning is far less succinct outside of prose.
Erotic poetry is a prime example. There is a significant amount of it and almost all of it sucks, because it is all blended together - such a specific thing to talk about isn't going to have much variation, so every single one of these poems, while sometimes provocative and can be pulled off better than others, is generally forgettable and worthless.
Your poetry needs to be unique, it needs to be the flowings of your mind. You need to have a vague style and people enjoy it because they attribute it to you. Poetry should be to entertain, not reinforce sexual motivation, or try to make you improve the environment - leave that to articles, or novellas.
Of course there is one blaring whole in my view that needs addressing. If you don't like a quirky style with very limited meaning or to learn from it; simply entertainment from the author's brain - then that's fine! If you think sexual motivation is what you happen to find as entetrtainment - that's okay too, some writers are significantly better at erotic poetry than others, because...
As an overall factor, poetry is an artform.
A lesser art, given, but an art nonetheless - and as a result what you like and what is good are two seperate things. You can like anything you want, but that doesn't mean it's good. You can dislike whatever you want, and that doesn't make it bad. However, I'm just looking at the sheer core of what poetry is, and I implore you to understand, that poetry for poetry's sake is awful. Try to think of poetry you remember very well but have no idea who the author is - very few, if any. We know the works of William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allen Poe, Lewis Carroll and Willaim Blake because they are Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Plath, Poe, Carroll and Blake! We might not like all of these, but you can't deny their fame.
Do you get the idea? I have no desire to demean your poetry or the kind of poetry you like, but just be aware that it should be you being poured onto a page as a different form of writing to literature: your words mean nothing if the poem is too distinct from you.
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Appologies for the long post today, it'll be a bit lighter next time, I promose. Thanks for sticking with me, though. I'll leave you with a poem of 'Advice' from Bo Burnham's Eggheads (Or you can't live on ideas alone):
If the poem you're writing is silly and dumb,
make sure that it rhymes at the end. Bum.
And, as always, ciao for now!
(P.S. Go back and read only the words in bold.)
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