The problem with poetry · 12:59am Jan 10th, 2014
I bet you thought I was going to do this blog post in rhyme. Come on, admit it: you did, didn't you? Thought so.
At the time of writing this blog post, I have five "stories" up on FIMFiction. Those quotes are deliberate, because the most recent one, Friendship is Poetry, isn't a story at all: it's a collection of poems. Those poems have a thread running through them to link them all – that they're based on episodes of the show – but nevertheless they are separate pieces that could stand alone (two-parters excepted) in a way that chapters of a prose story could not.
And there's the rub. I couldn't publish that collection until I had seven poems written, for the simple reason that it was only then that my total word count exceeded 1,000. The problem is that, for reasons of practicality, poetry is held to the same minimum word count limit as prose – and that really isn't fair. Understandable yes, since relaxing the limit would inevitably lead to some people trying it on and submitting 60-word rubbish under the guise of poetry, but nevertheless a shame.
Poetry gets a hard time in this fandom. I've been told directly by an EqD pre-reader that the site's visitors really aren't interested in poetry for the most part, with a strong implication that a poem would have to be of much higher quality than a prose story on a similar topic to reach EqD's acceptance threshold. Here on FIMFiction, poetry is accepted easily enough – but most poetry is still ruled out, because most poems are nowhere near 1,000 words in length. We're bound to be missing out on some poetic gems.
I don't know of a realistic way out of this problem, since I doubt that a dedicated pony poetry site would make a go of it given FIMFiction's established supremacy in the pony fanfic field. But in such a broad and varied fandom, one where prose, music, animation, cosplay and even cupcake baking are all welcomed and valued, it does sometimes seem as though poetry is being marginalised. It's hardly surprising that I don't much like that.
I think you've managed to nail both sides of the quandary here. While poetry shouldn't be held to the same length as prose (one of my favourite poems is four lines long and perfect the way it is), as you say there isn't any way to relax the word limit the wouldn't open the floodgates to all manner of dreck either.
That said, I think that this:
Is less a fandom thing and more a consequence of poetry's lack of popularity in general amongst the young. It's a rather unfortunate side-effect of being forced to study in poetry in school, or possibly just a reflection of the fact that poetry makes you work to understand it more consistently than prose does, and thus lends itself less well to casual reading.
1702391 Well, I don't know. When I was more active in the Watership Down fandom (admittedly a much smaller one than this) I found it fairly easy to find a receptive audience for my poetry. True, the book itself contains a little -- but then we have Zecora. I think you may well have a point regarding the effort needed to understand some poetry, but I'm not sure it's the whole answer.