Reading the discussion in How do we review/critique poetry objectively? made me wonder what people thought about this.
I know that most of you will probably read the subject and shout "there are none" in the thread, but I'd like to challenge you to answer this question. They say that in poetry you can "break the rules" so what are those rules that we can break? If there are no rules, then we shouldn't be able to break anything.
That being said, the real thing I want to discuss is actually your personal rules with which you write a poem. I want to explore style more than standardizations in poetry and talk about the differences we have, or why we have some of these rules.
To start us off, I'll talk about my rules for my poems.
1) It has to be aimed at being clear and conveying the message I want.
- Basically if I ask someone "what is this poem about" I want to hear what I meant it to be about. I wrote this one poem called "Puzzle" a long time ago in which I was making a point, but I was trying to make a jigsaw to put it together, and after that point, I really hated that sort of poem because I had way too much going on, too many points that all just made a jumbled heap rather than a pretty picture.
2) It has to be about something.
- I like it when my poems are more than just pretty words put together. I want it to convey either an emotion or a message/thought. That could be basically anything, but I need my poems to be about either an event a subject, or a thought that I'm having. It still leaves me open because my poem can simply be about what I saw/see, but it also gives me direction so that I don't go all over the place.
3) It has to pass the "you're not the boss of me" test.
- Awhile ago I started noticing preachiness in poetry and I really started disliking it so I check my poems to make sure they're not talking about what you should do, or why you should do it, but conveying the messages about me rather than you. It makes my poems less confrontational, and I can still talk about my opinions on things by changing "you" to "I" to provide self-ridicule rather than ridicule of others.
4) Follow the punctuation and capitalization set the poem needs.
- For me, punctuation and capitalization is about subject, so I have sets of different subjects or feelings which correspond with different punctuation and capitalization styles. For instance, if I'm writing a moody poem, I'd definitely use no capitalization and no punctuation. If I'm writing a poem about coming out of something like a meditation, or from one state of being to another, then I would combine punctuation and capitalization changes to indicate which one is more or less strict.
Those are really the basic ones that I can think of off the top of my head. What are yours?
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