Comments on this website are, to me, fairly unsatisfactory. As a community
I feel we have a responsibility to be honest to one another, and in that honesty
help others along. It can be difficult to be your own critic, which is where
this community could become so special, to the benefit of each and every member.
To this end I have been asked to create a commenting guide; not as something
to restrict you, but instead as an aide to those who feel unsure of how to compose
a comment. Do bear in mind that these are the roughest of guidelines, and will
avoid too much detail at any point.(As a note I will be using the term ‘he’
to mean either gender. I cannot be bothered typing he/she all the time).
I’ve broken it down into three loose parts for you:
Personal Response: How exactly do you respond to the poem?
Let the writer know if he has inspired any feelings in you that you didn’t
necessarily feel to begin with. Let him know if he’s intensified any you
already had. Personal response is a large part of any successful poem, and it
can vary greatly between audiences, therefore it’s immensely important
to include this, but as it’s the most personal there’s not much
of a guide I can give here except honesty.
Visual Response: What does it look like?
Poetry has it’s own rules of aesthetics since, on this website at least,
it is in written rather than aural format. No-one wants to see the text equivalent
to China’s great wall, breaking up of poems into stanza’s is as
important as the words themselves at times. I’ll take a line here to point
out the obvious comment of a poem’s outline forming a shape consistent
with the content. Aside from that there is the style of varying (or consistent)
line length that can affect how the poem is received as well as separating a
word or line from it’s fellows.
Literary Response: The real meat of a good comment.
This is a massive topic to be contained within such a small space. As such
I will cover here the basics of analyzing poetic techniques, something I find
the most lacking in comments received on this website, quite possibly because
people just don’t know about them.
Word Choice/Semantics
The individual words a poet uses are indicative of the effect they are trying
to achieve. Monosyllabic words tend to give a faster pace while polysyllabics
add elegance and style to a piece. As for semantics, the actual meaning of the
word is important to a poem as indicative of the effect a poet is trying to
achieve. Often we are confronted with many word choices for a line, but the
one that gets chosen can mean a lot.
Grammar/Punctuation
This is often the poet’s only way to communicate the pace of a poem. Pauses
are added, often to give the effect of irony or sarcasm. Alongside this, grammar
(or it’s lack) can be a way of conveying an accent, or a state of mind.
Form
While many poems are of the blank verse variety, there are equally many that
constrain themselves to the almost limitless accepted forms of poetry. These
range from haiku’s and sonnets to terzanelles. Things to look for here
are the same as mentioned earlier, but add to that the idea of how well the
subject fits the form and if the poet has managed to fit his words to the construct
without sounding contrived in any fashion.
Within form we also come to the sticky subject of rhyme. Often a contentious
issue, rhyme can be an important section of the poem; it lends pace, rhythm
and, at times, elegance to a piece as well as imparting to your average reader,
a sense of ‘poeticness’. However, as we all know, rhyme is not a
necessary part of blank verse, one of the more popular forms on this site. There
are simply too many styles of rhyming for me to list here, although I will make
special mention of para-rhyme, a partial or imperfect rhyme, often using assonance
or consonance solely. This tends to be overlooked by many readers, and is often
difficult to use, but worth noticing.
This brings me to the end of my rough guide. I hope you’ve found something
interesting and that your confidence in commenting knowledgeably grows.
Jesse_Raen
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