Bitching About Poetry

I don’t know how big an overlap there is between people who read this blog and people who just know me from poetry sites, but I suspect it’s like two or three people, tops. Nonetheless, there’s apparently nothing important happening in the real world except the Corona Virus, so that’s what I’m going to write about tonight.
These poetry sites. Some are larger than others, I don’t usually post on the ones that have like 30,000 members or so. That’s like skipping rocks in the ocean. They scoot across the surface, have barely any ripple effect and then sink like a… well, like a rock.
Even the sites where I post, there are barely any comments and usually none, and whatever you wrote slips down the list pretty quickly. That’s O.K., though, it’s sort of like going to readings. There are so many people, and everybody deserves a hearing, and no matter how good your work, you’re only a small part of the crowd, one tiny thread in the human tapestry. And a lot of peope are probably bothered that theirwork isn’t getting seen enough. It’s human nature.
But all that isn’t what I wanted to talk about. Not everybody’s posting poetry. Lots of people try to get conversations started by asking questions like “Do poems have to rhyme?” or “Can anybody think of any good poems about unicorns?” or, the one I saw today that prompted this blog “Should a poet use big words or small words.” I don’t understand this kind of post.
If you don’t have some kind of an idea of how you want to write, if you’re looking for some set of official rules as if all there is to writing is to stick to the recipe. Two cups of big words, one cup of small words, add a bit of rhyme to spice it up, and stir well.
Still, although I thought it a silly question, it got more comments than any of my poems ever have. So, whatever.