Poetry Forum

Hello Everybody

Nice to meet you all. I look forward to reading your work.

I hope you will forgive some shameless self-promotion, I have recently started a website offering bespoke poetry services for special occasions.

www.livethewords.com

Be seeing you.

Oliver

Hello Oliver, nice to meet you too.

It perhaps seems an odd choice to try and promote your business to people that already write their own poetry. Never mind, I hope you've come to take part in the forums too.

Nash.

Hi Oliver,

A good idea to join a poetry workshop, certainly.

Welcome.

Ros

Thank you both for your kind welcome.

Well Nash, I guess I'm pretty much telling everyone I can about the site at the moment, and I thought I would share it here not because I thought it would drum up a lot of business but because I thought it would be nice for people who might actually be interested in poetry to see it, to get their feedback as it were.

Have an amazing day.

Oliver

Hi Oliver,

To be honest, (and I'm not sure you really want me to be!) the poems on your website come across as rather cliched and sentimental, and (to be even more honest) didn't actually make much sense. Sorry... Have a look at the poems here and perhaps you'll see the contrast. If you're keen on improving and want to write stuff that's more specific, personal, powerful, then get stuck in and you'll be welcome.

Ros

Ros wrote:Hi Oliver,

To be honest, (and I'm not sure you really want me to be!) the poems on your website come across as rather cliched and sentimental, and (to be even more honest) didn't actually make much sense. Sorry... Have a look at the poems here and perhaps you'll see the contrast. If you're keen on improving and want to write stuff that's more specific, personal, powerful, then get stuck in and you'll be welcome.

Ros

Hi Ros

Thank you for your feedback. I have now taken down the site and will not pursue this.

Immortal details that unseen threads of dream and memory unite and define people before and after death. That even though we are linear individuals who will be forgotten as such, the memory of us not as a specific entity but as 'ancestors' will live on. In this way we live forever, at some point we were all just a dream our parents had of one day having children. We then become a reality. Following our deaths we become a memory and then finally as those people who actually knew us also die we become a non-specific memory or 'dream' of who the ancestors were.

The second piece was spoken from the point of view of a widowed lover who would rather live the current day forever than to witness the beauty of another sunset without their partner, the idea being that beauty would be lessened without them to see it. Working on the idea that happiness is based on a shared experience of things.

I am sorry to hear that you did not like or understand them. For me poetry has always been a platform from which to view the bigger picture, the big ideas, the universe and our emotional complexity within the context of a universe that either does not know or care.

For me the poetry I wrote was personal, for it touched on thoughts and feelings about family, where I come from and who will remember me. I know that a lot of modern poetry likes to focus on very specific personal details but to me much of the power of these pieces exists only in the mind of the writer, having not shared the experience they are writing about I often feel that I am just reading somebodies diary and have a disconnected feeling of it not having relevance or sense to me.

I believe that there is a place for sentimentality and cliché, oft the reason something becomes cliché is because of its popularity. People often criticise this because they have an overwhelming desire to be 'radical' and 'new' even at the cost of their writing. Personally I would rather read inspiring pieces about the immortal soul of humanity than disjointed and vague items about motorways, burger kings and episodes of friends.

thank you for your time

Oliver

Hi Oliver,

It's a subjective thing, obviously. The idea is to use the personal to illuminate the wider picture. The problem with clichés is just that they have been used before; you're not likely to persuade people to buy phrases and sentiments that they already feel familiar with. I understood your work in a general sense, but some of your individual phrases, when actually analysed, didn't seem to mean much. I can't discuss them now you've taken the site down, though. I'm not arguing that all the work here is meaningful to everyone (and it's not finished, of course, or it wouldn't generally be posted here), but the idea is to use language and sound to its fullest extent, often to illuminate just the themes you find inspiring.

Don't take your site down on my behalf; if you can find a market, good luck to you. You've given examples of what you do, so people should know what they are buying. You did need an apostrophe in the first line of one of your poems, though.

If you want to stick around here, we're happy to have you.

Ros