Writing in your own style

After reading some of the discussions on criticism and how people react to poems, I feel like some people want perfect 14 line sonnets or whatever. Yes, writing originally had specific structure, and many poets (good poets) conform to that. However, we don’t want another thousand copies of Shakespeare. If everyone wrote to particular framework, we’d all be bored to death. Why not just write something different, from the heart. I forget who it was but someone apparently re-wrote a poem “correctly” in a comment, why!? Take John Agard for example, I’m sure Microsoft Word didn’t like how he spelt things, and people will be looking at the punctuation thinking wtf? But is poetry really about being grammatically correct? Most english essays, or exam papers are along the lines of “What effect does this give?” or “How does the author convey this?” “Comment on the structure of the writing, what effect does this have?” “How is imagery used throughout the poems…” I’m not sure if it’s true or not, but only 5% of our grade is our spelling, (if that makes sense… no, spelling is only worth 5% of the grade at GCSE level, correct me if I’m wrong.) People should be entitled to poetic licence, and work is either appreciated or not. So don’t throw strops if people don’t like it, honestly, who cares? And for those that just say how terrible something is, explain it, then maybe people will accept the criticism as constructive, not just “hate comments”.

Very true Emma, ask you know who.

exactly

wow, Bob! I've never seen a reaction like that from you! Normally, I would have deleted JustPlainMe's comment (especially if there was no reply) but I REALLY like your reply, so I'm going to leave it...unless you tell me otherwise....

i dunno, sometime I think Just plain me (however it's spelt) has a point, people take a few things over the top.

ya rebel! write how you want! lol someone told me like you have to have like four lines then a break then four lines then break, they do look good like that but wow have i broken that "rule" so many times! lol i write how i wanna write and u should too, and i ain't the best speller eitehr thats for sure!

~lil slam~ and also since everyone is mentioning bob i will too see lol i said bob. :)

im thinking that some people ciritise people bc they dont want anyone to b better than they are... so they convince themselves that u suck and pik out stupid things to insult anothers poem so that u feel good about ur own

people should write the way they like and people are allowed to say what they think