It's all crap, Vampires and Elton John.

Our dear lensfunk editor requested another poem today, I am reluctant because they are so rarely finished and I like them that way. Sensing my reluctance he asked for some thoughts on poetry. So here they are, I’m aiming to walk the line between patronising and inspiring, feel free to let me know how I get on.

A great deal of the poetry I write is bad, I don’t mean recently- dumped-teenager-bad, it just doesn’t quite work. This is not a big admission, most poetry is bad as is most music, literature, cinema, etc, etc. These are difficult forms and rarely done well. How many whiney Vampire romances do you need to torrent before you let the right one in?  How much of Elton John’s greatest hits can you numb yourself through before skipping to Tiny Dancer and then changing the album? So when you're  flicking through that huge anthology of poetry your Gran owned, or stumbling upon something by me the Lensfunk resident poet, don’t hate the form, hate the execution. The best example I can think of, in this, the week of the American Mid-terms is the inauguration poem by Elizabeth Alexander. Presumably Obama had the choice of all the lefty poetic types in the land to produce a verse or two for his big day and we ended up with this:

The nice Guardian person has earnestly reviewed it but the fairest review I heard at the time was that she ‘took advantage of the bullet proof glass’. I love poetry but this makes me want to chew my ears off.  - can we take a vote on staging this? - ed

But I don’t know the rules? This is something poets hear all the time, only the other day one of the nice Lensfunkers out there asked me about the placement of a hyphen when proof reading a poem. My answer (to the rules question not the one about the hyphen) is yes you do, you don’t think you do but you do. I don’t know what a middle 8 is, I don’t know a semiquaver from a something-else-musical but deep in my brain I know when music sounds good. In the recesses of  all our brains we know when poetry sounds good, or moves us, or surprises us or sometimes all of the above. 

We may not have spotted the rhyming scheme or counted the iambs, but the badly or brilliantly placed word will jar just the way it should. If I learned what a semiquaver was and then went on to learn other musical stuff I could probably appreciate music at a different level, I could perhaps love it more, but it wouldn’t change the fact that watching a tour bus singalong of Tiny Dancer makes me happy. I don’t want to discourage learning the rules, ‘learn as if you were to live forever’ Gandhi said just after saying something better known. But this is not the place for lessons and other people have done it better than I could (take a look The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry) .   

I simply want to encourage you to be un-threatened by poetry and I think a good way to start is to worry less about the metre and more about the metaphor. Read some, if you don’t like it, read it again, if you still don’t like it throw it away and read something else. Keep going until you find one you love and then, and only then try and work out why.

So, Obama, Elton John, Swedish Vampire Movies and Gandhi or a post about Politics, Pop, Popcorn, Pop-philosophy and Poetry. Which is alliteration (kind of), not that it matters. Send us your poems if they are any good we’ll look at them jealously and admire you from a far. Recently dumped teenagers need not apply.