An excerpt from "On Poetry"
Poetry is the creation of a vicarious situation in concise and evocative language. Again, a vicarious situation could be an idea, image, thought, etc. And concise doesn't necessarily mean short. Concise has more to do with a lack of superfluousness. I think a [good] poem uses only exactly what it needs: nothing more and nothing less. Basically, a [good] poem is good because adding anything to it--or taking anything away from it-- would weaken the created vicarious situation. And to explain "evocative language", I'll quote Mark Twain, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." Yea, I like this definition.
~GamerJosh
Greetings
Hello, and thank you for showing interest in my poems, essays, and (maybe one day) quotes list. Most of the site is pretty self-explanatory, but I feel like I should explain it anyway. Use the menu on the right (Yea, over there --> ) to navigate through the site. Selecting "Home" will bring you back to this page here.
Poems
The poems and everything are separated into different categories. For example, any poem (or anything else) that I upload that I haven't written will end up in the "Not By Josh" category. Love poems fall into the "Love Poems" category; and so on. Some poems will fall into multiple categories. Also, any poem that I've written will always end up in the "By Josh" category. The categories themselves are organized by date, with the newest poems on top. This means that if you get an e'mail that says I've uploaded a new poem (of my own), you can always click on the "By Josh" link to find the newest poem sitting right on top. Finally, most of the poems and writings I put on here, I'm going to comment on in some way--even if it's something of my own. Click the "Commentary" links to see if I've written anything about the piece your looking at.
Logging Out
Your computer will remain logged in either until you manually log out (by clicking the "Logout" link) or until the end of the day. I've put all of my poetry here, behind a password, for a few reasons, the most important being that I wanted to be able to share my writing, without having to worry about it being stolen by some random person. If you use a public computer, it is really important to me that you logout so that nobody else will be able to get into the site.
Some Other Stuff
I've been thinking that one day, I may sit down and record myself reading the poems on this site. Does this idea interest anybody? Also, you can always contact me through the e'mail address used to let you know about updates.
Thanks again, guys!