mmoa_writes

I'm part of an online writers community which is quite a lot of fun. It's not quite as flexible as other sites like skyehawke or fanfiction.net, where you can actually write reviews of various pieces. You can only rate. Having said that, the rating is itself quite flexible - you get options ranging from (article A) is better than (article B) by far, all the way to slightly more, and vice versa.



So far I've only been sent poetry to rate. This is again probably a good thing as I don't really have the time or patience to read the novel excerpts or short stories, most of the latter being little more than slightly exaggerated (albeit very well-written) memoirs and thus, don't quite cut it for me as strictly short fiction.

What I've noticed is that most of the poetry is... banal. Not bad necessarily - bad writers/pieces are weeded out pretty soon from my own short experience - but just not, affecting in any way. They're the poetic equivalent of those collector's edition painted plates by some half-assed commercial artist who specialises in 'children and animals'... or cliched native American Indian mythology. In themselves, they're not terrible, but they're just not anything special and thus, very difficult to rate (I tend to stick with the 'better by slightly more' mode).

This also seems to extend beyond the internet. Lots of modern poetry just doesn't do it for me. Perhaps that's because I don't read that much of it, but from what I have read, it's direfully banal. I almost want some truly terrible poetry to get published just so that I can have an ounce of feeling towards it.

Apathy is a wonderfully exciting thing to write about, is it now? lol...