Poetry for all (1)

For a few years, I've been posting poems on a site called allpoetry, where other people can comment on them. As well as that, the site has an AI algorithm which instantly gives each poem a "mark" out of 10, which sounds dreadful, and is a bit dreadful, but can be helpful in certain respects. 

It looks out for things like misplaced capitals, repetition, "good" words, ""bad" words, cliches etc. All to be taken with a pinch of a salt, but it can be a helpful way to slightly improve poems or to know if your poem's a bit hackneyed (if you didn't intend it to be).

The comments can also be a bit desultory ("You did a great job with your nice poetic flow here ...") though are occasionally valuable. Sometimes poems get chosen to go on the front page, and you'll get more comments then. Mostly, I'd say, the site's members are American and not necessarily the audience I'm playing to. Still, all of that is, in its way, part of the point. What point? What's the point? I'm not looking to make money from poems, have made no attempt to be published nor will, but, still, I find there to be more intrinsic worth and pleasure in writing poems than any other writing I do. By some margin. My aim is to write one really good one. Or five pretty good ones. It's a beautifully achievable aim which is always out of reach.

I read quite a lot of contemporary poems these days, some of which I like, some of which I don't, but one thing I've learnt is that I am not a natural, not in terms of what is mostly commended in modern poetry. I am operating within emotional, cultural and linguistic limits which the most lauded modern poets are not. Yet still, I might be able to use what limits define me to write one good one if I am able to reshape it and push beyond it. There's a certain push and pull between making the most of the facty, quizzy, listy me and running from it.

Anyway, all this to say, I'm going to change tack for a while on this blog, by posting poems (as I did right at the beginning of the blog). One per post. I'll accompany them with a song or two, a photo perhaps, a thought, maybe an explanation. Most won't be very long. I'll try to post one a day.

I suppose this is just to continue the process of looking at poems I've written in different contexts, to see which ones are most robust. Every time I post one, it is an opportunity for me to look at it with new ideas and maybe improve it. 

Feel free to comment if you like one particularly, or if one just doesn't make any sense at all to you, or if there is something fundamentally wrong, you think, with how it scans or plays out. Feel free not to, of course.

I also, a year or so ago, did a Zoom poetry course, which was ok, gave some confidence and some steps forward, and I did learn one or two useful things - one of which was that I'm not very good at giving titles, and sometimes my poems are too much like riddles, or they ask too much prior knowledge from people (naturally enough, considering who I am and what I do). So that's something I'm also working on, and I'd be happy to receive any notes about.

I'll begin with a short one, called:

Taking the L

I made a small mistake

which made

the engine stall and broke the brake

which woke

the cat who lived next door.

He doesn’t live next door no more.