/lit/ - Literature

No. No, she's not.

If she only writes for herself, I don't see the problem. I don't mind narcissism if people keep it to themselves.

Do people ever *really* only write for themselves? Sure, it can be cathartic, but every author who's ever mentioned they only write for themselves still allow their work to be published. So, somewhere along the line, does the desire for other peoples opinion on ones work come in to play during the writing process?

I don't believe she actually responded entirely in that fashion. I think you've tried to make her sound more ignorant than she was actually sounding so you can win /lit/s approval and feel smug and superior.

Well it won't wash, Fink.

There was a gay kid in one of my writing classes like this. He literally stated that he knew his writing was fantastic and that he did not need to revise it and didn't give a shit about what other people said about it.

His argument was that he had been published in a highschool poetry book, so he's good at writing.

I wanted to strangle him the entire semester, and so did the professor.

>>1877541
I don't know man, I've known plenty of girls who were just as ignorant as the one in op's post, if not more so. I don't see why it seems so implausible to you

>>1877544
and then the whole theater stood up and applauded

>>1877544
Because I've known plenty of 4channers who have proven to be more ignorant and insecure than those girls.

It's far more likely that OP is making himself look much better than he actually was in that conversation, and is making her look like a total idiot.

I'm sure they're probably both idiots.

>>1877541

Whoa, hey now. I understand that people may like to dick around and play head games to make themselves feel good around these parts, but it's pretty cynical to assume posts like mine are going to always be utilized as a masturbatory tool. For the record, since it's obviously needed, I copy and pasted from our conversation.

So, what made your butt hurt so bad about what I said? Clearly you think I'm being a dick for disagreeing with the girl, so what's the deal?

>>1877555
It's probably a femanon who's on her period. Just ignore it.

>>1877547
Starting slowly at first, with one lone clapper. He clapped strong, and proud. Then it built up into a thunderous roar. A sea of the clap!

>>1877556

Ohhhh, too true. Good point, should've caught that one myself.

>>1877555
I don't think you're a dick, and I'm not mad. I just think this probably didn't go down exactly how you're portraying it.

Let's call it optimism. I'd rather refuse to believe people are that stupid.

>>1877526
Her attitude makes her happy and does no harm.
Let it go

>>1877556
>>1877561
Patriarchal oppressors. Just because a woman gets mad doesn't mean she's on the rag, you homosexuals.

loljk, i trolld u didnt I? u thot i wuz a faminist loll

>>1877562

I never said her way of thinking was stupid. In fact, I was asking if it was, or wasn't, and I guess you answered that question yourself in the most roundabout way possible. So, sure, I point something out that can be observed as idiocy, but you're the one who stuck the label on it, not me. That doesn't sound too optimistic to me.

>>1877566

Wow, women really do post on the Internet.

>>1877571
Stuck a label on it? What are you talking about?

I didn't pass judgement either way.

>>1877526
>doesn't need rules and regulation to call her writing poetry.

Free verse? It's pretty much poetry with no real rules or regulations.

>>1877575
>if I claim this guys a woman, i'll look smart and people will laugh at me and respect me

Oh wait. Is this thread about Sylvia Plath?

Bravo, if so.

>>1877581

>implying free verse is poetry

>>1877579

Troll sensors on full blast. Should've caught this one earlier as well. Feeling like a derp today.

>>1877581

But even free verse - even the most bullshitty nonsensical poems - abide by the most basic of principals of the English language, and it never hurts to recognize or understand them. The usage of musicality, and sound, and texture all play a role in the creation of most poems. Perhaps they aren't "rules" everyone needs to know, and they're the type of things some people can just inherently know by being absorbed into a culture that utilizes the language, but to say one doesn't believe in poetry because they refuse to see that an ever evolving language like English has qualities that benefit poetry when understood, is a bit naive, especially when calling yourself a writer.

Art is subjective. Poetry is an art form. Poetry is a completely subject medium which doesn't require communard style regulations.

>>1877585

You seem to be taking this a little bit more seriously than everyone else.

Someone else can drop the "m" word for me.

>>1877588
Like a hand in rushing water,
a cool and tangible surface,
like a hand out a car window,
the wind controlling its movement,
like a hand upon green grass,
as you watch it bend in softness,
like a hand touching fire,
every moment leaves a mark,
like a hand in the frozen snow,
your warmth could melt it all,

gently,
slowly,
specifically,
all detail matters,
and every inch is art,
I could tell you about a reason,
to love a moment like this,
but its better left,
unsaid,

for a touch is worth a thousand words,
and pictures just don’t matter anymore,
for only a memory of your touch,
can bring that look to her face,
and that longing,
to her eyes.

>>1877588
Classicalist detected.

Move along. Nothing to see here.

>>1877599

You use "communard" like people coming together under one banner of language is a bad thing. We're all shoved into one alphabet - there are basic principals that can be understood and observed without "poets" having knee-jerk reactions about how similar they are to everyone else.

>>1877597
I even made it obvious. I was like 'okay, he's going to get it now.' but it took you another two more posts.

Oh well, we all have our off days.

To answer your question, sounds like she's talking about free verse, which is just for lazy people who don't understand rhyme schemes because they had shitty english teachers.

>>1877609

The trolls on /lit/ are classy, I see. Touche.

>>1877605

What a thought filled poet.

>>1877623
Thank you. I call it "The Art of Touching a Woman"

It's autobiographical. I am very experienced at lovemaking.

God I HATE HATE HATE self-serving poetry/literature/anything. If I wanted to know so much about the writer's struggles, I'd read their freaking biography or their "about me" on their facebook. There's this kid I know that wrote sappy poetry a while ago and it did NOTHING for the readers, it was simply a pity party in a bastardized poem. On the next post I'll put up one of his poems, just so you can see what I mean. Anyways, as a reader, I want to read something that applies to others or has an interesting perspective that makes a foreign perspective relatable to me. When the poet is too busy using the first person as a method to channel their whining, why should I care? And THEN, he writes another note giving a goddamn explanation as to why he writes the way he does! I hate this idea that writing is so subjective that it transcends criticism and should only matter what the author thinks of it. It makes NO sense.

Let me take you to a place that only I know
Where the sun shines bright and the green grass will always grow
A place where I am always happy 24/7
This is a place that I would like to call my little slice of heaven
A place where I can be anything I want and change at any time
A place where I will never grow old and will always be in my prime
This place is unlike any other
A place where everyone is so close knit like a sister or brother
I can walk through an endless meadow and stop to smell the flowers
A place where my dreams come to life so I just sit there dreaming for hours
A place where I will never get hurt
In this place I will never be 6 feet under lying in dirt
This place is something no one can take from me
It is where I don't feel imprisoned and I can be truly free
A place where heroes walk amongst the earth
In this place everyone is a hero and always shows what their worth
A place where everyone has a good conscience
A place where no ones opinion is considered nonsense
This place there is only one of it's kind
This place exists somewhere deep down inside of my mind

...seriously, what the flying fuck is that nonsense.

>not sageing from post 2

I don't even know how to reply to this thread. Stop assuming what you learnt in high school English is factual you objectivist asspie and start looking beyond the aesthetics of language. Sometimes raw, unstructured content can be more compelling than the most virtuoistic use of structures.

I've never been moved by a Shakesperian sonnet - actually I don't really like Shakespeare at all. I understand the forms, structures, rhyming schemes but it doesn't mean a damn thing. If it doesn't make you feel anything then there's something wrong with it.

>>1877708
>If it doesn't make you feel anything then there's something wrong with it

Or you're expecting it to be instantly accessible when you actually need to be working at deriving meaning instead of having it just handed it to you on a plate, i.e., people who dislike free jazz because they've heard it once and decided it has no purpose, content, or meaning

>>1877708

sounded like a reliable anon until mentioned Shakespeare
And then I realized Anon is probably a 16 yo who just failed his final on Shakespeare

>fucking summer fags.

>>1877708

Someone clearly didn't read this entire thread.

>>1877713
It's too bad that subjectivity gets so much hate around here, because this is one of those examples where its relevant. To put something down because it doesn't resonate with you personally on an emotional level is somewhat ignorant, because it will likely have that emotional resonance with someone else.

The emotional content, and technical merit, of any work of art are different things, although usually interwoven.

Basically, I enjoy the things that I enjoy, and vice versa... but I don't necessarily think that all of the things that I like are high tier in terms of technical merit, but some of them are.

>>1877708
Agreed, Bukowski's raw, unstructured work often reaches me more than Shakespeare.

>>1877726
fucking exactly, thank you

it is possible to divorce one's opinion of whether something is good or bad from one's emotional response; they are different though interrelated things. I like a lot of things, love a lot of things, that I am also capable of acknowledging are really, really bad.

>respect for the English language

Kids lack this nowadays. I remember taking a test in high school, and the girl next to me wrote "vocab" on the top instead of vocabulary. That made me really angry. Why did she have to do that?

Your response to her is probably the instinctive response of anyone with a sense of appreciation for poetry, and I think it is more or less the correct one. You've highlighted the importance of 'texture' in poetry which is one of the big elements that sets it apart from everyday language, its ability to defamiliarise, make strange the language we use. It is similar to, to use a well-known example, the shift from walking to dance. Surely, one of the things we love about dance is its ability to free us from the regular constraints of uh.. familiar pedestrian movement, and surely we tend to appreciate the finely choreographed, rule-based and regulated dance of russian ballet over the unguided fumblings of the club-footed. Indeed, the existence of arbitrarily imposed rules is often quite necessary for pleasure (a world in which we can fulfill our needs and desires effortlessly quickly begins to lose its value or temptation; hence the need for regularity and constraint), for the recognition of differing levels skill, talent and ingeniouity which help us determine upon whom we wish to confer exclusive merit. I'm not of course saying that disregard for the rules, whether it be in poetry or any other art form, is always undesirable or harmful: I should think that many if not all great artistic accomplishments are achieved by surmounting (but not subverting) the governing artistic conventions, a tenuous but necessary act in many cases for the progression of an art form. So to summarise, rules are the necessary component for pleasure in many areas of life, and for evaluation; they're simply inescapable if one lives any sort of existence in which one chooses to qualitatively differentiate between pieces.

1/2

>>1877819
As for this,
>I know basically everything about the english language, i'm the best writer I know. I only write for myself so it doesn't matter if it's pretty.
Let's not even take the first two points seriously, self-praise is hardly-sustainable praise. This is more interesting:

>I only write for myself so it doesn't matter if it's pretty.
The reality of writing is that no-one writes "for themselves"; all our utterances presuppose an other, even when we talk to ourselves. Dostoevsky's Underground Man is a classic example of double-voiced discourse in a societal unit as small as the individual; he addresses society, he uses the other voice of the questioning self. No-one can write for themselves, and no-one can be their own evaluator, because the precondition for the possibilty for evaluation is societal: we are born into values and norms which influence our judgment, our we are born in opposition and outside of those norms which equally serve as a contrast on which we make our evaluations.

Your friend is very clumsily stumbling around the area of allowing unrestricted free-play as a mechanism for the progression of an art form, but this in no way escapes the necessity for rule governed evaluations. T.S. Eliot, when describing a form as supposedly unrestrictive as free verse, wrote "no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job", and I think that still stands very well.

2/2

>>1877824
I agree with most of what you said, but I've always disagreed with Eliot's complete dismissal of freeverse. I don't think that freeverse is chaotic in such a way that makes it unenjoyable, but is, instead, a form of controlled chaos that was birthed out of the extreme, strict rules of more formal styles of poetry.

tl;dr I think freeverse is a product of traditional poetry, not a deviance from it.

It's not that there all free verse is worthless to Eliot, it's that all language can be described by form. Compelling free-verse may not assume a regular rhyme scheme or meter, but sound -- and therefore poetics -- will be engaged.

>I'm the best writer I know

I already want to disagree with her solely on this display of narcissism. But, if she really does write strictly for herself, I don't see any problem if she writes like shit or not, as long as she doesn't get a big head and starts spreading terrible writing around. Besides, I don't think anyone writes purely for themselves. Most people like getting a little ego boost from others praising their writing.

>>1877819
>>1877824

Fucking 5-star post, nigga.

>>1877854
>best writer I know
>I write for myself.
obvious confirmation bias, I don't think that anybody could hold themselves in such high regard once exposed to the scathing criticism of other people.

I tried to get critique on this poem yesterday, but I barely got any response. Anyone care to tell me what they think of it? Good, bad, mediocre? Thanks.

Done undone, deeds linger on
like hanging-heavy heads,
they echo down through peatbog holes,
in tightly thick-wound bandage gauze
round bodies, said unsaid.
Memory is echo-bound,
regret is ever-stirring,
a sealed cave of repitition,
preserved undisinterring.

Posting my poem along with some original artwork.

One bird sat in the shade to hide
A second nestled to his side
The first asked the other to stay
He said "Oh!" and then flew away

Dancing down on a mane of reddened star
The onyx depths brandish their cold scimitar
Flurrying, panicking, let the apex unfurl
Crests allow sight - what secrets they sell…

Just skeletons here, no lies to the fold
Of sifting from wisping crushed drowned marigold
Clinging on bone it’s diffusing, cracked skin
Awash with empowering knowledge it’s in

Drenched within paradox, void made replete
It hums with drowned voices of those that I meet
Floating it gallops on eight-legged steeds
Diffusing turgid aural seeds

Dripping I’m played by the wind as a death
Fished from the blood and into the breath
Upon me as lances and bursting with splint
The fugue takes it’s hold as dull blasting print

Two evils and violence of void I desire
Consumed phantasmagoric pyre
Abandon the breeze and the scythe and the breath
And into the blood and the void and the death

A land breathes in non-stop one-way exhalation
And slithering from megalithic oblation
The burning of static in mind’s respiration’s
Respite from the rasps of the days desperation

Deadening down to the hell-marine hymns
Replacing disgraced atrophying limbs
Last utterance lost as bubbles will rise
To hold up slowly sinking skies

I need to add punctuation and then experiment with the consistency of the meter.

>>1877866
>I don't think that anybody could hold themselves in such high regard once exposed to the scathing criticism of other people.

Have you met D&E yet?

>>1877916
You really think that's what D&E is on about?
Okay. Interpretation, death of the author ect.

See the thing with poetry is that it isn't true that there are no rules to it. Sure someone could ignore the rules and still come up with great poetry but that's the same as someone sitting down at the piano and writing an amazing tune without any knowledge of rhythm or form.

There are rules to poetry, people just aren't taught them anymore.

>>1877884
everything you do is good. yes i know who this is.

>>1877787

Don't be such a crochety old man. She did it because she wanted to, not pending your approval.

Also >implying you're not a kid

>>1877923
Thank you sir, you are kind. Interesting that you know who I am.

Females, minorities, and homosexuals will usually take this attitude when it comes to anything difficult.

Get used to it.

OP here

Sweet blueberry butterfuck. Intelligent responses? On MY 4chan? As Uncle Joey would say, Cut. It. Out.

>>1878098
without females, homosexuals, and minorities there would be no poetry besides bukowski collections read by 19-year-old boys saving up for black flag tattoos

>>1878098
you are fucking terrible and i don't want you to post anymore

>>1878098
A+ post

>>1877639
lmao

>>1878585
lmao

>Is she on to something?

No.

>doesn't believe in poetry
bitch, it exists.

>>1878585
>without females, homosexuals, and minorities there would be no poetry besides bukowski collections read by 19-year-old boys saving up for black flag tattoos

You sure about this? Check your facts and get back with us.

>>1878585
>claiming bukowski is for 19 year olds

good one.

>>1879124
more like 16 year olds

Yes, she is. She is right that you dont need rules and regulations to create poetry. Poetry is the pleasing effect that language may have, but there is no formula for creating that effect. Every rule of grammar has been broken by poets and has pleased someone.

As for not being pretty, thats true, but you said beautiful, which is broader. There are beautiful people who are not pretty. Many poets.

Her writing makes her happy. Good for her. She is probably coping with some issues through her writing and your attempt to constrain how she does it threatened her ability to cope, so she gave you a defensive response.

>I know basically everything about the english language, i'm the best writer I know

Almost everyone who claims something like this on any subject is an idiot. People who are genuinely knowledgeable on a subject are far more aware of the scope of the area of interest and therefore how much they still have left to learn.

It's also a pretty damaging mindset. How do you expect to improve if you delude yourself into thinking you're perfect already? Once an artist is fully satisfied with his work he no longer grows as an artist.

>respect for the English language and it's ability
>English language and it's
>respect
>English
>it's

Idiot.

>>1877907
haha, that's not your poem buddy, that is my poem

I know because I have very specific explanations for some of the lines, and after I posted it here, I changed some of them because I was displeased.

Flattering, I guess.