4.10.2014

rules-based writing

A poet teaching composition is dangerous to both student and teacher.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They both need to be taught a lesson.

JforJames said...

Of course I'm being a little facetious with that "dangerous" bit, but I've been in workshops where someone who seemed a little too invested in good prose writing criticized a poem for containing sentence fragments. Or sometimes you'll encounter someone in workshop who can't get a handle on the lack of regular punctuation in a poem. Those cases seem to be symptoms of taking 'prose rules', which even good prose writers take liberties with, and applying them too rigorously to poetic composition.