Compass, champagne corks, and straws
Everyone has their own choice of cutlery with which they face
the world and cut it into manageable portion sizes. Mine happens to
be poetry, what’s yours? I grew up thinking of reading
as an arsenal against the world as well as a champagne cork to pop at every
celebration. And poetry is the straw and also the compass I clutch
at as I drift through life’s vast oceans.
So, does poetry make a good subject for a blog? Yup,
it does and here are my top reasons:
Brief and punchy
The first tip that an expert gives a newbie is to keep it brief,
between 300-1000 word count for each blog post. Well, what else can make a
point as pithily as a well turned quatrain? One
of Shakespeare’s famous sonnets totes
up less than 120 words, and you could probably edge in a poem of epic
proportions at a word count of 1000. Like this one for instance. Poetry fits into the pared down précis world of 420 word counts and 140
characters like nothing else can. Here's another example.
Trendy
Poetry deals with themes
that are always in demand – love, sex, hormones, happiness, loss, grief, mindfulness, spirituality, beauty, humour, work and play, you
name it, there’s a poem about it. And you could always add your own
take on each of them, they’re not likely to go out of fashion anytime
soon. Poems and rhymes encapsulate the collective wisdom and “how to
.... in 3 steps” for a vast range of subjects. In short and sweet
verses, just the right byte size to nibble at during a coffee break. Intense
but short attention-span reading. Nothing quite like it.
Convulse the SE’s now, go
on
Strangely enough, traffic and search terms need not have anything remotely to do with the actual content that’s written, only the labels and headers that the SE’s can pick up on their radars. For instance, someone may have written a perfectly innocuous and deeply profound poem about a war-ravaged topsy-turvy world and then called it “The Second Coming”; and no guesses on how the SE’s gleefully O that for the kind of search terms that make toes curl. Or your blood curdle, alternatively. But hey, that gets the traffic moving, right? Poetry has a lot of potential that way. If one can figure out the tags and terms. Which I totally can’t. But then I can’t figure out any of the rest either, so that’s okay.
Lo salt alternative
One thing I keep hearing
is that how I shouldn’t take everything I read on the net as gospel
truth.
“Don’t take it seriously,
a large pinch of salt is a mandatory addition,” my more net savvy friends tell
me with raised and wagging fingers, ”Just because a page has a half a million
views a month doesn’t make the information accurate.”
“Lies, damn lies and
statistics, most of ‘em,” another one tells me, “Check the sources.”
Seriously? I always
thought people went to the net for information, Google being the modern day
Jeeves, no?
“What are you, insane?
Only .gov and .this, .that and .other are reliable, the rest is bs.”
Well, a poem does not
convey facts and since it's imaginary there need not be any disclaimers
about accuracy or the lack thereof. Writing a poem doesn’t require
reams of research, and reading it doesn’t require you to be on some information
red-alert either. It only needs for one side to feel it and be able
to communicate, and the other side to read it and enjoy it. Easy write, easy read. No salt or seasoning mandatory. Read
it, shut it, forget it. Or not, as you like.
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