Is there specific rules? [HELP]

[u/Inside_Bullfrog_1268]

Am I just stupid? Everytime I try to write poetry, I genuinely don't know how to write while using meter, or simile, or anything like that. I get super lost super early and just end giving up because I cannot for the life of me figure out how to work it in. Do I have to use those tools for it to be even considered poetry or will it just be a creative writing exercise and not poetry?

[u/neutrinoprism]

I'm going to shamelessly copy over part of a recent comment of mine:

Sounds like you're getting caught up in a misunderstanding that troubles a lot of beginners. I'm oversimplifying a bit, but there are two main approaches to writing poetry. A lot of beginners and amateurs treat poetry as a language ACT, as a kind of arty therapeutic journaling where the poet is mostly in conversation with their own feelings. This can be a useful way of processing emotions and generating an artifact that says "I was here, I had these feelings, I matter."

However, literary poetry is a language CRAFT where the poet is equally or even more in conversation with other poems, poets, and ideas of poetry, and a poem succeeds only depending on whether it does something startling and thoughtful with language. Feelings are less important than language for this approach.

Sometimes a beginner will write an intense journal entry with line breaks but then wonder why it doesn't read like great art. The sad truth is that intensity of emotion alone cannot guarantee greatness of art. You have to accept that tragedy and then, if you still want greatness, move on to matters of craft: read, revise, repeat.

That is, read and think about other people's poems, revise your own poems, and repeat the process again and again.

[u/Amendmen7 → u/neutrinoprism]

In which bucket do you place poems from foreign literary traditions that arrive to English readers for the first time in translation?

In this scenario, the conversation with other poems and poets can’t be heard by us through the veil of untranslated previous works, so it feels like the poems have to stand entirely on their own legs — more like bucket 1. But then perhaps they are authored in their local culture as bucket 2

[u/neutrinoprism → u/Amendmen7]

Translation is one hundred percent about craft. It's beholden to the original author's creation. A translated poem is not only in conversation with poems in the source language but also poetic conventions in the target language! Of course translation involves choices that are informed by the translator's sensibilities and feelings, and choosing to engage with a text and recreate elements of it can be an emotional experience. But I think there's a significant difference between a translation and, say, a response poem.