/lit/ - Literature

Not me.

Everyone thinks they're so unique when they start writing poems that are just stupid prose broken down into verse with nothing beyond the surface yet at the same time people have been doing that for over 50 years.

>>4892197
but its so Xx_De3p_zX.

>>4892182
what the fuck did i just read that shit was what the fuck Brodsky and Auden are rolling in their grave

damn eileen myles is looking rough

>>4892224
>Brodsky and Auden are rolling in their grave
shakespeare and dante are laughing in hades at how pleb you are

>Poetry
>not as dead and stagnant as Comedy

top

>>4892182
>farm 2
>Steve Roggenbuck
>ingredients for an overly long touhou-worthy title
>random hipster faggot holding a cat
>transexual howard stern
>george carlin's guide to life
They could have more impact if they only used the titles as super-compressed poems instead of doing this broken prose shit.
Can't we just pull the plug on poetry?

Sorry but after slam poetry i can't take modern stuff seriously any more.

Anyway much of what's endorsed on that page (like in slam poetry itself) is school of resentment bullshit.

>>4892299
>much of what's endorsed on that page (like in slam poetry itself) is school of resentment bullshit.
tru dat
It's either that or those retards that experiment with structure and format when they still don't know how to wipe their asses poetry-wise; no substance, just experimenting with structure for the sake of it.

It's a bad feel when the only good poets we have today are good rappers.
i am cereal here

Maybe if those lazy assholes could start rhyming half as good as Poe did I'd read their shit

>Steve Roggenbuck

It's easy to love fate when you think that life is only vlogs, rain, and forest hikes. Send this guy a decent reading of eternal recurrence/amor fati. Let's see how easy it is to affirm your life while affirming the death and hideous lives of all those who came before you and will come after you.

Is there any poetry out there that isn't buoyed by the whole DIY, my life and all its banalities must be made into products that increase my feel goodness + cultural/real capital?

Where is today's Celan, Holderlin, Rilke? Hell, I'd settle for a Cummings.

>>4892370
You're only able to enjoy those poets because they are highly regarded and considered influential today. Today doesn't have a Rilke, Celan or Holderlin. Poets of that stature can only discovered in hindsight

>>4892423
>this is what fucking retards from r/books actually believe

>>4892423
>Poets of that stature can only discovered in hindsight.

Very prominent philosophers were well aware of the significance of Celan in contemporary times (Adorno and Heidegger spring to mind).

I understand that those writers were distinctly products of historical circumstances and can't be expected to manifest themselves now, but most poetry just seems so inconsequential now. It's very much the writing of people hopping along in a small world making everything small.

>>4892182
>http://flavorwire.com/406950/23-people-that-make-you-pay-attention-poetry/view-all

These are some sexy-ass poets, which makes me slightly suspicious.

>>4892182
flavorwire is probably the worst website on the internet.
At least at buzzfeed they know they are idiots.

>rich jewish girls, gay men, and a black dude

Seems about right for internet tastemakers.

>>4892516
I clicked through to the website and read her poems just because of this pic.

>dem feet
>dat slutty look

I'm pretty sure that 23,710 shares on facebook is actually very little.

Michael Robbins's poetry is awful. It's not awful because it doesn't conform to the highfalutin sensibilities and subject matters that people ascribe to poetry, it's awful because it's completely ironical and not funny.

Which of these is the most pleb?

I like pleb poets like Billy Collins. I don't want to have to think too hard

>>4892450
I don't think that this is a good time for american poetry.
It's a country flooded by the internet, with no historical memory and undergoing a simplification of language.
Also the us never managed to free itself from its anti-intellectualism and its love for novelty.

And poetry takes history, patience, reflection and on part of the reader memorization. As a reader, part of appreciating poetry, is your expectation that you can use it to communicate with others.
But in a rushing forward culture all you get is the rehash of popular culture (yolo) and the gimmick.

Culture itself is all a game of one-upmanship, of knowing the next big thing, of showing off that you know more that you are better, that you are in step with the times, not a question of intelligence and depth.

That's why in this situation the only ones winning are not the poets, pace roggenbuck, but the spammer, the salesman, the marketing gurus and the children of the already famous ( see mira gonzalez daughter of one of the black flags)

>>4892556
>I don't want to have to think too hard

Well then you've stumbled upon the perfect batch of creatures who have somehow beaten natural selection.

>>4892559
From a linguistic pov, U.S. English has never been simple and I'm not sure you can make the argument that it's undergoing a "simplification" without it merely being a slightly prejudiced value judgement.

>>4892562
>perfect batch of creatures who have somehow beaten natural selection
THANKS OBAMA

>>4892559
I feel like in some sense, more and more linguistic communication taking a non-verbal turn is really ruining what distinguishes poetry from simply prose.

Aside from ruminating on small things in small ways, most of these contemporary poets have no regard for the musicality and lyricism of poetry. There's no rhythm or beauty in any of these poems when read out loud.

I think people are misreading poets like Cummings who while disregarding traditional limitations in poetry, were still aware of them and managed to create lyrical, sonically interesting poetry. There's no concern for what musicality can imbue poetry with.

I actually do think better lyricism is being carried out in music than it is in poetry itself as a literary form.

>>4892567
Naturally I don't have studies underhand to argue against that and I can only give my personal opinion.

First of all of the five language I speak/read to various degrees of fluency (Italian, Russian, French are the others) English is the simplest to use and master (in the sense that it does mostly what I want it to do, it offers minimum resistance to meaning).

Second while it is true that us english has many slangs and regional dialects and neologisms, so do other languages, I would say, in equal manner.

Third, I'm not sure that the diversity of lexicon brought by slang means increasing complexity. Slick/cool/sick/based or yolo/carpe diem, while each element has a different shade and a different history there is no added complexity because they are not used interchangeably. People that say "that's sick" rarely will says "that's cool" to imply a different shade of meaning. The choice of each element largely denotes not a particular shade of the concept but your demographics.

Fourth I would be suspicious to discover that with the lack of attention and glamour that is given to the education in the humanities that this has had no impact. I mean I have seen journalists (which are language professionals) complain about the style of will self, in his article of the guardian, or complains that Franzen uses hard words.

Fifth that the language is less complex is fairly evident by comparing the level of language in translation of the same classic from the 70s with those made now. While today's new translations are more accurate from a philological point of view, the translations of the 70s were consistently more complex.

I examined every single "poet" listed.

I can't unread. I actualy felt violently ill reading some of them. My nuts tingled when they failed.

>>4892611
Diction plays a very small part of it. There are people in the U.S. who use constructions like "I might could do that" and others who speak with almost English (U.K.) elisions. We're getting slightly more into the speech part of matters -which, after all, is more important, writing being only a relatively recent trick in humanity. Writing is purely an outcome of education, whatever language you speak.

As regards translations, you're correct: modern translations are generally more correct from a philological point of view, but when you use words like "complexity" it makes me think you're after it for its own sake. Mandelbaum's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses is just about standard nowadays, and it uses relatively uncomplicated language. Golding's translation of Metamorphoses is technically more complicated but that's only really because words like "vouchsafe" and "ac" are all but extinct to us modern-folk.

Slam poetry is so fucking horrible

NPR, Conscious Hip Hop, PBS affirmative action. I think in hell the only thing available to listen to and watch is slam poetry.

>>4892450
>Very prominent philosophers

top laff

>>4892518

Flavorwire is definitley competing with jezebel

>>4892554

Yeah I have to agree. Every time I see his stupid fucking face on poetry foundation's website I want to hurl. He has an essay in Poetry right now in which he just shits on James Dickey--a guy wrote poems 8 million times better than his bullshit pop culture reference circle-jerk wordplay.

Fuck him and his stupid fucking smug looks

>>4892726
Yeah but those constructions are not interchangeable, it's not like they use it as a way to make their language more defined.
Most people at best have a colloquial mode (where they use some of that strange constructions depending on geography and demographics) and a formal mode (learned at school).

This in my view does not add to the complexity of the language in the same way that in Italian the mixture between local dialects (which are basically languages apart that other Italians can't even understand) and Italian in spoken language does not increase the complexity of the language spoken.

As I see it complexity comes from:

1)Ability to understand, interpret or/and use with precision the vocabulary. So instead of saying "the back of the ship" you say "the poop deck",
2) Awareness in the language of its etymological and historical dimension. I remember one time, in college, reading this story by a girl in class and she wrote that the protagonist "hysterically laughed" while she was at the gynecologist. Unfortunately she was not at all aware of the etymology of hysteric.
4) The richness of references in the language, that is how it evokes a series of memory and quotes and situations. How a certain contraction can recall you another one. English does very good in this aspect (mostly through pop culture) while other languages like russian weren't doing that well in 90s.

we actually live in a very exciting time for poetry; and all of art

right now it is a giant clusterfuck of mediocrity, but out of the shit will come great works, they might just be hard to find

>its one of those poems that doesnt rhyme

>no Mary Ruefle

Madness, Rack & Honey is amazing

>>4892947
'The honest critic must be content to find a very little contemporary work worth serious attention; but he must be ready to recognize that little'

>>4892947
Maybe or maybe the giant will grow in china and write in chinese.

>no Matt Hart
This fucking guy blew my mind when he read at my school. This is the kind of shit that gets people excited about poetry:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2COebHBW9gQ

>>4893237
>chinese
>poetry

Shi Shi Shi
Shi, Shi Shi
Shi Shi Shi
Shi, Shi Shi

>>4893292
That's the oldest-looking teenager I've ever seen.

(I'm speaking solely of his appearance, the poem is interesting.)

>>4893334
He has to be at least in his thirties, if not older. He gave some of us a private talk about poetics before the reading and he told us the story of dropping out of his philosophy grad program while he was studying Wittgenstein, and it seemed to have been a relatively long time ago.

>>4893314
"I'm a huge fucking faggot please rape my face"

>>4893386
you forgot your meme arrow

>>4893314
Haha, I actually get the joke.

>>4893366
>at least in his thirties, if not older

30 is not old, especially not from a writers perspective

>>4893966

>30 is not old, especially not from a writers perspective

If anything it isn't nearly old enough.

I'm not gonna read any of their poetry but EJ Koh is a hot bitch.

>>4893975
>subhuman
>hot

lolololololol

I don´t know one of those people.

>>4894002

Great post good work.

Why is most modern poetry a fucking excuse for people to write turgid monologues ?

>>4894034
>Allen Ginsberg

>>4894002
I'm sorry, but Asians aren't subhuman.

The problem is that is list seems to be restricted to Yanks.

There's good poetry being written in the UK now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgWonG2HLDo&feature=youtu.be

There is no one on that list worth reading. Disturbing that those people would ever entertain the idea what they're writing had any merit let alone share them with others. Truly most modern poets have such egos what comes out is by nature ugly.

>>4892182
>first line of the first poem recommended to read
>The contract began somewhat sporadically

fucking christ

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/timely-the-prophet/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

i dont think ive ever cringed so much in my life

I think we need a return to a movement with aestheticism at the heart to get away from this social justice tripe. Just creating the most beautiful or clever poems as possible.

>>4892182
poetry is fucking sickening these days. it really is. it's devolved into the lowest form of art, besides whooping.

Tyler fucking Okonma has more poetic promise than all of these pathetic monsters put together.

Literally Yung Lean is 10* more artistically worthwhile than these poor fucks. I'm not fucking joking.

You depressed me op.

>>4894133
I agree, but there is still lots of great stuff being promoted but it's mostly in academic circles. The TS Eliot prize is still my favourite because they pick forward-thinking, beautiful, clever poems, none of this American shit. Still a lot of it might seem like prose in the use of vernacular, but it's still fresh.

>>4894142
this article isnt a proper representation of the 'modern poet' its just a list of pseudo intellectual brats trying to be edgy with their broken forms and shitty purple language

>>4894142
This selection is terrible but there is loads of great poetry just not in popular culture.

The sad thing though is if Tyler went to most poetry events (mostly slam by default these days) he'd be a good slam 'poet'.

>>4894133
Couldn't agree more.

>>4894128
He is so bad that no one criticize him because it's if anyone says that they like roggenbuck they are either idiots or in bad faith.

>>4894133
I'm actually in new york trying to create that movement.

>>4894060
They certainly are.

The only societies they're capable of building are the most rudimentary empires, which as soon as they are constructed immediately stagnate and suffer from suffocation of knowledge and innovation due to the obscene conformism of the Asian type.

>>4894219
post some work

>>4894221
Please go away /pol/

>>4894528
It's the simple truth.

>>4894060
I don't know about Asians but she definitely writes like one.

>>4894128
>According to the 24-year-old M.F.A. dropout Steve Roggenbuck, “We are entering a golden age of literature” that is perfect for poetry. Chunks of verse should populate the “content streams” on phones and Facebook feeds. His do.
He kind of has a point, but god if he isn't a fucking retard about it.
Letting the direction of art to the plebs always ends up bad, though.

>>4893975
Reading her blog she sounds like a typical hot girl pretending to be a tortured artist and thinking it's real because people treat hot girls like tortured artists... or whatever they want to be treated like.

In other words a deluded narcissist.

Her "poetry" reads like she wants to be amy tan but she doesn't have the talent.

Is this even poetry? Is this what poets write these days? This isn't a poem. It's a paragraph.

>>4894978
That poem is very well done though. The first thought introduced remains a constant theme throughout and forms the foundation for the overall message. Very thought-provoking and interesting.

>>4894991
>That poem is very well done though.
'Well done' in the sense that a steak is well done - ruined, inedible, offensive to the senses, a cruel waste of potential.

It's rule fucking four, people:

"4. Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths."

Just because he got old and crazy that doesn't mean we get to completely ignore grandpa Ezra's advice.

>>4894991
>The first thought introduced remains a constant theme throughout and forms the foundation for the overall message.

Apparently poetry has sunk so low that something as basic as this is sufficient to earn a poet accolades.

What is Western civilization even doing at this point? I read that some academics have determined that the average Western IQ has dropped by 14 points since Victorian times, and I think they may be right.

>the rape joke
That wasn't really poetry. Funny though

>>4895016

>Go in fear of abstractions.

See

>>>4891522

>>4892299
>>4892324
I'm with you. Glad to hear a concise term for the list: me-me-me, I-I-I; therapy poetry; intentional nonsense. The Rape Joke is therapy poetry, and not really verse at all.

>>4892423
Mark Strand is alive. So is Phiip Dacey, Lynn McMahon, and Jennifer Chang. Sadly, by the time their anthologization over the next century proves you wrong, we'll both be dead. And when I came to love Steeple Jack, Marianne Moore was still alive too. It's easy to pick winners if you pay attention beyond the 20-something flacks stuck in the not-invented-by-me period of their lives.

>>4892579
ca. it is. yes.

>>4892632
all except the nuts thing. mine retracted in fear for the future.

>>4892947
it takes some work, yes.

>>4894088
The lucky thing about it is that in days of olde, juvenalia disappeared into Mom's closet for the archivist to discover and properly catalog long after your death. These twits are making it permanent and no one compiling the anthologies of 2050 will let them forget it.

>>4894146
yes.

>>4895016
thank you.

For anyone who wants to make a revenge post in defense of these "poets" or spit "post something good then, faggot," I'm right over here:

>>>4892366

I bet these people think Shakespeare is overrated

I actually bothered to click through to every link and read these poems and literally two of them were even remotely palatable.

>tfw you occasionally dabbled in poetry and you're pretty sure you were better than these assholes

Time to get back to writing

>>4892529
This.
Last year a new Danish poet sold over a hundred thousand copies of his book.
27,710 is how many click on a youtube link every day because the thumbnail shows breasts.

>>4895123
I bet they think Shakespeare is overrated because he was a white, middle-class male.

>>4892182

It’s no surprise that the greatest poets of the world generally burst in times when poetry was either a lucrative business or a decisive form of social influence. Power and money are words were highly competitive human beings wander, and there is no space for weakness and mediocrity: you will be devoured if you have those flaws.

In ancient Greece poets were considered almost prophets and bearers of the truth, and thus, with grand power of influence, highly intelligent and ambitious men turn theirs noses to the writing of poetry.

And the greatest poet of all, Shakespeare, was the product of an Age (one of the only in the history of mankind) were poetry was not only appreciated, but actually lucrative. Theaters were grossing high sums of money, and the better the poetry and more rhetoric the language the better: people loved colorful language.

But today, in an age were science don’t give any space to mysticism, and were TV and Film have taken the higher place of cultural food, ambitious and bright people are directed to other areas. Poetry is not lucrative and not influential, and so there you have it: weak people, mediocre people, the wastes of society are the ones who are now occupying the niche of poetry. They can live there because superior people don’t have any interest in poetry and thus will not eat the space of the weak ones.

How I wish that poetry was lucrative business, and that, the better the poet, the higher the grossing. Then all those clowns would be eaten alive by really gifted people, and poetry would reassume its place as a major art form.

>>4895247
The world you wish for is not possible in an egalitarian, "democratic" society.

Bring back visible hierarchy, elitism, and aristocracy, and we'll see beauty rule again instead of the baseness of the mob.

>>4895423
What we need is a good, strong monarchy with a tasteful and decent king who has some knowledge of theology and geometry and to cultivate a Rich Inner Life. Only then might beauty once again rule.

>>4894978
>This isn't a poem. It's a paragraph.

>what is prose poetry

>>4895445
>what is prose poetry
Apparently shit.

>>4895423
Please. Where do you actually see egalitarianism or democracy. The average person, especially in the USA, is just stupid and deluded enough to believe the country isn't ruled by the rich, usually coming from 'old' money.

>>4895247
I think you're right; brilliant creative thinkers are drawn to fields that are also lucrative- nowadays in film or television and even, I would argue, to things like programming.

It would be interesting to see what a Shakespeare-level artist would be drawn to in contemporary times. I imagine an epic drama written and performed in BEV, which can actually be an incredibly interesting dialect.

>>4895247
It's a good myth but tv and video games haven't been exactly good despite critical acclaim. Entertaining yes. Good not so much. I mean just think that Martin, who is at best mediocre in literature, is currently considered among the best writing in tv.

Also music has been the most creative arts in the last 30 years and yet one of the least profitable one for creative people.

>http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/archive/online-reading/poetry-is-not-a-project-by-dorothea-lasky/

The only good thing to come out of that list. A bit on the romantic side, but then I am a romantic.

>>4895423
>>4895437
You are the mob, and I'm willing to bet a majority of the people here would come under that nomenclature.

>>4892527
Don't you get it? That's her deal, she's a product.

>>4893975
get some taste please

>>4895488
You're joking about music being the most creative right? Music since the 80's has basically continued to be distilled into less creative and complex form. It is completely incomparable to, say, the mid-to-late 1800s. Or 1920-1970 with the development of jazz into jazz fusion.

>>4895517
Are you speaking into regards to what is considered "popular music"? If that is your basis for comparison then please shut up.

>>4895494
>You are the mob

How is this relevant? What bearing does it have on the truth of my assertions? I flatter myself by believing that I don't cling to any illusions about life after the rebirth of aristocracy and hierarchy. My prescriptions for elitism are not predicated on my becoming one of the elite.

>>4895523
I'm referring to music in general. Increased creativity in an nearly insignificant portion of music, like atonal orchestration, is hardly indicative of a creative growth of music as a whole.

>>4895423
>>4895437
Can you two -- assuming you these posts were posted by two different people -- explicate on this? I am fascinated.

>>4895557
xD

>>4895582
Or even better, start a new thread with a quotation from Song of Roland or Gawain, or Chretien de Troyes then pose the question in that context so that yet another thinly veiled /pol/ thread begins with at least a veneer of /lit/

>>4895593
SRS pls go, you massive faggot.

>>4895582
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditionalism

Like, what do you need explained? I guess Dugin was right about liberalism:

"According to Dugin, the triumph of liberalism has been so definitive, in fact, that in the West it has ceased to be political, or ideological, and become a taken-for-granted practice. Westerners think in liberal terms by default, assuming that no sane, rational, educated person could think differently, accusing dissenters of being ideological, without realizing that their own assumptions have ideological origins."

Hell, most people aren't even aware that other worldviews exist at all, it seems.

>>4895603
No, you liberal faggot, I was just curious how Hierarchy facilitates aesthetics.

>>4895610
>No, you liberal faggot
That post was explicitly anti-liberal you dunce.

>>4895610
Implicit in that assumption is that the best will be at the top of the hierarchy, and that they will not be beholden to the mob.

>>4895612
kek. I Stopped reading when I saw "reactionary".

>>4895617
So does that account for anomalies like Balzac?

>>4895610
If the elite are writing, they will have access to leisure, education, experiences, etc from which to draw inspiration. if they are writing for the elite as well, they don't have to worry about low class, mainstream, simplistic appeal.