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/lit/ - Literature

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15170228 No.15170228 [Reply] [Original]

>teleports behind you
>unsheathes progressive talking points
>writes shit poetry on said talking points and about liking white dick
>wins international literary acclaim

Don't lie, /lit/ you're jealous af

>> No.15170239

His head seems pretty big

>> No.15170395

>>15170228
Ocean Vuong came to read at my college. I've rarely been so engulfed by the vocal performance of poetry than while hearing him draw his words through the air as if from a music box. Afterwards, I was able to meet and talk to him one on one; he was so fragile and could not have appeared less self-confident.

In any case, I appreciate him for his oratory ability, as well as his ability to discuss rather progressive ideas elegantly and with some aesthetic beauty. This is rare among your standard new-left/trans/transloving MFA grad.

>> No.15170414

>>15170395
>he was so fragile and could not have appeared less self-confident.
i wonder how these people muster up the confidence to submit their work and read it on stage etc. does their narcissism ultimately override their anxiety?

>> No.15170425

>>15170414
I took it as the awareness of their art and its worth overcoming anxiety. And for some people, their art is or becomes the only way they can successfully interact with the general world.

>> No.15170440

Why is he being shilled so much. I love twinks as much as the next guy but he's ugly

>> No.15170638

sauce on the white cock poetry?

>> No.15170737

> He is a recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry.[2] His debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019. He received a MacArthur Grant the same year
how hard is this? do you have to have connections? he's basically having the type of career i'd like to have, but I'm not going to get an mfa from NYU, so I have no insider knowledge of how the publishing world works.

>> No.15170754

>>15170737
Some anon from another thread said his prof had connections in the biz so it was easy to get published/noticed.

>> No.15170759

>>15170754
>prof had connections in the biz
fuck. so truly no hope for outsiders to make it then

>> No.15170768

>>15170414
I would imagine its like performing live. You fucked up and get the embarrassment out the way with the early shows, then you do it and it's successful. The dopamine rush after keeps you coming back.

>> No.15170985

>>15170754
his professor was BEN FUCKING LERNER. thats not just any connection. thats a golden ticket. I’ll keep shilling Jon Baskin’s On the Hatred of Literature here though. These people are not the people you want to play the game with.

>> No.15171065
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15171065

>>15170985
>BEN FUCKING LERNER
literally who
t. neet just going through bloom's canon

>> No.15171083

>>15170985
>I’ll keep shilling Jon Baskin’s On the Hatred of Literature here
based, although I still like Lerner, despite his hyper-academic approach to art

>> No.15171139

>>15170985
>These people are not the people you want to play the game with.
what's the alternative

>> No.15171173
File: 1.12 MB, 1000x1285, William_Baylebridge_as_a_young_man.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
15171173

>>15171139
buy and sell shares and use your profits to self-publish like a boss

>> No.15171287

>>15170985
ben lerner has taught hundreds of kids. if you think having him as your teacher is some golden ticket, you're a dumbass. obviously he provided him with some of his network but it's just as more obvious that he's an overachiever. pushcart, ts eliot prize, mccarthur genius grant

>> No.15171619

>>15170228
Asian fag who hates his dad, idealizes his mother, hates america despite his life being immeasurably better than it would be in Vietnam, hates white people, yet loves Aryan chad thundercock changing his diapy and giving him a bottle of milk after pounding his twink ass. Can't write about anything except his Asian parents, being a promiscuous gay, and how America sucks. Wow I can't wait to read more poems about this.

>> No.15171640

>reading any author who has written anything within the last 100 years

>> No.15171663

>>15171640
Vladimir Nabokov

>> No.15171668

>>15171663
tick tock

>> No.15171680

His prose novel is unbelievable trash

>> No.15171686

>>15171668
William Faulkner

>> No.15171691

>>15171680
post excerpts

>> No.15171701

>>15171686
Not quite yet

>> No.15171702

>>15171686
Now this right here. This is better than cooming.

>> No.15172127

>>15171640
Steinbeck

>> No.15172148

>>15170228
I'd be ashamed if my own shit poetry about progressive talking points got international acclaim

>> No.15172197

>>15170440
he's gorgeous

>> No.15172710

Daily reminder that unrhymed poetry is not poetry

>> No.15172736

>>15172710
sit down gramps

>> No.15172752

>>15172736
I have all the reasons to believe this guy's talent is 90% giving blowjobs to his jewish publishers abd 10% being able to write readable poetry.

>> No.15172758

>>15172752
>>>/pol/

>> No.15172762

>>15172758
Lol cope

>> No.15172903

>>15172710
rhyme is shit in english. rhyme in other languages is mostly meaningless due to small vowel inventories. unstrict but present metre and alliteration is most suitable but there might be something else to the language that has been brushed over in aping the styles of other languages.

>> No.15172971

>>15172903
>rhyme is shit in english
No
>unstrict but present metre and alliteration
English used to have a strictly alliterative metre in its early days

>> No.15173269

>>15172971
yes i know and it was good. rhyme is shit in english because it ruins other parts by its obscurity and comes across trashy. without loanwords it'd work better like other germanic langs because of abundant compounds with many reused elements.

>> No.15173687

>>15172710
there were a lot of 17th century poets that thought rhyming in poetry was a gimmick and what really counted was meter

>> No.15174448

>>15172148
i bet your mom is so proud of you and everything you've accomplished, posting on this anonymous image board

>> No.15174461

>>15174448
The greatest of souls are born posthumously

>> No.15174471

>google this retard
>american "poet"
when will the amerimutt menace be stopped?

>> No.15174491

>>15174471
At least he's less cucked than me since i have to write poems in English to allow others to read the shit i type down. I'll give him that.

>> No.15174511

>>15171640
Proust

>> No.15174515

>>15174491
stop defending this lil faggot, his poems are shit, just as bad as rupi kaur

>> No.15174532

>>15174515
I'm not defending shit and i said that unrhymed poetry automatically invalidates whatsoever talent the artist is deemed to have.

>> No.15174541

>>15170228
He's pretty good at poetry.

>> No.15174547

>>15173687
That's a pretty reasonable point, the elisabethans used blanks verses (so meter but no rhyme) to great effect, meanwhile one of the worst poets in histoy only cared about rhymes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_McGonagall

Reading this guy inevitably recalls Baudelaire's comment about some poetry being merely "une singerie rimée" ("a rhymed monkery" literally).
Rhyme is only efficient because of meter, while meter alone can make for good poetry.

>> No.15174558

Is this /lit/‘s favorite new poet?

>> No.15174564

>people arguing rhymed vs unrhymed poetry like it's two centuries ago

lmao. this board is so garbage with poetry.

>> No.15174617

>>15174547
Rhyme draws the best words out of poets. When you've set up a rhyme scheme you can just write down the last word in the verse and write whatever comes before the rhyme by filling the blanks. It forces you to rack your brains and squeeze as much meaning as possible into a single verse.

>> No.15174647

>>15171691
My gf is reading it for a book club. I've only read the first paragraph on google preview.

>Dear Ma,
>I am writing to reach you - even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are. I am writing to go back to the time, at the rest stop in Virginia, when you stared, horror-struck, at the taxidermy buck hung over the soda machine by the restrooms, its antlers shadowing you face. In the car, you kept shaking your head. "I don't understand why they would do that. Can't they see it's a corpse? A corpse should go away, not get stuck forever like that."
>I think now of that buck, how you stared into its black glass eyes and saw your reflection, your whole body, warped in that lifeless mirror. How it was not the grotesque mounting of a decapitated animal that shook you - but that the taxidermy embodied a death that won't finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves.
>I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence - I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.

>> No.15174664

>>15174647
This is shit urbanites stroke to.

>> No.15174679

>>15174647
... and this man might win a Nobel down the run.

>> No.15174692

>>15174617
That only works if you have an ear for rythm and meter. Else you're at best slightly above the level of the silly folk chants people learn in school and in the army. Unless you think "I don't know but I've been told/Eskimo pussy is mighty cold" is great poetry (and at least this particular example has some rythm).

Don't get me wrong rhyme is an important part of poetry to this day but it's not the most important part, and it only works when the rest is solid.

>> No.15174710

>>15174564
Not really, people are shitting on a contemporary American-Asian writer like it's still 2013.

The rhyme vs meter argument (not rhymed vs unrhymed unlike what you pretend) is only a digression.

So back to the important question: how does Ocean Vuong compare to Tao Lin?

>> No.15174712

>>15174664
>>15174679
it's cliche to the max

>> No.15174715

>>15170395
>I've rarely been so engulfed by the vocal performance of poetry than while hearing him draw his words through the air as if from a music box.
I watched a video of his readings and it was monotone as fuck. The guy has this one-note breathy cadence that purports to have some kind of depth or profundity, but its entirely hollow. It's like speaking that way compensates for the fact that his poetry is saying absolutely nothing, and that he is incapable of expressing the full range of human emotion.

>> No.15174733

>>15174617
>>15174692
Writing with strong meter is incredibly difficult. Most people have a pretty hard time hearing which syllables are stressed in english and on top of that where the stress falls in english words is incredibly arbitrary. I've been trying to write a verse in trochaic meter today actually and it really sucks ass.

>> No.15174739

>>15174712
what's cliche about it? it's overwritten but literary fiction usually is

>> No.15174740

This is a bulletin to all anons: you should have learned a long time ago the world of traditional publishing is an incestous progressive cesspit. Don't worry about other people's successes. If you just focus on your own writing, then your mental health will be much better for it. You do not want to socialize with these people. Trust me. They stab you in the back for no reason at all. These people are not your friend.

>> No.15174750

>>15174647
>le inconsequential event with le profound signiface

>> No.15174753

>>15174692
>an ear for rythm and meter
There are websites made for the specific purposes of counting the syllabes of words if you're unsure about where the stress falls on. Once you'll get the hang of it, you'll be able to predict the position of the stress of your own accord even if you aren't a native speaker.

>> No.15174758

>>15174715
poetry hits different live

>> No.15174811

>>15174739
the image of seeing ones reflection in an eye is the most cliche horseshit man.

>> No.15174963

People whoi realy want the stereotyped "literary" lifestyle and all the grants and accolades and big publishing deals remind me of high schoolers who want to make video games when they grow up. Its so obviously all a nepotistic scam to be enslaved to the awfulest people on earth. Anybody can self-publish today easily. You don't need anybody's permission to write and share it with others. How vain can you be that you don't think its worth writing unless millions of people read your work and pat you on the ass?

>> No.15175093

>>15174710
One's /ourguy/ and the other is a preening purple faggot. There is no comparison.

>> No.15175111

>>15170228
Why are gooks the most ugly East Asians? And why are Nips the cutest?

>> No.15175178

>>15175093
Agreed. Hasn't Tao become schizo or something recently?

>> No.15175258

>>15170228
kys retard

>> No.15175403

>>15174564
If you think merit changes with time, you are the real problem

>> No.15175532

>>15170239
For you

>> No.15176099

>>15174740
thank you for the reminder.
>tfw got another rejection today, but the agent used the characters' names so i know she actually read it and liked it enough to remember them
>>15174647
it's explicit pandering but not the worst thing i've ever read, I guess. i'd throw myself off a cliff in shame if i wrote that level of mediocrity, though. dead deer heads are creepy but it's disingenous and juvenile to pretend you've literally never seen or heard of them before just so you can be a dramatic bitch. if leftist hysterics at least could write well i wouldn't despise them, but my god it's all posturing and melodrama strung along by cheap gimmicks.

>> No.15176422

>>15176099
I can't stand the playfulness wrt "I am writing because never say because" and that sort of horseshit wordplay which is barely even wordplay. The image is garbage. There's also fucking taxidermy in Vietnam so unless his mom was living in a fucking farming village her entire life she would obviously have known about it. It's so obviously anticipating the fact that the stupid fucking PC audience will immediately and willingly look down upon an immigrant as "not knowing any better" because "their unique experience", which to the stupid PC audience is of course actually "opening oneself up to cross-cultural experience" or some other horseshit. White women absolutely love appropriating the experience, namely the suffering, of non-whites

>> No.15176738

>all these seething yts

lmao. cope more

>> No.15176885

>>15176738
>ching chong bing bong
Shouldn't you be eating dogs or something?

>> No.15177332

>>15176738
eat bats, slant

>> No.15178875
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15178875

Random poem from Night Sky With Exit Wounds

>> No.15178982

>>15174740
Right, it's just people playing status games. Nothing is about creation. I bet they have a very low opinion of creativity, in fact. I recently starting thinking about how with all the editors and agents and people going over a manuscript, it's kind of a manufactured, assembly-line product, with authors as the mascots.

>> No.15179094

>>15178982
is this how you cope? "I'm the true and rill artist even though I haven't published anything and never will, all of the rest are fakes"

>> No.15179142
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15179142

>>15170737
Knew a professor who was a drooling idiot with a Pulitzer prize and massive international literary acclaim. He clearly barely knew what he was talking about whenever he spoke and talked like he was the smartest person in the room anyway, even when making surface-level or, sometimes, outright bullshit statements. Every other undergrad in the room hung onto his every word anyway.

Here are the requirements for international literary acclaim in the modern West, as far as I can tell:

1) Have minority or otherwise 'protected' status. Can be whatever - international, nonwhite, female, gay, mental illness, transgender, etc. Don't be too offensively minority, though; a gay vietnamese man is much better than a transgender black polyamorous schizophrenic demiwoman. You need to be a visible minority, but not so much of a minority that it makes white women uncomfortable.
2) Attend a MFA program and make connections with people like the professor I mentioned above, suck some dick, get them to say that your writing is good.
3) Write about minority experiences.
4) Enjoy your Pulitzer.

Quality of work is irrelevant. You could be writing the next The Souls of Black Folk or the next Dear White People. It literally doesn't matter, you'll get massive international acclaim anyway as long as you're writing about black people or something. Nearly every acclaimed author of the modern era follows this pattern. There are exceptions, but they're rare.

>> No.15180267

>>15178875
bretty good actually.

>> No.15180426

>>15174448
She's certainly not ashamed I am white worshipping, self-hating, narcissist manlet of a "poet".

>> No.15180505

>>15178875
He basically is all wordplay. This poem is actually fantastic:
PRAYER FOR THE NEWLY DAMNED
Dearest Father, forgive me for I have seen.
Behind the wooden fence, a field lit
with summer, a man pressing a shank
to another man’s throat. Steel turning to light
on sweat-slick neck. Forgive me
for not calling Your name. For thinking:
this must be how every prayer
begins—the word Please cleaving
the wind into fragments, into what
a boy hears in his need to know
how pain blesses the body back
to its sinner. The hour suddenly
stilled. The man genuflected, his lips
pressed to black boot as the words spilled
from his mouth like rosaries
shattering from too much
Father. Am I wrong to love
those eyes, to see something so clear
and blue—beg to remain
clear and blue? Did my cheek twitch
when that darkness bloomed from his crotch
and trickled into ochre dirt? Father,
how quickly the blade becomes
You. But let me begin again: There’s a boy
kneeling in a house with every door kicked open
to summer. There’s a question corroding
his tongue. There’s a knife touching
Your name lodged inside the throat.
Dearest Father, what becomes of the boy
no longer a boy? Please—
what becomes of the shepherd
when the sheep are cannibals?

>> No.15180540

>>15180505
The serious issue he'll get is he doesn't know how to do deep metaphors. So in the poem, every interesting nuance he brings up, gets abandoned as soon as he uses it. He has an amazing farming message and spiritual Jesus undertone, but then utterly drops connecting the two with sheep, where he just needed to change
>when the sheep are cannibals?
to:
when the sheeps graze themselves?
The blue is another one he fails to use again, could do something like:
>kneeling in a house with every door kicked open
>to summer.
to
Kneeling in the house of summer, blue
in every window.

I'm guessing one of you fucks knows this guy, send him this feedback because I think he has a unique poetic voice that's being untapped.

>> No.15180567

>>15171287
You’re a dumbass if you underestimate it. In an overpopulated, underselling industry scrambling to find any reason to sort through the slush pile, networking is 90% of the game. Sure, I guess you can make the claim that he had to impress Lerner first, but the difference between Vuong getting published (which OF COURSE leads to further acclaim, dont get me started on that argument) is merely the equation of “good” poet + right sales pitch + right identity (also for sales) + right connection versus some other asian twink with an mfa who is a “good” poet + right sales pitch + right identity - no good connection. That’s it. It’s a game of arbitrary variables, and this guy had the right lineup. You’re deluded to think otherwise.

inb4 19th century Romanticist notions of genius

>> No.15180578

>>15171139
Publish where you want to, if someone will take you, and, if not, self-publish. Keep your day job. Have faith in your art and not in the ability of the public to receive.

>> No.15180645

>>15180505
Wow, this is good. I wonder if any of his detractors here have read any of his poetry or are they just pissed off he is brown and gay and sometimes writes about his identity.

>> No.15180774

>>15180505
i like how it treats itself seriously and goes in depth, but i dont think its working for some reason. pretty language and clever, but i think its lacking soemthing. i think may prefer rupi; i like rupi quite a bit.

>> No.15180827

>>15178875
I like it. Would make a nice lounge song, some smooth bluesy piano notes to set the scene, a little sexy, and little sad.

How much you want to bet Vuong browses this shithole? Hello Vuong! Congratulations on your successful career.

>> No.15182342

ocean is based. i hope he does something smart with his genius grant

>> No.15182355

>>15180645
Have you ever read one of his collections ?

>> No.15182367

>>15180645
I am brown (mediterranean) and gay and i still can't fathom writing poetry without a solid rhyme scheme. On top of that his overt pandering to progressives gets under my skin. His poetry seems hedonistic to core and not unlike the other gay poets i have read. He simply lacks originality and imagination.
>hurrrr there's a colorful description of some plants flying birds
>and durrrrr then i think of you holding me and fucking my ass and how much i love you smooch smooch smooch

Boring, dull, predictable.

>> No.15182379

>>15182367
*and flying birds

>> No.15182390

>>15182367
>brown and gay
>tripfag
checks out. but also if you're south European you are still white, dumbass

>> No.15182424
File: 35 KB, 460x657, tommaso-dei-cavalieri-1c1521a1-b8ca-4637-b668-264e51a9cf8-resize-750.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
15182424

>>15182390
>still white
If olive skin counts as white, sure.

>> No.15182454

ngl I shed a tear listening to that white christmas one. these asians boys got me feeling some type of way

>> No.15182483

>>15172710
I thought that until I read Beowulf.

>> No.15184041

his fiction is pretty decent. poetry is overblown

>> No.15184045

>>15184041
his fiction is trash. his poetry is overrated but is much better than his prose