/lit/ - Literature

Not prose, but I think that audiovisual media made literature obsolete. Or at least, in nowadays the biggest creative minds are drawn to audiovisual media instead of literature, and poetry that used to be the most experimental e creative branch of literature lost its innovations.

>>22243246
It's just too hard. People can't even bother to try to write good prose now. What to talk about poetry.

>>22243383
Is that why Martin Scorsese's most famous movies are all based on books?

>>22243471
Also, Scorsese said that he was literate by the movies, instead of going to school.

In Russia, at the beginning of the last century Lenin said that the cinema was the future of mass communication, and the films would educate the "proletariat" about the "socialist values". Disregarding the communist prattle, I think he made a pretty accurate prediction.

>>22243246
No. Poetry is essentially an oral form. It's meant to be recited rather than read.
Daily reminder that Homer's works were recited for centuries before they were ever written down.

>>22243781
I think that contemporary poetry is essentially embedded in music.

>>22243979
Please tell me you don't think rappers are poets.
At any rate, poetry recitals were traditionally accompanied by music.

>>22244104
In my country, they are the only true poets alive nowadays.

Unless you don't consider as a poem a stream of consciousness with more than 10 pages of verses that rhyme with each other, employ rich metaphors and language games, tell multiple narratives in a complex timeline, make a mosaic of different literary styles such as theater, social chronicle and film scripts, even drawing inspiration from elements of black metal compositions, and use a series of other linguistic resources to create a unique poetic aesthetic. Then, in this case, I have to agree with you because this is not poetry, this is on a higher level.

>>22244104

Phillip Pullmans sequel to his dark materials in based on it btw, but no one cares

>>22243246
As someone who writes both, I will say that telling a story in prose and telling a story in poetry both feel fundamentally different. There is something more mundane about even the best and prettiest prose, while poetry carries about it an air of the mystical, with its rhythms and meters. You have to essentially chant poetry, and that affects how the story is told.

There are some types of stories, some types of events, that work better in prose, and some that work better in poetry. This is what I have discovered, and it's affected which portions of my writing I convey in prose and which portions I convey in verse.

>>22244772
I like to think how it would be if Ezra Pound had written The Cantos in prose instead of verses.
Poetry (or good poetry at least) has this thing of telling something without really telling it, like it is some kind of evocation or literary ritual.
By any chance, have you read Poetry and Abstract Thought, by Paul Valéry?

>>22243246
no, simply because people are still writing poetry

>>22243979
song lyrics are poetry but people are also still writing poetry, you're just not aware of it

>>22244840
I said this more in the sense that in the last century, if you really were a good poet, you could make a living from it. Now, I believe that there are a lot of good poets who becomes musicians to not starve.

>>22244834
>By any chance, have you read Poetry and Abstract Thought, by Paul Valéry?

I have not, but thanks for the recommendation.

>>22244863
>in the last century, if you really were a good poet, you could make a living from it.
was there any poet in the last century who made a living from poetry? the only one that comes to mind is Frost, and the rest that come to mind -- Yeats, Eliot, Pound -- either held another job, were wealthy, or lived for years in crushing poverty. poets today mainly teach

>>22243246
As others have said, prose is becoming obsoleted by television, the internet and other modern forms of media. With people's shortening attention spans, I expect the novel to be dead within a couple of generations. But poetry as a medium is perfectly suited to the online generation and propagating itself through shortform on smartphones, as seen through its popularity in music. I expect poetry will be the form of literature to endure. It will only be a return to pre-orality, when poetry WAS literature.

>>22243246
prose will always be the most popular choice because it's filtration system is much more lax than poetry's. there is less technical knowledge needed.

>>22244902
I guess you are right, I was confusing fame with money. My point was more that in the last century, there were a lot of pop poets or superstars poets, and writers too, who became celebrities essentially because they wrote. I can't imagine something like that happening now, except perhaps for writers like Dan Brown. But Brown's fame is not the same kind of fame that Hemingway or Pound had.

>>22244942
I tend to agree with you about the potential that poetry has in contemporary media, but at the same time, I only see """poets""" like Rupi Kaur using this space, so I don't know if there aren't good poets anymore, or If the good poets haven't learned to use the Internet yet.

>>22243246
Let me ask you a question, did photography make abstract art obsolete?

>>22245183
You got filtered by Kaur, nigga. Has it ever occurred to you that she is popular for a reason? Mainly her skill, style, and substance? A lack of understanding is the fault of the reader. You are probably just a poor reader not in tune with poetic faculties

>>22244984
But what do you think about that the first linguistic resources developed for poetry were related to memorization strategies and oral dissemination? I mean, I don't think that Homer, in his time, was a poet not understood by the public.

On the other hand, I am very impressed that something like The Cantos, instead of being an obscure and underground work, has been translated into many languages and gained a certain position in the mainstream.

>>22245188
Do you think that Kaur is a good poet?

>>22243246
>Did prose make poetry obsolete?
The printing press did.

Poetry is a method of memorisation, a method which is no longer required when you can make copies of a text.

It began a long, slow death as soon as Gutenberg built his device.

>>22245194
Do I think? I know, fool

>>22243246
Winston Churchill allegedly wrote his speeches in poetic verses and he was a fat manlet who loved referencing far better men so I'll be going with prose because nobody that writes in prose will ever surpass him in sheer faggotry.

lol at 'obsolete'

they're art forms not fucking games consoles

>>22244716
It doesn't do any of that.

>>22245188
>Has it ever occurred to you that she is popular for a reason?
It's called marketing.

>>22244716
>There's a new girl on my street
>Wanna introduce her to my meat
>Told my homeboy I was scoping, hoping
>To crack them legs wide open
P O T T E R Y

Poetry is aristocratic and so poetry declined alongside the decline of the aristocracy. The novel is superior for socio-political commentary and so that’s what came to the foreground through the Democratic age.

>>22245219
By whatever logic you could say poetry is “about” memorization you could say the same about prose stories.

I read an interesting claim once. It was that literature only gets written down when a thing starts to become forgotten by a culture. Poetry is written when the oral form starts to be forgotten. Prose fiction is written then when the oral form of plain stories are forgotten. It’s a step of dissolution further along than merely forgetting the old oral poems. If true, the popularity of prose fiction would be explained by suggesting we were forgetting our stories. All of them.

>>22244772
There's nothing mundane about Proust's prose, it's prettier than the best poetry.

>>22245829
It drops deep as it does in my breath
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death
Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined
I think of crime when I'm in a New York State of Mind

>>22243246
RIP Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

>>22245465
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iFqlDfU-qo

>>22245190
You make a good point with Homer. A lot of the good ol' boys said that they preferred the simplicity of Homer over the academic and technical masturbation of the Hellenistic poets. Further to your point, the plebians loved to hear his works at religious festivals.
According to the scholar John Van Sickle, when Vergil wrote the Georgics, on the surface a poem about farming, it was only intended for the literati and not actual farmers because both the content and the form was highly abstruse.
Yes, poetry may have had humble beginnings but after 2-3 millenia of refinement, it is not the case today unless you are an Indian lesbian who was influenced by Taylor Swift's middle aged, balding songwriters.

>>22246356
Taylor writes her own music, you fucking imbecile.

>>22246119
Niggers quote this one verse and ignore the countless instances of doggerel in the rest of the album.

>>22246126
lmao it's worse than I expected.

>>22246113
Proust's prose is a quasi-mystical experience for people who aren't initiated in Decadent literature, high romanticism, or religious and mystical poetry.

>>22246577
keep telling yourself that

>>22243246
No
and "no" to your invitation to argue

>>22246356
I think that poetry became something very sophisticated and complex throughout the Middle Ages, but at the same time it became obtuse and closed, as if they had turned a literary genre into a sect. Just consider how anyone today can understand The Iliad or The Odyssey without too much difficulty, but to understand The Lusiads, you need to have read all the epic poems that preceded it and be familiar with the linguistic techniques developed by the Iberian poetic tradition in the medieval period.

>>22246592
Visualizin' the realism of life in actuality
Fuck who's the baddest, a person's status depends on salary
And my mentality is money-orientated
I'm destined to live the dream for all my peeps who never made it
'Cause yeah, we were beginners in the hood as Five Percenters
But somethin' must've got in us, 'cause all of us turned to sinners
Now some restin' in peace and some are sittin' in San Quentin
Others, such as myself, are tryin' to carry on tradition
Keepin' this Schweppervescent street ghetto essence inside us
'Cause it provides us with the proper insight to guide us

>>22243246
Not at all. People have this idea that poetry is supposed to be beautiful, and that good prose attempts to imitate poetry, but this is backwards.

Prose is not a blunt instrument, but a delicate one. It's not a "window pane," it's the music with which ideas are communicated on the page.

Prose is not merely a flat utterance, but a verse of song with varying degrees of rythym. Prose should rise and fall, flow and flutter, sit and stir. Prose shouldn't merely imitate poetry, it should inspire it; poetry is prose in its purest, most compressed form.

Poetry is to prose what short stories are to novels. Poetry will never be obsolete because it's the best of prose compressed, and good prose moves even dullards to reflection.

>>22248458
This is indeed a good observation. But if the decline in the interest for literature is real, then poetry could be forgotten in the future, like the quipu system used by Andean people ceased to be known and used after the persons who knew it vanished.

Even though I enjoy reading and writing a lot, I have the impression that written language may have been just a phase in human history.