Awful?

True creativity cannot die. Regardless of criticisms and disapproval, the spark of art that lives within certain entities cannot be eliminated. It can wither and crumble, but its roots will always remain and eventually break forth on new ground to further branch out, seed, and therefore bring out new creative ideas. Though, the attempt to make creativity out of nothing by non-creative people is umm… well…. nothing. It was never there and so it does not exist. It cannot exist on its own- only by diligence and persistence is any improvement made, and well, anything past nothing is something, so that doesn’t initially say much.
In Steve Kowit’s chapter entitled “Awful Poems” in his book In the Palm of Your Hand, his judgments don’t venture far from the name of the section. And, I cannot say that I did not agree with the most of his criticisms on the epidemic of implementing poor language into a form some call “poetry.” Stevie, let’s call him Stevie; Stevie makes clear in this chapter that one great problem with the emaciated phrases is the direct word display of emotions rather than painting the portrait of those emotions. He says in reference to one poor prose on page 38: “It is an example of telling us the feelings instead of showing us the scene that conveys the feelings.” Agreed. To effectively exhibit these passions the entire surrounding arena must be displayed. Yes. It’s true.
And as I agree with Stevie on this ground, there is one comment that he makes which cocks my brow. He states on page 42 that imagery should not be used out of context in poetry. In reference to another novice poem and its fanciful liquid visualizations Stevie says: “Those images of water, boats and frogs… here they are out of place.” As I found many other wounds in the poem (hah, wounds), the disconnected imagery was not one of them. I quite enjoyed the comparisons and found them complementary and not distracting. I can appreciate the leg on which he stands, (hah, leg) but in this case, I cannot agree.
On that note, what is true creativity and who is to determine the quality of it? What have I to say in contrast to Stevie, or any other judge of poetry, or you? Beauty must be in the eye of the beholder or something like that- colloquialism and out.