Yup, the open thread is a reasonable place to post poetry.
I have a bit of feedback but it may not be very useful: I don’t see what this gains from being presented as poetry. If you removed all the line breaks and the capital letters at the starts of lines, would its impact be much different? If you replaced each line with a paraphrase, would much change? (Would it be … functionally different?)
Perhaps my view of poetry is terribly conventional and old-fashioned: I think it’s usually distinguished from non-poetry by some combination of (1) concern for sound as much as for sense, (2) repetition (of sounds, of ideas, of patterns of stress, etc.), (3) compression (via allusion, ambiguity, exquisite control of nuances), and (4) constraint (on syllable counts, appearance on the page, rhyme scheme, etc.). If something doesn’t have much of any of these, then for me the experience of reading it is different enough from that of reading more “central” examples of poetry that I don’t see why it should go in the same pigeonhole.
(For the avoidance of doubt, “poetic” is not remotely the same thing as “good”. Writing can be very, very good with rather little of #1, none of #2, scarcely any of #3, and none of #4. And writing can be indubitably poetry but also utterly terrible.)
Yup, the open thread is a reasonable place to post poetry.
I have a bit of feedback but it may not be very useful: I don’t see what this gains from being presented as poetry. If you removed all the line breaks and the capital letters at the starts of lines, would its impact be much different? If you replaced each line with a paraphrase, would much change? (Would it be … functionally different?)
Perhaps my view of poetry is terribly conventional and old-fashioned: I think it’s usually distinguished from non-poetry by some combination of (1) concern for sound as much as for sense, (2) repetition (of sounds, of ideas, of patterns of stress, etc.), (3) compression (via allusion, ambiguity, exquisite control of nuances), and (4) constraint (on syllable counts, appearance on the page, rhyme scheme, etc.). If something doesn’t have much of any of these, then for me the experience of reading it is different enough from that of reading more “central” examples of poetry that I don’t see why it should go in the same pigeonhole.
(For the avoidance of doubt, “poetic” is not remotely the same thing as “good”. Writing can be very, very good with rather little of #1, none of #2, scarcely any of #3, and none of #4. And writing can be indubitably poetry but also utterly terrible.)