“Share your innermost life,” marketing gurus advise writers, “with your readers, your newsletter folks, with everyone. Make it all public Make it pop-ular.”

That’s a certain way to burn out most of your audience, who just want the knowledge you have or just want to be entertained.

“Open the window. Let them see into part of your life.” That’s reasonable and rational marketing advice.

A window doesn’t give access to every room of your home, and it certainly doesn’t give access to what you’ve stored in closets or tucked deep in drawers or hidden in old boxes in the attic.

We writers have a constant push-pull dynamic of revealing ourselves. Heartfelt emotion is one of the four requirements of song, applicable to all writing. It speaks to us, touches us soul-deep, and leaves us weeping because we have a similar wound.

In this segment we have two poems by a man who wrote for public consumption but also purged his private anguish in a poem meant only to be published posthumously.

TIMINGS

00:00 Welcome

00:40 Introduction / Public vs. Private

2:20 Deceit with Reader / Heartfelt Emotion

4:23 Longfellow / Long Rant

7:05 HWL Public vs. Private Poems

8:53 Lessons 1, 2, and 3

9:50 “The Harvest Moon”

11:00 Lessons 4 and 5

12:30 “Mezzo Cammin”

14:45 Lesson 6

15:50 Last Words / Closing

Total Run Time = 17:58

Analysis is All Original Content / No AI Used

#henrywadsworthlongfellow #marketingadviceforwriters #harvestmoonpoem #mezzocamminsonnet #sonnet

LINKS

Bio on Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wadsworth_Longfellow

“Harvest Moon” https://poets.org/poem/harvest-moon

“Mezzo Cammin” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50629/mezzo-cammin

Link to Website https://thewritefocus.blogspot.com/2024/11/fall-into-poetry-writing-public-vs.html

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