Bad Poetry?

A friend of mine recently said something very wise, something to the effect of, “People are so afraid to exercise ‘judgment’ anymore; the word, the notion, the act has bad connotations. But judgment has its place! People commit heinous acts, people do things that are wrong, and it’s right to stand up and say so. It’s right not to tolerate things that make the world a bad place for us, for our descendants.”

She was obviously talking about exercising judgment in society itself rather than in the arts. But I found her view refreshing.

Having said that, I tend to lean the other way – to looking for what’s good in most things, what I like in a poem (even a “bad” one), what can be polished and shined to make a poem a better poem. This means I have to acknowledge that I think there are bad poems.

Not being well educated in this art form (yet) I don’t know how I’d define a “bad” poem specifically and articulately. Vaguely, I’d define bad poems as the poems that sort of fluff past me, are full of clichés, are clearly “first draft” material, are too much telling and no showing, or that do not stimulate me in any way – in thought, emotion or physical sensation. I’d be interested to hear other definitions of same, of what your standards of poetic quality are.

The line that stuck out for me in this thread is Leanne’s: “There is, however, no poetry that is beyond redemption IF the writer is prepared to work.  Thus it is possible (at a stretch) that there is no bad poetry, only bad poems and bad poets.”

It causes me to ask: Is it me or are a lot of bad poets who write bad poems inordinately sensitive to constructive criticism, and staunchly married to what they’ve created? At least that’s often my experience. The beauty of belonging to a writers’ group or online community is that you can get feedback from a variety of people with different tastes and levels of experience. If nine out of ten people are telling you to go back to the drawing board, chances are you need to improve the quality of the writing.

Is everyone capable of that? I don’t know. Should people who love to write but write crappy poems by your standards or mine be encouraged to write? I don’t think there’s harm in it, in encouraging people to use writing as an outlet for expression. I think poetry communities that believe “there are no bad poems, only different kinds of poetry,” are going to attract the whole gamut of writers from crap to quality, which means their feedback for your work may also range from crap to quality. The question is, do you want to wade in that pool or not? There are other ponds in which to swim.

I know I just wrote in a lopsided circle of sorts. Hope there’s some sense in this somewhere and that if there isn’t, it inspires some from another writer.