h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Does this apply to poetry? Are you trying to give people information in poems? Or are you conveying a feeling?

If you were trying to write a guide book entry about, say, the graveyard at Haworth, you might say how many stones there are, how old they are etc. If I was writing a poem about the same place, I might try to convey a feeling of sorrow at the number of inscriptions about little children.

Of course you're conveying a feeling. The 'information' a poem communicates may be a mood. Or it may be some other kind of message. Somehow, 21st-century poetry fans seem to be stuck on these little 'mood' poems, but there's an awful lot besides that a poem could say.

There's a lot in this poem of ee cummings' than just a mood. The Cambridge he's talking about is in Massachusetts, near Boston:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47245/the-cambridge-ladies-who-live-in-furnished-souls

But if the feeling you're conveying is you, the authorial voice, wallowing in whatever emotion you've got going, then you probably don't have a very good poem. If Byron can get out of the way of his story, so can everybody else. You don't get the idea that it's he, Byron, in the dungeon at Chillon.

Let's take your imaginary poem about the cemetery at Haworth, for example.

If what you convey is that the implied narrator feels sorrow at the children's graves, you're probably blocking the road. You need to get that narrator, that 'I' voice, out of the way.

The trick is to get the *reader* to feel that sorrow. There are a lot of ways to do that, including making up an unreliable narrator (Browning, anyone?), but hey, ars long, vita brevis....

Ah, that might be what's wrong with the poem I was trying to write about my grandfather. Ive put myself into it. Thanks.

Looking forward to the poem.

Applying your four points to Cursedmas:

"Don't leave readers out in the cold. Tell them what they need and want to know."

Well, right off the bat they want/need to know who the story is about, in this case Ralph and Sonia Hedspin. The faint but persistent sense of menace is established right away with Sonia's dream about Christmas in Hell.

Remember to contextualise.

In the second day's tableau, the reader will learn that Ralph is about to get saddled with a Hellish Christmas writing assignment. His life is not fabulous, what with a twit for a boss and a forward-looking (but not *too* forward-looking) magazine to write articles for.

Don't add extraneous information that readers will not want and won't know what to do with.

Ralph is on something of an odyssey. His boss has ambushed him with a demand that he get information not meant for mortals. We will see how his self-respect holds up under this pressure. Frankly, I think the "experts" can be too fussy sometimes. Mark Twain's story about the Jumping frog has numerous delightful discursions. Also, how many times have you read a detective story that goes on many wild goose chases? All of these apparent masses of extraneous material are actually calculated to get the reader in the right frame of mind, so that when the solution is found (or the frog finally jumps), it will be a delightful surprise. Many readers enjoy getting played.


DO include details that will add interest

I am only just getting started with the details



Very high quality rubbish literature indeed.........

I'll come over and have a look.

It's here:
A87921101

I can honestly say that I don't know how it will end.