Honest Critiques
No, I mean it. REAL honest. Email your excerpts or full stories, up to 1000 words or so, to honestcrits [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk. Synopses would also be welcome. My backlog is so daunting now that I recommend not submitting anything you are not prepared to wait a couple of months for a response on.
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Thursday, August 25, 2005
Poetry
Ils says, "I'm curious to see if you critique poetry as well as prosy
whatnots. If not, don't abuse me too heartily on the blog for making the
enquiry!"
Pitiful fool! No, I'm joking of course. I don't have much of an insight into the poetry publishing industry, and I'm wary of publishing anything in its entirety here on the blog, so I'll steer clear of poems in general. Sorry.
More in a bit.
whatnots. If not, don't abuse me too heartily on the blog for making the
enquiry!"
Pitiful fool! No, I'm joking of course. I don't have much of an insight into the poetry publishing industry, and I'm wary of publishing anything in its entirety here on the blog, so I'll steer clear of poems in general. Sorry.
More in a bit.
Torgo, 8:35 pm
1 Comments:
Critiquing it is tough unless you're a poet yourself. It's easy to spot bad poetry, IMHO, but difficult to be constructive about it.
Most unpublished free verse I see would be no better or worse if the line breaks were taken out. If it reads just the same as prose, it probably isn't poetry.
I do think that every writer needs to try writing poetry from time to time, and by that I mean structured stuff with rhyme and metre. Writing that sort of thing helps to train the ear, and you start to see how each paragraph in a work of prose has its own rhythm. If you can write a decent sonnet that scans and rhymes and doesn't sound forced, you can move on to free verse and plain ol' fiction with more skill and confidence.
Most unpublished free verse I see would be no better or worse if the line breaks were taken out. If it reads just the same as prose, it probably isn't poetry.
I do think that every writer needs to try writing poetry from time to time, and by that I mean structured stuff with rhyme and metre. Writing that sort of thing helps to train the ear, and you start to see how each paragraph in a work of prose has its own rhythm. If you can write a decent sonnet that scans and rhymes and doesn't sound forced, you can move on to free verse and plain ol' fiction with more skill and confidence.
