In my recent visits to Eratosphere, I am reminded of why I stopped participating there much. There are some great people there (and a few churls), but they aren’t my audience. I don’t want to write clever-clever metrical poems that have all the stresses in exactly the right places but never say anything important.

Different workshops end up with different feels. Erato’s in one of pedantic nitpickery and celebration of the most antiseptic impulses in poetry. But it’s inevitable. When you talk about sonnets too much, you end up hatcheting them just to have something to say. Non-metrical workshops tend to ooh and aah over metrical work, far beyond the poem’s merits.

I’ve never found a middle ground.

I don’t write in rhyme and meter as an end. They are tools, not the point of the exercise. Stating up front that I want a poem to be read as a “metrical” poem is so so where I want to be.

Yet I submitted a sonnet to the sonnet challenge. So I’m obviously a hypocrite, and a bad dresser to boot.