/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16984150]

how do you not be on the nose when writing poetically?

[Anonymous No.16984289]

>>16984150
Good question. A lot of cringe comes from exactly this i.e. incompetent sincerity. It's like an awkward confession of love. It's often really embarrassing.

Writing is a very artificial process. You make marks on a page and someone looks at them and it's supposed to make him think and feel what you thought and felt, or what you want him to think and feel. How weird is that? Once you accept it's all very artificial, you can get rid of the notion that just writing "from the heart" will get you were you want to go. Everything is technique. It's all fakery. But when you get good the fakery runs so close to the bone that it doesn't feel like fakery - not to the reader and not even to you.

The short answer is, just read good poets and see EXACTLY how they do what they do. Even when it looks as though they're just writing "straight", they're really not. There's a million subtle ways to "write the truth but write it slant", as E.Dickinson said:

* Selection & Omission. There's a billion things you can say about anything so which details do you put in and which do you leave out?

* Getting up to speed. A lot of poetic cringe comes from too much intimacy too soon. The reader comes to your poem cold so you have to warm him up first before you make any great emotional demands. Philip Larkin is good at this. He almost always starts in a very low-key or chatty or jokey way, and only when he has the reader on his side does he try any flights of fancy.

* Hemingway's iceberg applies just as much to poetry if not more. The audience is cleverer and more sensitive than you think. You don't need to spell anything out. More often than not, you don't even need to say the single most important thing. You just write around it. "There is a sort of contempt in the act of speaking. Whatever we have words for is already dead in our hearts", as Nietzsche said.

* Extended metaphors are your friends.

I could go on I suppose but this is too big a topic for a post on 4chan. Just read a billion good poems and write a billion bad poems and then might write a decent one.

[Anonymous No.16984330]

>>16984289
shit, an actual productive reply on /lit

[Anonymous No.16984336]

>>16984289
Based.

Write a hundred bad poems too. You'll sit with them and see why they don't work.

[Anonymous No.16984376]

>>16984150
you channel the eternal godhead