"To keep the review thread clean..."

[twelveoone]

Ziggy Dwarfcrap by IrmaCerrutt

Several years ago I posted on a now defunct poetry board. We had a resident troll who thought he was a serious critic. He insisted poetry should be a flow of unrestrained words. Editing, reworking and making sense had no place in his world. A friend and I went into our spam filters and took some of the random strings of words found in spam emails and cut them into poetic lines. Then we analyzed and critiqued each other, as if the poem actually meant something. Our troll was delighted. He gave highest ratings to both pieces. This piece reads very much like those poems.

That is the best godamn review I've seen in years. Even though I am laughing my ass off, bronze the title is:
New Poetry Recommendations
but at least you posted a link
I'm still cracking up

of course I could say the same about the previous commenter , but he wasn't funny.

 

[Maria2394]

well, if 3 is the mid-range point, then perhaps this is indicative of a more balanced way of voting. gives us something to strive for if a genuine 5 is to be achieved.

but i have to admit, i'm still writing the same way - it happens, i sort of midwive it then clean it up.

i am having so much trouble atm with the glosa - it's finding the mote i want to use that's causing me problems. i've tried a few but i'm not happy with the original 4 lines and it's showing as i try to gloss them out.

You will get it eventually, Chip. I have trouble with my work sometimes and Ange told me to go ahead post it and see what suggestions you might receive and sometimes just leave it alone until you clear your mind. Then it all seems fresher.

You will get it eventually and be happy with it, too.



oh yeah, EPMD, I did not know what else to call the equinox except equinox and I found 2 spellings and was worried about that. I did change it several times, but settled on the version I posted. I also had trouble with the last line of February's Fear. I could not decide on welcomed to the waiting ground, or welcomed by the .....

but that is why I post work I am not satisfied with, it is the in between place ...between the first draft and the submission to a publication. I want to get it as right as I can. Thank you for your time today, It is a precious thing, time, and I appreciate every single second anyone spends on reading me and helping me, and Tess, a thousand s and s..I forgot to turn them off, and i am glad.

night chall.

hugs,

~ m

 

[Angeline]

Thanks to those who commented on my glosa, Wedding Picture and to Emp for recommending it. Sorry I haven't been around much to comment the past few days but we have some very welcome visitors coming to spend time with us (ee's son this weekend and then my son for three weeks), so I've been rather occupied with getting ready for them.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Thank you to EPMD for the mention, it was a suitor that still thinks he can swan in and take me to bed lol after all these years ........ yeah right!

 

[theognis]

Oh I quite agree with you UYS, but there are obviously those who are good at maths who are trying to manipulate the ratings. (And the answer to your first question is--no, it's just to win a pointless non-contest. I did say it was childish, didn't I?)

I find it funny the way you're attempting to turn the tables on this.

 

[theognis]

The contest to get H's and ratings and all that other childish shit some people seem obsessed about

All of a sudden you don't care about H's and ratings?

 

[theognis]

I was asking originally about learning to write a glosa and why theo wasn't interested in improving

I would like to improve, but perhaps not in that way.

 

[twelveoone]

All of a sudden you don't care about H's and ratings?

Both you guys should take a walk over in the top list. Some have 2,3 comments; 38 votes. Allowing for the fact that trash sells, you do see some with a list of H's.
for what that is worth.

 

[theognis]

Both you guys should take a walk over in the top list. Some have 2,3 comments; 38 votes. Allowing for the fact that trash sells, you do see some with a list of H's.
for what that is worth.

I just looked at the top list, and I see the top rated poem of all time has a perfect 5.00 rating (the only one) and 13 votes, with zero comments. I see none with even close to 38 votes. As I've said before, this seems to be a very small universe here on the poetry side of Literotica, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because, from my perspective, the overall quality of the poetry on Lit is far superior to the overall quality of the stories found here. But it's all a matter of opinion, I suppose.

 

[theognis]

Both you guys should take a walk over in the top list. Some have 2,3 comments; 38 votes. Allowing for the fact that trash sells, you do see some with a list of H's.
for what that is worth.

I just looked at the top list again, all five pages, and I see there are two poems with as many as 38 votes, but that's out of 250, and only four have as many as 30 votes out of the whole group.

Strange, for a site with so many members.

 

[twelveoone]

I just looked at the top list, and I see the top rated poem of all time has a perfect 5.00 rating (the only one) and 13 votes, with zero comments. I see none with even close to 38 votes. As I've said before, this seems to be a very small universe here on the poetry side of Literotica, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because, from my perspective, the overall quality of the poetry on Lit is far superior to the overall quality of the stories found here. But it's all a matter of opinion, I suppose.

I was wrong on 2/11/11 there was one with 39
Now take a look at past twelve months 20 votes no comments for one, Angeline's 12 comments 11 votes (one someone commented on twice), that's impressive.
Now does anyone wonder why I generally hand out 5's. And I don't seriously feel like leaving comments sometime.
You do have to allow a certain amount for the porno tags that go some of these.
But yeah the system is gamed, and don't think I am unfair.
I think you are all doing a good job most of the time.
If you all want I can play the other game, just ride into NPR, tell you what I think, not post links, etc.
Makes no difference to me.
Or I can continue, say something when I feel it will make a difference.

 

[theognis]

I was wrong on 2/11/11 there was one with 39
Now take a look at past twelve months 20 votes no comments for one, Angeline's 12 comments 11 votes (one someone commented on twice), that's impressive.
Now does anyone wonder why I generally hand out 5's. And I don't seriously feel like leaving comments sometime.
You do have to allow a certain amount for the porno tags that go some of these.
But yeah the system is gamed, and don't think I am unfair.
I think you are all doing a good job most of the time.
If you all want I can play the other game, just ride into NPR, tell you what I think, not post links, etc.
Makes no difference to me.
Or I can continue, say something when I feel it will make a difference.

As I've said before, I have no complaints with the way you've been doing things. I enjoy reading your comments, and I don't care how many fives you hand out. It's all good.

 

[Angeline]

I just looked at the top list, and I see the top rated poem of all time has a perfect 5.00 rating (the only one) and 13 votes, with zero comments. I see none with even close to 38 votes. As I've said before, this seems to be a very small universe here on the poetry side of Literotica, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because, from my perspective, the overall quality of the poetry on Lit is far superior to the overall quality of the stories found here. But it's all a matter of opinion, I suppose.

The overall quality of poetry is very high right now. For me it's stimulating to read all these different poems every day and get ideas from what people are doing. It won't last though: we've always gone through cycles here and this is an up time. Our current Most Influential Poet, UnderYourSpell, is someone who carried this forum almost singlehandedly through a long down time, a slow, slow year. She was consistently posting good stuff when no one else was writing much. (And to give fair credit, Tzara was writing a lot--and a lot of good poems--during that time here, too.) The way the community is right now, with so many good poets putting new stuff up, is an infrequent thing.

I don't know that I'd say the overall quality of poetry here is far superior to stories though. There is more variety on the poetry side. For one, there's a lot less erotica being written here in terms of type of poem submitted. But there is also a lot of bad poetry. A whole lot of crap, frankly. Sometimes I am stunned by what people put up here as poems, not because it's shocking but because it's shockingly bad writing.

And you know the thing about the top list is that it changes everytime someone votes on one of those poems and while there are some really good poems there--some that have been in the top position--mediocrity mostly rules.

I'm just enjoying the ride for now. As for scores, the only good thing I can see in them is that if you do get an H or on the top list, your poem is more likely to be read and the more one is read, the better the opportunity for feedback. This attitude (of mainly caring about comments or feedback) is, imo, a luxury that the folk on the story side don't have because they're always competing for contests. Here it's much more about the best quality and that has been good for this poetry community.

 

[bronzeage]

I just looked at the top list again, all five pages, and I see there are two poems with as many as 38 votes, but that's out of 250, and only four have as many as 30 votes out of the whole group.

Strange, for a site with so many members.

The statistics are revealing.

Of the worlds population, 98% have written at least one poem. Of this 98%, 50% have read at least one poem, which was not assigned as school work.

Of this group, 50% have written more than one poem and showed it to another person.

For those who are counting, we are at 24% of the world's population.

Of this group, 1% think poetry matters, whatever that means. (.24%)

The small group constitutes all of the world's serious poets and also the world's poetry readers.

Lit draws its poets from the English speaking people of this group, so it may seem like a lot of people, but not really.

 

[theognis]

The overall quality of poetry is very high right now. For me it's stimulating to read all these different poems every day and get ideas from what people are doing. It won't last though: we've always gone through cycles here and this is an up time. Our current Most Influential Poet, UnderYourSpell, is someone who carried this forum almost singlehandedly through a long down time, a slow, slow year. She was consistently posting good stuff when no one else was writing much. (And to give fair credit, Tzara was writing a lot--and a lot of good poems--during that time here, too.) The way the community is right now, with so many good poets putting new stuff up, is an infrequent thing.

I don't know that I'd say the overall quality of poetry here is far superior to stories though. There is more variety on the poetry side. For one, there's a lot less erotica being written here in terms of type of poem submitted. But there is also a lot of bad poetry. A whole lot of crap, frankly. Sometimes I am stunned by what people put up here as poems, not because it's shocking but because it's shockingly bad writing.

And you know the thing about the top list is that it changes everytime someone votes on one of those poems and while there are some really good poems there--some that have been in the top position--mediocrity mostly rules.

I'm just enjoying the ride for now. As for scores, the only good thing I can see in them is that if you do get an H or on the top list, your poem is more likely to be read and the more one is read, the better the opportunity for feedback. This attitude (of mainly caring about comments or feedback) is, imo, a luxury that the folk on the story side don't have because they're always competing for contests. Here it's much more about the best quality and that has been good for this poetry community.

That's interesting, Angeline. I've only been paying close attention to the poetry here for a couple of months, but I'm very impressed with the overall quality, as I've said, so I'm not surprised by your comment that the quality is unusually high at the present.

I didn't vote on your glosa, by the way, because I don't think I could give an informed vote on it.

 

[theognis]

The statistics are revealing.

Of the worlds population, 98% have written at least one poem. Of this 98%, 50% have read at least one poem, which was not assigned as school work.

Of this group, 50% have written more than one poem and showed it to another person.

For those who are counting, we are at 24% of the world's population.

Of this group, 1% think poetry matters, whatever that means. (.24%)

The small group constitutes all of the world's serious poets and also the world's poetry readers.

Lit draws its poets from the English speaking people of this group, so it may seem like a lot of people, but not really.

Don't you find it a little strange there is so little interest in poetry, even on a site populated by people who presumably like to read?

 

[Tzara]

The statistics are revealing.

Of the worlds population, 98% have written at least one poem. Of this 98%, 50% have read at least one poem, which was not assigned as school work.

Of this group, 50% have written more than one poem and showed it to another person.

For those who are counting, we are at 24% of the world's population.

Of this group, 1% think poetry matters, whatever that means. (.24%)

The small group constitutes all of the world's serious poets and also the world's poetry readers.

Lit draws its poets from the English speaking people of this group, so it may seem like a lot of people, but not really.

Don't know where you've gotten these statistics, bronze, but even small percentages of large populations add up to a lot of people.

Let me take your 0.24% percent figure about people who speak English and think poetry matters.

Well, I'll start out by grabbing some figure about how many people speak English. This place says there are roughly 375,000,000 native speakers of English and another 375,000,000 speakers of English as a second language. We'll discount that second group, though some of them, one would suspect, would read English language poetry, even if only because they teach it at some German university.

Whatever.

So, 375M * .24? Nine million. Even if you mean that .24% as a true percentage, you're still talking about 900,000 people, not counting those for whom English is not their first language.

Not, granted, a big audience, compared to people watching American Idol, but not all that bad.

Maybe.

 

[Angeline]

That's interesting, Angeline. I've only been paying close attention to the poetry here for a couple of months, but I'm very impressed with the overall quality, as I've said, so I'm not surprised by your comment that the quality is unusually high at the present.

I didn't vote on your glosa, by the way, because I don't think I could give an informed vote on it.

That's fine about the glosa. I think it was just ok, myself. I wasn't very creative with the text, just stuck it at the beginning and ending lines of the poem. The two I wrote before that are in the thread here are both better, but it was good writing practice for me.

I'm sure you have discovered by now, as one will if he or she sticks around, that this is a very different breed from the Lit story community. People come here with the expectation that we're similarly focused on ratings and contests. But I think if one were to poll people in this community, especially those who've been around a year or more, you'd mostly hear that people write and stay for the joy of writing and being around other writers who feel the same.

 

[bronzeage]

Don't you find it a little strange there is so little interest in poetry, even on a site populated by people who presumably like to read?

I don't find it strange. It fits right in with my experience. It's certainly true in the US.

What I have learned about the audience for poetry is it consists mostly of poets. Poets read poetry, poets buy poetry books, blah, blah, blah.

We are essentially a choir without an audience. We listen to each other, singly and in a group.

Don't know where you've gotten these statistics, bronze, but even small percentages of large populations add up to a lot of people.

Let me take your 0.24% percent figure about people who speak English and think poetry matters.

Well, I'll start out by grabbing some figure about how many people speak English. This place says there are roughly 375,000,000 native speakers of English and another 375,000,000 speakers of English as a second language. We'll discount that second group, though some of them, one would suspect, would read English language poetry, even if only because they teach it at some German university.

Whatever.

So, 375M * .24? Nine million. Even if you mean that .24% as a true percentage, you're still talking about 900,000 people, not counting those for whom English is not their first language.

Not, granted, a big audience, compared to people watching American Idol, but not all that bad.

Maybe.

I made it all up. It's all totally bogus.

 

[Epmd607]

That is the best godamn review I've seen in years. Even though I am laughing my ass off, bronze the title is:
New Poetry Recommendations
but at least you posted a link
I'm still cracking up

of course I could say the same about the previous commenter , but he wasn't funny.

If you were here for any amount of time, you'd know the thread title began as New Poetry Review and only in the last couple years or so altered to the more user friendly 'Recommendations'. Our intention was to be more inclusive and to give a little more protection to the reviewer whether they decided to simply recommend a poem or single one out for positive/harsh criticism. All you had to do is look at the title of this thread before posting. 1201, when your meaning is decipherable you often sound llike you've no fucking clue.

To quote Eve on first page of New Poetry:
...Will be enforced for a while, and after that we'll just play it by ear: poetry discussion only. This thread is to recommend, review or comment on new poems posted at Literotica.

 

[Epmd607]

If you were here for any amount of time, you'd know the thread title began as New Poetry Review and only in the last couple years or so altered to the more user friendly 'Recommendations'. Our intention was to be more inclusive and to give a little more protection to the reviewer whether they decided to simply recommend a poem or single one out for positive/harsh criticism. All you had to do is look at the title of this thread before posting. 1201, when your meaning is decipherable you often sound llike you've no fucking clue.

To quote Eve on first page of New Poetry:
...Will be enforced for a while, and after that we'll just play it by ear: poetry discussion only. This thread is to recommend, review or comment on new poems posted at Literotica.

firstly, you'd both have to take it seriously. that might need working on.
secondly, you'd need to be sure whoever was voting to decide the winner was also taking things seriously.
thirdly, with opposing viewpoints, and a raft of poets who might line either side for poetic preferences (or personal friendships, as has been known), how are to we conclude, definitively, the winner?

of course, if you guys want to go for it, feel free. it might produce some great (or at least entertaining) poetry in the event. gauntlet tossing has produced surprisingly good results before - so if it's to be a goer, between yourself and anyone, or anyone and anyone else, let me know so we can stick up a ring to contain the blood and muck.




my own way of rating hasn't changed at all - maybe some are thinking harder before doling out 5's like candy, or 1's like rabbit poohs.

does this mean you'll moderate our contest? i figure we could be given a set of instructions and then write and let the viewers decide who writes better poems. a silent vote or no vote at all is fine with me. i'd be happy just to put up a few verses against 1201 to show him he needs to pipe down.

 

[twelveoone]

does this mean you'll moderate our contest? i figure we could be given a set of instructions and then write and let the viewers decide who writes better poems. a silent vote or no vote at all is fine with me. i'd be happy just to put up a few verses against 1201 to show him he needs to pipe down.

I write, when I want, I do maybe 8 poems a year. What you do get about half time is something you've never seen before, if you open your eyes.
I don't think so.
As said, I've seen your verses.

 

[twelveoone]

Well, I'll start out by grabbing some figure about how many people speak English. This place says there are roughly 375,000,000 native speakers of English and another 375,000,000 speakers of English as a second language. We'll discount that second group, though some of them, one would suspect, would read English language poetry, even if only because they teach it at some German university.
.

and following the links around...(ah the old Internet linkety -link)

Essays in Criticism


I like this more than that.
This is better than this.
This means this and that.
This is what this one wrote.
This is not that at all.
This is not good at all.
Some prefer this to that
But frankly this is old hat.
This is what Thissites call
Inferior this, and yet,
I hope I have shown you all
That that way lies a brick wall
Where even to say "Yes, but..."
Comfuses the this with the that.



Instead we must ask "What is this?"
Then, "Is that that sort of this,
Or a modified this, or a miss
As good as a mile, or a style
Adopted by that for this
To demonstrate thisness to those
Who expect a that-inclined prose
Always from this one -- a stock
Response from readers like these."
But of course the whole thing's a trick
To make you place them among those
Who only follow their nose,
Who are caught on the this/that spike
But who think they know what they like.



Anthony Thwaite
which just goes to show you
something, but I don't know what

 

[twelveoone]

one of my comments disappeared, I may have voted twice, sorry about that, greennmountainer if you received two fives. one one hand it was probably worthless, on the other it did call into question a grammatical tactic, that I don't think was effective.
but then I know nothing of such things

 

[butters]

evenin', me luvverlies

i see you've all been playing nicely while i've been away.