The Ides of April Constrain Me

Yes, I'm working on my taxes, working on preparing my weekly Sunday School lesson which includes writing a handout as well as teaching notes, and have found almost no time to write except for that. Also, the class my wife and I are taking Tuesday and Thursday evenings at the community college is cutting into all things avocational and leisurely. The good news is the taxes are well along. I might finish the Federal tonight, though will take a couple of days to perfect it. I actually finished the lesson for this coming Sunday last night also, so I might be able to prepare another one this week and be a week ahead. I'd like to be two weeks ahead, if I can.

So, in the place of writing a new post here, I'll be lazy and copy in a post I made at the Absolute Write Water Cooler, in the poetry discussion forum. This is the first of several posts I'll be making in the thread on poetry craft.

Quote: "A few weeks ago, I was asked to judge a chapbook contest, partly because I enjoy a little recognition locally and partly because it's hard as hell to get someone to judge these things. I just finished going through the stack of pocketfolders that cradled the entries.YUK! After I finished, I almost wanted to cry. Most of the "poets" who entered this contest knew nothing about the craft...."

Okay, after saying I wouldn't get to this for a while, I decided to use my lunch hour to do this instead of planned things. The wind at 30 mph and the threatening rain are excellent excuses to not take my noon walk.

Concerning the quality of the poems submitted to the contest, I would like to know to whom the contest was opened. The general public who might have seen a contest notice? High school students? University students? Members of a local poetry society? That's important to know, because for each group we would expect a different aggregate quality of the entries. If entrants are people who responded to a notice posted in the library and in a newspaper, we would expect pretty poor quality. If these are English majors in college, we would expect something better. Since these are chapbooks and not individual poems, that tells me the entrants are more serious poets than the population at large, in which case the lack of quality is more disturbing.

We tend to think that there is more dreck being passed off as poetry today than at times past in history. I wonder, however, if that is true. Dissemination is so easy today, due to technological advances not available to poets in a ruder era, that more people see the dreck. But maybe, as a percentage of all poetry written in any given era, we have no more today than in eras past. Mercifully only the best of those eras survive; we don't see the dreck that was written simultaneously as Keats' odes, or Shakespeare's sonnets, or Chaucer's epics.This might not be true when one factors in the expansion of literacy, as Haskins said. More literate people, as a percentage of the population, might indeed produce a higher percentage of crap than did a people in the past. Either way, sponsor a chapbook contest in 1800, and I'll be you'd get plenty of chapbooks at which you'd want to gag. Again, all those chapbooks were destroyed by knowledgeable heirs who found them tucked away in chests and realized the judges were correct in writing on it, "Foresooth, these stinketh."

Other parts of your post will have to wait for a later time.

I guess there's something to be said for lack of notoriety; no one is asking for me to judge anything. May it ever be so.