sometimes if a poem has an unusual layout, i am at first afraid of it.
i voted today, for example, in Andrew's daily poem finalé,
and when I plugged into Inside the Maze, my initial reaction
was the silent groan my face made without my consent.
But Inside the Maze was a wonderful read;
i almost voted for it...
two more days to vote, by the way
Friday, June 29, 2007
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4 comments:
I just read through the poems myself, and "Inside the Maze" is a good read, although I did find that I stumbled once or twice not because of the layout but because of missing commas.
You know how I am with those! :-)
I was surprised to see the poem win! I think it won in fact because of the effect of the layout and punctuation. If it had been set out in regular lines, it would not have had the same impact.
enjoyed the poems.
cheers
I had a long email discussion with a friend about that very point. He disliked the poem because it achieved most of its effect with the layout.
I can understand that. I've heard critics who say if you can't achieve your aim with words you won't be able to do it with line breaks and indents, for example, so I'm taking this poem as proof that that is not true.
I think readers tend to dislike weird layouts to begin with, which was what I wanted to say with this post, but give the poems a chance and they can be very effective. and why bother to break lines at all if we didn't think it would influence the reading of the poem.
cheers
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