Yet more on poetry

I was going to write a long post on my thoughts on poetry, then I realised I'd done it before (and sparked one of my longest-ever discussions).

The motivation last time was some superficially amusing but ultimately mediocre poetry by a Union minister. This time the motivation was Anindita's reflections on appropriate criticism of work that one doesn't like; and the motivation for that was a particular poem that she didn't like, and her attempts to say so without sounding mean or nasty. (In fact, I quite liked that poem and, it turns out, at least one published poet likes it too. But it would be boring if everyone agreed on everything.)

I have a lot of thoughts on the subject, and also on analogies in science, but I went into some of that in comments to my previous post as well as new comments on Anindita's; I may yet expand on them in a new one.

Anyway, the discussion on Anindita's blog is getting interesting, especially how two different published poets (she and Vivek Narayanan) each see a published poem so differently. (And at least two other poets are commenters there, with interesting thoughts on the criticism process.) Go read it if you're interested in such things.