I am a romance poet and I normally write poems that are average of 20 lines. But yea I would like to know which type of poetry would ppl prefer, a long or short?
I'd say it depends, though honestly I'm more inclined to read short pieces as I'm turned off by seeing large blocks of words. But I might just be lazy.
Sometimes you just need a few lines to express an idea. Other times, it needs to be much longer. I'm guessing that "When is it long enough?" is something every poet has to ask at some point.
As a longtime reviewer, I'm more likely to suggest cutting superfluous words than adding them. Yet as a writer, I like to ramble and don't want to cut anything. Go figure.
"You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand." Leonardo Da Vinci
I'm going to echo Nite - I'm prone to cutting anything superfluous in a "say it once, say it right" kind of way. In essence, boiling down to the root of the poem. Why take three lines to describe the exact color, texture, and shape of a tree, when one line will do?
However, I would say when the urge to ramble as a writer strikes you and cutting lines just won't do, my next suggestion is to simply make me care as a reader. Longer poems should engage and excite us towards the ending, it should make us read further and we should enjoy the journey - not make us skim because it has a boring middle that we must slog through. Likewise, short poems should make us want to wish to read more, or read it over and over again. Engagement is essential to both
I agree with the other three- it completely depends on the reader's liking. For me, I find poems with repetitive lines to be intriguing. I have a personal theory on the repetition like; once you understand the objective of your poem and repeat it with different varieties of metaphors...like for example a man's love can be said crisply in four lines but that to me, it doesn't linger enough to brood and dream about his love. Anything that's long, draggy, sometimes the long poems can also be boring but how I see them is that maybe the guy is simply bored of loving or begging to be loved.
But that's just me.
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