Good lord, the day any self-respecting poet actually stops to listen to this kind of male, western, logocentric cyber babble, he/she will at least have the comfort of knowing that the competition is weak. I suggest, Mr Rutherford, that you go back over your oh so illustrious blogroll and ask yourself a simple question: who am I to define an age-old art form in five measily little sentences?

Now let’s have a look at one of Harry’s poems:

“Harmison’s dew-pearled

The lark’s on the wing,
The snail’s on the thorn,
Harmison is on fire,
Panesar is taking key wickets,
Pietersen is holding his catches,
God’s in his heaven –
All’s right with the world!
As I’m sure Browning meant to say.”

I think this poem is really surprising, interesting, and nuanced. Well done!

That’s exactly it Harry, and unfortunately we don’t have many connections in the poetry/writing communities (versus the design, technology, development communities) so our reach is definitely limited. We’re very interested in finding new blogs though, so hopefully soon we can use your blogroll as a resource and specifically invite some great literary blogs based on your recommendations.

In retrospect, what annoyed me was probably not that I thought 9rules’s choices were exceptionally bad; it’s that I thought they were very typical. I think those choices say quite a lot about what our culture thinks poetry should be. If I was starting again with that post, I would do a better job of bringing in the general cultural context, and downplay the importance of 9rules and the specific blogs.

Nonetheless, as someone with a belief in poetry as an important artform, I think it deserves better treatment. Possibly my approach would lose you readers – who knows.

I’d rather define good content. There are lots of different ways to write poetry, but here are some of the kinds of things I might hope to find in a poem:

Good poetry is surprising, interesting, and nuanced. It makes use of striking imagery and the sonic qualities of language. It takes familiar things and makes them unfamiliar. It makes the reader meet it halfway. It shows a feel for the texture of language and uses it in a fresh way.

The two poems I picked out lack those qualities. They are not examples of good poetry. I feel slightly unfair in picking those two writers out, since their poems are no worse than most of the poetry on the internet. But ‘the best of the independent web’? No.

N-a-F: just glad to be of service, ma’am. *tugs forelock*

Curiously enough, I had no agenda at all – I just wandered across 9rules and decided to comment. But thanks for dropping by.

Harry

A supreme honor to bag a bad review from you…