any of my work..looking for comments..

Hi Sean, very quickly: It seems to me that you're caught between two stool, from what I've read. In some of your poems there's a hint of something that would be very good as a performed poem (If I had Breath for example)if you worked on it more. Your other poems seem to to be hampered a bit by uncomfortable contortions to make sure that they rhyme, or a general lack of structure. If you're going to go down the route of preparing poetry for performance, sound is really important. If you trip, stumble, twist, stretch or otherwise have to do something uncomfortable when you;re reading a poem aloud, unless you're doing it on purpose, there's a problem with what you're writing. You still need to look at structure and style though, especially if you want stuff to come alive on the page, too. Learning about different poetic forms and structures is probably the most important thing you can do if you want to write poems. First off, read other poets, read poets from different times, places and approaches. Second off, find some guides to different forms, study them and see how they work. Third off, find what it is you want to say, then try and say it following the rules of structure and form. Do this, and you'll be able to break the rules afterward, but you do need to know and understand them before you do. Is this any help? Cheers, Mark

Sean, you could do worse than having a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry Being self-taught's no bad thing. I'm self taught, too. The important thing is to keep teaching yourself, trying new things and learning more about what you're trying to do. Form and rhythm and structure are things that free you up rather than constrain you, I find. They give you the challenge of meeting the rules and saying what you want, which makes things interesting and gives you a real chance of coming out with something special. Stick with it! Cheers, Mark

I would also add that -in my opinion- very often, the best of poetry is one that allows one outside your context to be able to appreciate it e.g. first line of a poem titled 'life': "A seed does what is required of it" anonymous Instantly I know that that writer whoever she or he may be knows what he/she is writing about. From the word go I can say yeh, this is going to be good. And regarding your self-teaching I can only say: that never stopped good old Bill.