/lit/ - Literature

>>21620956
Haha. Our culture sucks man

>>21620963
as in culture of the wider world or board culture

>>21620956
Poetry isn't real

>>21620984
It's one and the same.

>>21620999
to an extent, I'd agree. it saddens me that neither appreciates contemporary poetry. the wider world ignores it, and /lit/ never reads it and yet makes vague, sweeping pronouncements about its death

i know a bunch of them but they are just meme poets like rupi kaur that 4chan hates :)

>>21621337
Nah fuck new poetry

>>21621337
ocean vuong is probably the best contemporary poet and he just writes about his parents having sex and how heckin evil america is.
There is no soul.

>>21621580
America is evil though

>>21621584
I don’t need random ass line breaks from a wannabe ESL mutt to tell me that. I’d rather read Whitman and Crane for the rest of my life than ever read contemporary schlock

poetry is dead bitches
it's current year already

Here's my contemporary poetry. I wrote this because I haven't written anything in a few years and instead I've spent those years posting every goddamn thing I could write on this website.

Enjoy:
[CHARISMA]
00000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000

inspiration to change
is the real GOD
of modern fools

wishing to be something different
or greater than
the scum that they are

the laughing elites; they mock us
and feed us their shitty, half-baked
solutions

and we eat it up
ask for seconds
and keep the consumption flooding
forever more

what i'd like to do
if i could
is take up
this broken mantle

and convince everyone
of the lie
that they can better
like me

i'd shower them with
an overabundance
of information

and have them bathe in it
like children in
a smelly ball-pit

DANCE, YOU FUCKING CHILDREN
YOU CASH COWS OF
HOPELESS RESENT

YOU COULD HAVE BEEN LIKE ME
IF ONLY
YOU WERE
FUCKING BETTER

BUT INSTEAD OF BEING BETTER
YOU ARE NOTHING
BUT A STUPID SHIT

A STUPID PEASANT; A MIDDLE-CLASS CLOWN
MY BASEST PLEASURE

>>21621709
honk honk

>>21621725
I guess that sums it up. Kinda cheapens it, but I guess it wasn't well thought-out to begin with.

>>21621597
something tells me your hatred of vuong has nothing to do with his objective aesthetic quality, anon

>>21620956
It don't rhyme

>>21620956
Poetry is fucking gay and my country has been completely destroyed by WW, FDR, Nix, and LBJ.

>>21620956
The majority of poetry is super gay because every author just bleeds out their feeling with very little skill, and thinks that putting line breaks into what is essentially just prose is "artsy." Only once in a blue moon does a poem actually hit me, and it's because it actually has great rhythm or vivid imagery or actually has an emotional impact.

>>21620956
/lit/ hates anything contemporary because there haven't been any fancy academics that have told them how to feel about it yet.

>>21620956
Only people studying or with a degree in literature care about poetry beyond few authors in general, expecting this board to know them is just retarded. If anything contemporary poets should ask themselves why does nobody care about them

>>21621881
>his objective aesthetic quality

>>21620956
Enjambmentificated free verse which despite the freedom is tone deaf as regards musicality and betrays the speech dysfluencies of a William Shatner, Barack Obama, or up-talking Valley Girl. Sometimes all of them at once.

That and it's a rare poet that puts out sustained incontestable quality for an entire book's worth. Finding the quality in contemporary poets relies a bit too much on compendiums, or chancing on them in a review/small publication, ect.

>>21623062
The only way to get published is to appeal to the wine mom or feminist audience who have no clue and couldn't care less what skill in poetry is and only appreciate dripping pathos in infantile form (preferably heavily politicised)

>>21620956
/Lit/ doesn't read. Still, almost all contemporary poetry sucks. I read various poetry mags, and even when stuff is well written the subject matter or point being made is generally trash.

>>21621709
No one asked; no one cares.

Context is everything. The context of poems sent to a magazine or being published in some book on amazon is weak. It weakens anything that might be said.
I only respect disembodied spirits. Your flesh and your mortgage payments and your marketing meetings are disgusting.

>>21623321
I've got the same experience. 95 out of 100 poems today are not worth a passing grade.

>>21621580
Yeats just wrote about wanting to bone Maud Gonne and how evil Ireland was. What's the difference?

i just want more shel silverstein. im not picky

>>21624048
95 out of 100 poems published in any era are not worth a passing grade anon. only the best survives. not everyone was keats, there were a lot of tay mcgonagals

Kids share poetry on tiktok and places like that now. What you'll see is that kids don't go out of their way to read printed contemporary poetry unless it becomes viral online from a video or the occasional blog/twitter post. Most adults don't even subscribe to things like anthologies or follow book tours so not surprising kids don't either. They tend to form small circles and share what they write among themselves and are also influenced by trends in things like music.

Sometimes older poetry is read but what's popular is slam style poetry. This is the kind of stuff the kids I tutor in high school have shared with me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqu4ezLQEUA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnKZ4pdSU-s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuQNwlecYdk

I'm not huge on poetry but it seems like if you want people to read your stuff nowadays you got to read it to them first.

Poetry basically died after the modernists (pound, elliott)

modern poetry seems to be nothing but dimwitted declarations of personal hubris and vapid affirmations of liberal ideology


Modern poetry is just narcissistic minorities whining about be opweessed :(


Ill take wb yeats writining about the occult and the end times over rupi kaur writing about her vagina

there are no poets that speak to me in the modern age, im a 30 year old loser shut in thats going to die alone, all poetry and all literature is marketed to overly social upper class white women who non ironically cried when hillary lost

>>21620956
Can you post 3 good contemporary poems?

>>21625574
It's hard to put into words how deeply unappealing those videos are.

>>21625621
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ8-ETHE9AI

>>21625601
sure.

"Failing and Flying," by Jack Gilbert:

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

"Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg," by Richard Hugo

You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs—
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

>>21625601
and the final one which I couldn't include in >>21625656 because of character limit. a particular favorite of mine

"Separation," by WS Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

(important to note I'm using contemporary a bit loosely here, referring to poems "from the contemporary era" rather than "poems written by people who are currently alive.")

>>21625663
>>21625656
Not a fan of any of these

>>21625691
I'm sorry to hear that, anon. I think they're wonderful poems. what are some examples of contemporary poems you enjoy?

>>21625696
I don't read any contemporary poets. But I don't read much poetry anyway. 4 Quartets, The Wasteland, The Shield of Achilles, pretty much all of Dickinson, and this one below are some poems I like and what I'd compare your examples to:

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

>>21625725
Not a fan of that one, but I enjoy Dickinson. Four Quartets intimidates me but I adore The Waste Land

Have a bump because I wanna see a good antology of contemporary poetry.

>>21626396
Probably best to just search on piracy site for poetry anthology and sort by year and see if any focus on contemporary poems

>>21620956

>why does /lit/ hate contemporary poetry so much?

I DO NOT HATE CONTEMPORARY POESY; I DETEST WHAT TODAY PASSES FOR POESY.


>most of you can't even name three contemporary poets without googling [SIC]

CARLA QUEVEDO, LILI REINHART, MILA TESLA.

>>21620956
I admit it: I just don't GET poetry. To me, (good) prose is just so much more beautiful and effective at conveying information.
Is it all the video games I played as a kid? Or is poetry just a huge self-conditioned delusion?

>>21626396
>picrel

>>21626396
>>21626902
>+picrel
this should get you started anon

>>21620956
The main reason: free verse particularly and contemporary poetry more generally requires one to think. Too many anons want their hands held by mommy's jingle-jangle of strict rules re: metre and/or rhyme.

>>21620956
Favourites? Władysława Szymborska or if she's not contemporary enough then Natalie Diaz.

>>21620956
anne carson, adunis and transtromer
love the first two, transtromer can fuck off
I suspect that by "contemporary poetry" you mean someone like kaur and you're just baiting the plebs

>>21626992
> mommy's jingle-jangle of strict rules re: metre and/or rhyme.
In the same way that paintings a too restrictive medium because they require the use of paint, sure. Contemporary poetry is bad because the abandonment of all poetic devices other than enjambment and line breaks homogenizes the poems into disassociated, monotone words that would be spoken to an empty room at night.
Compare Kubla Khan with any poem posted ITT. The soul has been stripped by collegiate retards who saw that the more rigid structure of poems had slowly faded away and thought “uh what if got rid of everything lmao” and in doing so missed the forest for the trees

>>21621709
if you need to write in all caps to evoke intensity you are probably ngmi

>>21620956
They pale in comparison to the poets of the past.

>>21625663
>I'm using contemporary a bit loosely
Yes, because you’re retarded.

>>21626902
>>21626907
None of these “writers” are contemporary, you disingenuous faggot. Imagine calling Paul Celan a contemporary writer.

>>21627462
close enough to contemporary for me

>>21627287
I’ve decided it’s unfit to use contemporary methods of emphasis in contemporary poetry.