Let's talk about taste!

Don't be for everyone, or about everything.

Opinionated taste and distinctive voice are two sides of the same coin. Learn one to learn the other, feed one to feed the other, in tandem forever. 

There's a place for better elevator music, but, generally: tailoring for the masses cheapens for production what was once the live wire to your soul. When it comes to your thing, let it be yours. Know what you're doing, and why. Know what sucks and what's great, and why you think that. Be critical, exacting, and hard to please.

Understanding how you think about other people's work is a structural part of the process. Let's take a minute and make this about me, because you're in my house.

Unpacking what unites the poetry I love & hate.

1. Direct, not on the nose.

   • The poems I love tend to achieve impact without falling back on a crutch. Of course, poems about heartbreak will resonate with everyone, but it's insulting to both of us to treat it like the only big feeling that matters. Secondarily, gently: the reader can tell the difference between harnessing trauma with purpose and abusing it disingenuously. It's easy to pull a lot from a lot. Try to pull a lot from a little. There's a place for both.

2. Word choice as a fixture of the background.

   • A good poem avoids word choice that distracts: too silly, too modern or too old-fashioned, too long, too crass, too far outside the target tone, etc. For example, it's usually better to call a phone a phone, not a proper noun like "iPhone" or "Samsung," and not overly decontextualized like "little black brick." This is probably the most important rule to break, but the point is this: the connotative and emotional direction should develop before the reader knows what hit them. A great writer plays the game.

3. Beautiful, not masturbatory.

   • Poetry should be gorgeous both visually and verbally. As I say, delicious. You should feel it in your bone marrow. The well-crafted composition is a thing of pleasure, but to wax on endlessly gets gross. The poems I love demonstrate restraint and self-awareness. A sentence that sounds good but says nothing will shoot your piece in the head. Make your poem a single word if you have to, just make it an honest one. 

4. Structured flexibility.

   • Enough said, probably. I don't tend to love a verse, a strict rhyme structure, or overdone repetition. On the other side, I don't tend to love the downright nonsensical or untethered (don't give me a bunch of loose, random words). I don't tend to like poems that are longer than two pages because, counter-intuitively, I usually find it lazy. I'm 50/50 on a narrative style. But then, I do love it when a collection flows cohesively or forms a whole, which is its own thing to me. 

5. Challenge in context. 

   • Poetry exists to push boundaries, a place for play and experimentation, like painting and jazz. However, like painting and jazz, your simple participation places you in a long tradition. Like Andy's cerulean sweater, we're swimming in the cultural water whether we acknowledge it or not, and you can almost always feel a writer's level of awareness of the conventions they're using or discarding. There are no wrong answers in poetry, but there are also masters and... not masters. The responsibility I'm talking about is ambiguous and metaphysical: energetic, but massive. 

The choice to break what is known.

Your work is the sum of your effort choices. This is to say, you can learn as much from the art you hate as you can from the art you love. And there's a great amount to be gained from spending time with the new age bullshit you just don't understand.

First of all, bad art is still a timeless intimacy and should be handled like it's an honor to be there, because it is. Second, I'll be the first to hate on those damn kids writing empty, irritating nonsense poems without a convention in sight, and I'll be wrong for it every time. It gets you much further to assume they're on a frequency you can't hear yet, like how it's a profound gift when the people around you are cooler than you.

It matters to hold the line in your own brain, to take stances and know your own standard; without these things, you're a mouth moving without speaking. The two giant qualifying conditions, though: a grounded sense of self-importance and the humility to notice when you're mishandling an opportunity for evolution.

Whether you like it or not, everything you consume will inform what you create. Choose your terms. Make the effort choice.