Can you get a good poem out of a bad experience...

[vrosej10]

on a more serious note, all poetry comes from somewhere, it becomes better when it moves from the specific to the general, sometimes great when it hits the universal.
Case#1 Sylvia Plath

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
...
http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/daddy.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daddy_%28poem%29

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/daddy.htm


Plathetic Fallacies

response

both from

'The Boot in the Face'

Just how much is this specific to ms plath, and how much did she move artistically to the more general? I don't know how far it reaches to the universal.

But really you do have to do more with either your bad (or good) days. A couple of years ago, it was like the fucking Oprah show around here.

Whilst I am quite a fan of Plath, she really did take the guts out route in here poems. Try some of the stuff she wrote that wasn't really personal; it's quite good. Unless done very well these personal poems can be a gut dump and unpleasant to the reader. I do write intense and dark stuff but the experiences in the poems aren't general personal ones. If I am going to write about the personal stuff, I'd want at least a decade between me and the horrible thing. I'd also be inclined not to write about it in first person EVER.

I can never listen to this because I know the story behind it concerning his child. That said, on the other end of the age spectrum, my wife, daughter, and I are seeing life slowly but methodically coming to an end in my wife's 93 year old father who lives next door to us. While Literotica doesn't seem bend in that direction, several of my submissions have recently, and I find that in addition to the sadness there, there are also many lessons on how to live.

I can't listen to that song without bursting into tears. I also can't listen to Top of the World by Dixie Chicks for similar reasons. Lots of things make me cry though. I'm a weeper.

 

[twelveoone]

I can never listen to this because I know the story behind it concerning his child. That said, on the other end of the age spectrum, my wife, daughter, and I are seeing life slowly but methodically coming to an end in my wife's 93 year old father who lives next door to us. While Literotica doesn't seem bend in that direction, several of my submissions have recently, and I find that in addition to the sadness there, there are also many lessons on how to live.

Hope this may be of some use
To the Edge of Existence: Living through Grief
book referenced is here, part online