Literary Aspirations

The advantage of writing poetry is that it really makes you think pretty hard about what you're trying to say. If there are flaws in your thinking, the carefully formulated language really brings them out. So you either have to rework your ideas to be more consistent, or just scrap the poem (and the point of view that went with it) altogether. It's an excellent method for testing your logic and adjusting your ideas, and of course it builds vocabulary and is an appropriately intellectual way to pass the time, and so on and so forth.

The disadvantages of writing poetry are that (1) you end up having to throw away some very pretty verses if you can't adequately defend the thought processes behind them, plus if you don't watch it, you'll become famous and someone will come along after you're dead and publish all the stuff you never wanted anybody to see, and (2) most sensible people feel that poets, as a class, are a bunch of consumptive, vitamin-deficient Victorian nincompoops.

I do have a pretty impressive cough.