Poetry critique thread

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Poetry critique thread Anonymous Mon Sep 5 12:45:27 2016 No.8475963 [Reply] [Original]

Alright, enough with this meme drivel, you fucks. I would like someone to read my poetry over (not that you people are really qualified to do so), but it is so very bad that I would be too embarrassed to share it with anyone who is not behind a veil of anonymity. This thread is for those in a similar predicament, as I am sure there are many very bad poets around here. Prose is also welcome, so long as you believe your prose to have the same ends as poetry, and to be written in a poetic manner.

I will begin with two sonnets I've written. The second was at the behest of a professor of mine, which is why I subtitle it "A Schoolboy's Exercise," with the absurd hope that it may stand as an early work along with the likes of Milton's Prolusions, which generally are not terribly insightful in themselves, but which are illuminated by Milton's later grandeur. Of course, my education is not nearly so good as I would like and deserve, and so my writing suffers.

Sonnet: An Evening Online

If to the monocle-acquainted eye
The aeroplane and piston seemed profane,
It’d flood the ages’ gloaming with its cry
To suffer this too-enchanting window-pane.—
And yet to call it windowpane were wode:
The analogy would fail this ópaque lake
Aboding vermin and the verminous ode,
The wording destitute, the feeling fake.
‘Turning blankly toward the blank page, churning
‘With desire, stranded in a house on fire,’
Runs the ode, ‘I abandoned fecund learning
‘For mere abstraction; a sterile, lustful mire.’
Nor can be saved the drifting hedonist
By monkish virtues: only amethyst
In verbal landscapes questioningly laid
Can make the Angel able to be kisst.

Contradictory Sonnet (A Schoolboy’s Exercise)

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
I still may call that hue unto my sight
As shows in Earth in spite of burning lime,
Outpacing music’s evanescent light.
Think how the amberlaid soprano cleaves
Unto the accompaniment, yet still is heard
Above that mumming beat commanding leaves
To hang and fall in sepiatone, and bird
To sing piano. Therefore, two lives we make.
For that we ne’er will live so long, nor so
Inter eternal visions, we must forsake
That one which perjures or true fire or snow—
But, that life which shines the dark on blazoned Sense
Shall mire me, but send you baptized hence!

Bloom is officiating as a reminder of your inevitable physical and literary mortality. Of course, the job of poetry is ideally to defy the inevitable.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 13:12:10 2016 No.8476047

I guess I'll bump with more schlock until someone gives attention or asks for it. The second of these requires expansion. I think it to be my best poem so far (which is awful), but the meditation it implies needs more time to unfold. I'll have to at least double it while maintaining its reverent feel, which is difficult for me, because I'm not naturally reverent. Oh well.

The Sorrow of Literature

Think.
--The Waste Land, §II

Think of the brawling song in which achieves
The milky violence of a poet’s sigh.
One’s thought can make a harmony in sieves…
And yet the image of ‘milky violence’—Why?

Because the mournful myth of cadence dips
Beyond the living, loving World that leers
In laboring hands and every page that rips;
Is murdered; and becomes the domain of fears.

It dips, and now the clamorous Muse achieves
The fully empty heart that cannot sigh.
Dead leaves, the fruit of myth, are brought in sieves,
Whose sighs compose a silenced singing: Why?

Paean to Shakespeare

The lass who graces
This serest of spaces
Is indivorcible from Shakespeare.

She will seem an image isolated,
Undebated,
Yet know the debate was won by Shakespeare.

Her curls, you’ll surely say,
Smack of ambrosi-ay—
But know ambrosia is monopolized by Shakespeare.

Say: ‘Your gait, dear, traced in cloudy fluff
‘Is in form earthly enough;
‘Yet ambrosia is its stuff.
‘It is a like a play of Shakespeare.’

Say: ‘Your smile, dear, is philosopher and stone,
‘Yet it is not your own:
‘The first alchemy, and the first at alchemy, was Shakespeare.’

Shakespeare, Usurper-King!
Thy play’s the thing
Wherein Beauty taketh wing.
But, whoreson magus! the wing is always thine, Shakespeare.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 13:43:58 2016 No.8476138

One more bump. This is a metrical exercise of the worst kind. Formally, I was consistent, but I think it to be a truly ugly piece of writing. Pitifully, it is my longest poem also.

Commandment in Reverse

Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
--‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, §IV

The banyan tree was fed
Upon an empty husk;
This poem, though born dead,
Shall smelly up the dusk.

It can’t do any better. Smell,
Though lowest of the passive senses,
Can by the figgy tree do well.
I won’t presume to use incenses.

Poetic inspiration, I’ve been told,
Is like a heightened epileptic fit:
Pressed tongue. The New assumes its throne; the Old
Expires. Heaney says, ‘I’ll dig with it’;

Or Beckett snatches grey ideas from out the foam;
Or Joyce engraves the Host upon a sooty face.
The entire enterprise becomes an onyx dome
Astride an emerald harboring a faery race.

And yet without that dome and race, the verses would go nude;
So Stevens pulses metaphysics’ strings; so pavement square
Comes to be haunted by white legs, and mind’s first quietude
Is burnt by shroudless Personage or concept. These all dare

A poet (how absurd!) toward actual expression. But Shakespeare knew
That absolute Construction must conceal all things t’reveal the One.
Obscurity should take its strange and truest Self: ‘A girl whose dew
‘Put Life, they say, to shame; for this verse first was gathered ‘neath the Sun.

‘From then on, prose will grow to rule the Earth. The dome’s obscuring tint o’erwhelms
The necessary hopelessness of nude ideas, dead in th’ heart. Enjamb-
Ment glints its bitter claw and beckons. No more the promise made by emerald helms
That house heads hollow, marching but to Poem’s simple beat. No more the Lamb.’

No poet claims this as the story of his Fall or his Decline: What is it then?
List, traveler: it is the grave of thought and self-appointed Creativity,
Who hails from indices and stars instead of rebel Bacchus and the Spirits’ din.
From this point on let these my lines flow backward, and the dangerous Truth my doctrine be.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 14:09:46 2016 No.8476190

Interesting, and in some ways excellent. Thanks for sharing, anon. Your wit and clever wordplay is refreshing, though oddly out of time: this reads like someone from Dryden and Pope's circle of friends, or Swift. Whence the Augustan sensibility? Do you like Horatian and Juvenalian satire? Have you read Lovecraft's hilarious Eliot send-up, Waste Paper? I enjoyed them all, even the "Shakespeare did it!" and lesser exercises. You have legitimate poetic dimensions and abilities, though they obviously serve your head more than your heart. Skill is not your stumbling-block, but sincerity might be, if you want to also write poetry that demands to be taken seriously, even at the risk of being scorned. It took Eliot a long time to stop winking at the reader for even a few lines. Just my two cents. I'm an adjunct prof, so I have seen a terrifying amount of amateur poetry (and real poetry too, of course).

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 14:38:12 2016 No.8476290

>>8476190

Well, thanks. I confess I have read almost no Augustan poetry, although I can somewhat see what you mean: this is certainly formalist poetry (in the worst sense of that term), though it lacks that absolute confidence in technical ability that marked Pope. I suppose that an unconscious imitation of someone you haven't read is better than a conscious imitation of someone you have. I personally detect an overabundance of Wallace Stevens. That one which took Yeats's 'The Sorrow of Love' (which is an incredible short poem, and criminally underrated in my opinion) as its formal model tried to be a bit more in the freely eloquent Yeatsian spirit, but failed miserably, becoming even more convoluted and, I suppose, metaphysical. And yes I have read Lovecraft's parody, although I have a hard time taking it seriously even as parody, since Lovecraft's intellect is so manifestly inferior to Eliot's, even if in terms of pure imagination he might be considered comparable.

I'm glad you think that technical ability is not the issue. I've mostly been following the commonplace that beginning poets should learn strict formal models before loosening up. But perhaps I'll loosen up a bit in the next stuff I manage to write. The Shakespeare thing is doggerel, but I think it turned out much more nicely than really anything else I've tried, the overly silly third stanza notwithstanding. It's wise of you to advise me to stop 'winking' at the reader; I'll try to follow that advice.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 14:38:30 2016 No.8476294

>>8475963

I've got a few minutes, so I'll give it a quick go line by line. I'll focus on criticizing and not praising; this is not to say that there's not some virtue or craft to the poem, but that's in this forum I think it's more productive to point out the issues that need revising or correcting.

>Sonnet: An Evening Online

This'd better be really good to justify calling a 16 line poem a sonnet. I mean, Hopkins wrote 20 line poems that broke most of the conventions of the sonnet, but still called them sonnets. Hopkins, I think, can do this. See his poem The Nature is a Heraclitean Fire for an example.

How will the "Evening Online" affect the theme or language of the poem? Does it?

>If to the monocle-acquainted eye
>The aeroplane and piston seemed profane,
>It’d flood the ages’ gloaming with its cry
>To suffer this too-enchanting window-pane.—

I'll get through this, but the first line already strikes me as incredibly pretentious (which I think you want as you invoke an image of a tof, right?) and artificially formal. Maybe this is part of the effect, too. I'll continue.

The struggle in sonnet writing since the Romantics at the latest has been trying to strike a genuine and natural tone and language usage while still conforming to a very contrived a structured form. Keats can do it, though most people's earliest attempts are too formal and consequently come off as wooden and insincere.

Lines 3 & 4 have one syllable each too many and the metre is broken in both. The "It'd" already upsets the iambic pentameter established by the first 2 lines, while the "too" of line 4 has to be spoken accented.

What is flooding the gloaming of the ages with its cry? The aeroplane? Modernity? Industry? Whatever it is, the syntax of line 4 strikes me as nonsensical. What is suffering the window pane? Is the cry suffering, as in patiently abiding? How does that work? Or does the window suffer from the cry? There's a play on words between suffering and pane/pain, and maybe a romantic/modern dichotomy developing.

>And yet to call it windowpane were wode:
>The analogy would fail this ópaque lake
>Aboding vermin and the verminous ode,
>The wording destitute, the feeling fake.

Again, there's too much language occurring here, and though it seems like the poem wants to comment on its own wordiness, I don't think it's sharp enough for that. Wode? The hell? Archaisms smack of the self-agrandising amateur. If you plan on intentionally writing archaically, line 6 should begin Th'analogy to accompany the unnatural accenting of opaque. What is the analogy of line 7? I don't feel that it's clear from lines 1-4. Line 8: The wording is not destitute, though the feeling is fake.

cont.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 14:57:40 2016 No.8476341

>>8476294

cont'd.

>‘Turning blankly toward the blank page, churning
>‘With desire, stranded in a house on fire,’
>Runs the ode, ‘I abandoned fecund learning
>‘For mere abstraction; a sterile, lustful mire.’

The metre turns all to shit in these lines. If you were writing a petrarchan sonnet, the logic should have turned by now, but it's a supposed quotation. I do wonder where it's going. Going with the Evening Online theme, is this supposed to suggest surfing for pornography? Desire, fire, sterile lust, abstracted sex? If it is, it's the unsexiest and least sensuous way of describing sex. Maybe, again, that's the intent, but I should think that these lines were where the language should be most alive and full of earthy anglo-saxisms (like the word fuck, for example. Moist is also good.) The dry formality of ll. 1-8 is stripped away to reveal something pulsing and alive. See Shakespeare's sonnets 20 & 129 for examples.

But since the metre is completely lost, though, attempts at sense making are hindered. If there's been a sustained and incremental meaning-making occurring, I've lost track of it because this is a train wreck. And no one can justify bad poetry as intentional.

>Nor can be saved the drifting hedonist
>By monkish virtues: only amethyst
>In verbal landscapes questioningly laid
>Can make the Angel able to be kisst.

Again, a sonnet should have ended at 14. The final couplet of Sonnet 129 could serve as a model... end in sensual despair, wanting escape but overcome by your own desires. Instead there's something like a puritanical turn to language and poetry with some promise of further abstraction. Given the terms of the poem, I prefer burning to death in the house on fire. It makes me think of St Jerome, who learned Hebrew to distract his own lustful thoughts and desires, giving us the Vulgate as a result. Or Augustine, who also struggled with both literature and desire in his attempts to know God. These lines dismiss christian virtue as a means of controlling the desires, but instead turn to completely hollow language and images. Where's the consolation there?

The reversal in line 13 (verb then subject) always sounds conrtrived and fake to contemporary readers. I understand that you're likely trying to make the metre work, but it shows that you're forcing it into shape.

The rhyme scheme is mostly alright, until the last four lines. Why two couplets? They're not even couplets, though, since line 14 enjambs into 15.

cont.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 15:02:05 2016 No.8476348

>>8476294
>>8476341

So look, I'm not saying that this poem is without its charms and virtues, and I think it's better than the shy self degradation you've pissed all over this thread. But it has plenty of problems if you mean for it to be a sonnet, or iambic pentameter, or pleasant reading. What you do from here, then, is revise and revise. Drop the sonnet nonsense, change the rhyme of the last quatrain to the abab that the rest of the poem had been. Drop some of the pretentious imagery and overly formal language and make the verminous ode sexier. I think the theme of the poem is something that should invite the sympathy and identification of your reader... become something like the anthem for /lit/: I wanted the glorious heights of langauge and learning and instead I'm wanking to donkey bestiality porn. We've all been there. By using such formalised language and odd imagery, you're intentionally pushing away the reader who would otherwise want to share the feels.

And above all this, I commend you for writing. 16 lines of poetry that need work is better than no poetry at all. No good poem was ever produced without hours of difficult revision.

Remember, poetry is a form of seeing with your eyes closed and not a code to be broken.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 5 15:08:30 2016 No.8476368 i would kill myself but nobody would know i would throw a party but nobody would show nobody would care, they wouldn't even stare brains on walls in empty halls i swear i'd do it but i don't have the balls where the fuck is my Poolitzer?

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 15:13:18 2016 No.8476378

Rainy rainy Sky,
Why am I so gay?
I just wish to die
Want to be away

Take me take me please
Anon that I Trust
I'll give in with ease
to the Power of your thrust

Sorry to have scared you
Please don't go away
I had not prepared you
To the lust within my say

Wake up from a dream
End it at fourteen

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 5 15:36:57 2016 No.8476452 >>8476368 I reccomend switching the first verse for the second one and vice versa

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 16:19:55 2016 No.8476579

Sup, /lit/. I just moved here from Pacifica, California, which is on the other side of the bay from here. On the other side of the peninsula, which is probably the least hip town in the whole Bay Area. And you can get a nice ratty apartment there with a nice panoramic view for about $700 bucks a month. Anyway, this is something I wrote while I lived there. It's called Pacifica.

My balcony looks over Eureka Valley.

In the evening, I get to watch the land turn the color of brick, and then aluminum.

On the hills there are trees: eucalyptus and Monterey pine.

And in the sandy bed, a housing development.

Often, I catch my eyes, sliding easily - as if they rolled on bearings, or had been oiled - off the identical rows of houses of people, and back up to the more peculiar trees.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 17:17:41 2016 No.8476797

>>8476348
So, unless OP is going to return at some point and say anything to the critique I offered, which I thought was the whole point of this silly thread, let me just say that this is a part of why /lit/ just wallows in le maymays and another thread about DFW. He seemed to respond to the limp praising post, but there's nothing to the thoughtful, short, and critical reading that I gave his 'sonnet'.

Kid, if you're gonna ask for critique, I suggest that it's courteous to acknowledge it. Thoughtful responses take time. I've always acknowledged the help that anons here have given me, even when I disagreed or disliked it. If you don't want to engage with readers who disagree with you, don't bother posting your shit here.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 17:32:17 2016 No.8476854

>>8476797
get off your high horse, you'll get all the (you)s if this thread departs.

And I'll add that I really enjoyed your critique of his poetry. My english isn't very good and I don't use to read poetry in English, so I didn't feel entitled to judge it myself.

but I couldn't agree more about the lack of sense and rythm in the verse
>To suffer this too-enchanting window-pane

and how him using the word fuck would've broken my expectations

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 17:42:48 2016 No.8476891

A few of mine

1st:

ship yer more reckless ventricles
with wet envelope haste,
to tumult-born horizons, nations infant,
ferret-ing its last dinner
from disappearing forest,
chipping its too-wide-too-idle
mouth on tiger shark tides,
no currencies yet to lie on
and all bloods lead to street,
where cannons bury the brave
and handshakes keep the weak

2nd:

you can riddle this minute in fragrant pauses; bring lank foibles
to onyx mute buff
waylay seams to us all
grafts thatched in lead,
easily wept is easily left
and
most suns never set

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 17:54:16 2016 No.8476926

>>8476854
>you'll get all the (you)s if this thread departs.
Huh?

Anon, I don't think I'm on a high horse. OP said this:

>I would like someone to read my poetry over (not that you people are really qualified to do so)

I believe that I am qualified to do so and I think I provided for him what he asked for. OP did respond to the post that gave a vapid but positive response, but not to my response which was detailed but critical. This suggests to me that he wasn't really interested in critique, despite his defensive and even combative initial stance. What I tried to give him took time and some thought, and I don't think it puffed up of me to think that OP would acknowledge it.

Again, OP began with
>Alright, enough with the meme drivel, you fucks
and I feel that I rose to his petulant call. I did go beyond the typical meme shite that pollutes this board and he shrunk from my critique like a limp dick.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 18:14:25 2016 No.8476998

>>8476926
Either OP doesn't care about the negative responses, in which case he can fuck himself with a dragon dildo

or op is absent and will respond eventually.

any way, contribute to the thread more if you have the time (in which case I'll be here to read it) or move on to something else and come back later (or not)

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 5 18:17:26 2016 No.8477014 >>8476998 Thanks.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 19:11:49 2016 No.8477230

Don't use antiquated language in your poetry in 2016 unless you're using it ironically and/or for comedic effect.

You will not get published. You will never have a readership. I am telling all talented poets this for their own good.

You also have to get over most traditional forms unless you're doing something interesting with them. Writing a sonnet about a contemporary object does not qualify as interesting.

Yeah, we know, a lot of free verse is shit. But no serious poet of the last 100 years has avoided it. Just pick up a book of Williams poems if you don't know why free verse is more relevant now than formal poetry. If you still don't get it you're not in the right line of work.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 20:50:16 2016 No.8477573

>>8476797

Since your critique is clearly very dear to you, I'll humor you, although your getting upset over these petty things makes me doubt your sensibility. Let me say you are obviously correct in finding it obscure, and that I take to be my primary problem: my syntax and imagery is so contrived that it is virtually a private language, and not a very rich one. However, your method is flawed: it seems you critiqued each line as you read it, which is not the way to read poetry. A poem, even a bad one, is to be read, and then its particulars judged in regard to the overall effect (or 'message' if you're a moralist). If no overall effect is detected even after close reading, which is my primary fear, one knows it is a bad poem, or rather no poem at all, but only versified babble. And clearly, at the very least, the wrong overall effect was imparted on you: I had not intention, and indeed it would seem to me abhorrent, to compose 'an anthem,' let alone one for /lit/.

So the bad impression is primarily my fault, as any bad impression left by a piece of art is primarily the artist's fault (we are using the terms 'art' and 'artist' loosely here). However, I also think your scope of interpretation too narrow--not to imply that my range of meaning is very broad, but it almost shocked me that you could see no use for the third quatrain except to express anxieties about watching too much pornography. You clearly think yourself very learned. You should have picked up on the echo of The Auroras of Autumn, which presumably would suggest the confrontation of a supernal power which one cannot confront. Of course, such echoes are wasted here, but you seem to be at least as fascinated by them as I am.

Your objections to the formal flaws are of course all sound, however I don't really understand why you're so outraged by its having 16 lines rather than 14. Small deviations in the form of the sonnet have a long history. Indeed Shakespearean sonnets are themselves of course a deviation from the traditional form.

Again, I finally think that your sensibilities are just very different from mine. I have no interest at all in putting vulgarities or obscenities in verse. They simply no longer shock or even interest. We are 150 years past Browning, I'm afraid, as good as he is, and 50 years past Bukowski, as bad as he is.

I can have no traffic with those who see life as a game between celibacy and naughtiness. I was never trying to write for you (though I think I ended up writing for no-one but myself, and even that's questionable). Thanks for the feedback in any case.

>>8477230

I appreciate your good intentions, but I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that you are literally 'Mr. Nixon' From Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Also if you think I'm thinking about making a living off my 'pen,' you're crazy.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 21:13:10 2016 No.8477679

>>8476290
I agree about Waste Paper, but Lovecraft is so far beneath Eliot as a poet that it's part of the fun to see him pretentiously mocking him, for me. If I had to make suggestions for reading, I'd say Eliot's Four Quartets, in which his intellect, wit, education, etc., are all brought to service of his faith and heart, and perhaps the brilliant and opaque work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom I shall never forgive for burning his poems and taking seven years off composing. I imagine you're familiar with both, though.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 21:13:15 2016 No.8477681

>>8476891

There are many impressively poetic words here (I like the Poundian 'ship yer'), although I can't really make head or tail of it. The first one SEEMS (and I am probably totally off here) to be about commanding one's lover to send their heart off to some exotic locale away from the wicked world of the money-lenders, which is a compelling enough theme, even if it is totally my projection. The second seems to be cheering someone up in a somewhat wistful mood, though I can hardly be more specific than that, as many lines are simply incomprehensible by any reasonable standards. I'm also not so sure how I feel about the whole no-punctuation thing. It seems you're using it to impart a sense of urgency and motion, which is paradoxically a yawn. The 'and' set off on its own line is also a cliched abomination.

On the whole, I find these not displeasing, and they halfway remind me of Hart Crane with their strange vocabularies, but neither do I find them especially interesting, because they are simply too obscure, as eloquent as at least the first one sounds. Do you have anything else?

>>8476579

An impoverished Wallace Stevens. 'the more peculiar trees' is the only thing worth preserving here, and indeed is quite Stevensian.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 21:43:56 2016 No.8477806
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Poem I wrote about the monsoon weather in Hong Kong:

Oh, fog
With rain
slides dead sheep
wet floating from hills
soaked wool valleys
Fill my window

I wonder
From atop steel
Tipped fingers
Skyscraper cliffs this city
You scale, bow legged
Locked angle legs
Moaning alongst steel
Down dark crevices
Out there, with lazy movement
You fill the city, the
Fog

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 21:52:32 2016 No.8477847

To all the poets here. Most of my disinterest with poetry these days concerns the fact that most contemporary poetry has no Argument. Think of the great poets of each language, they are pushing you into something holy, something beautiful. Every great poet believes in something to an absurd degree, otherwise they are trying to prove something, gain some validation. Believe in something intensely, then develop a style that you can defend to anyone who's ever lived or will live.

Anonymous Mon Sep 5 22:55:51 2016 No.8478049

>>8477573
Well, since you took the time to respond to me, which I did want, I'll take a moment to write back and then be done with it.

I'll start by saying that I've never pretended to be more than I am or more well read than I am. I think I am relatively well read, however, and particularly in the Romantics. I do teach in a college, have published chapbooks and academic articles, and have been a poetry editor/critic in several literary journals. I don't write this to suggest that I have authority or expertise in anything in particular, more that the opinion that I can give is informed, despite the failings you may detect.

I guess I'm confused when you say things like this:

>my syntax and imagery is so contrived that it is virtually a private language, and not a very rich one

Why ask for critique from an anonymous meme forum if this is the case? Why go from the stance of "I'm so bad" into the defensive posture of "I'm so obscure" as if it were a virtue? You briefly lecture me on "the way to read poetry" and suggest that you were "never trying to write for" me, but again, why ask the abyss for feedback? I offered a somewhat thoughtful response in good will and you have shat upon it?

I'll end by suggesting that, regardless of intentionality, impression, learned allusions, and private languages, nothing justifies a bad poem. Had this poem been submitted to either my class or the journals I've worked for it would not have fared well. About its being a sonnet... as I said, the poem has to be good enough to justify the deviation from the conventions. Since your poem cannot handle the basics of metre or the logical flow of the sonnet, I don't think you've earned the cred to change the form. Again, Hopkins can do it, Jee Leong Koh can do it, Rob MacKenzie can do it. This poem cannot.

I wouldn't say that my critique was "very dear" to me, as you sarcastically suggest. Your defensive and condescending tone suggests to me that my time was wasted, however. You requested feedback and I gave it with good intentions and respect for the interaction. I don't feel that the respect that I gave to the poem for which you requested feedback has been requited, however. Sometimes there's people on /lit/ who do genuinely want feedback and I value the interactions I can have with those people. This thread has been something different, though. I have nothing to prove to you, OP, and though I feel somewhat cheated by your douchey response, I'll just carry on elsewhere. Had you actually been interested in feedback and in improving your poetry, I'd like to think that I could have helped. But sometimes it turns out like this instead.

Best of luck, OP.

Anonymous Tue Sep 6 02:05:07 2016 No.8478569

In the whorl of ancient spires, in the core of Duragh Sin.
As a sparrow's beak on the mount of eternal day,
the Knife whispers on thought made flesh made thought made stone—
to pare what need not be from that which must cohere.
And Heaven's withered eye shall stare a thousand times
as it goes to one who must be, from one who has become,
In the whorl of ancient spires, in the core of Duragh Sin.

Anonymous Tue Sep 6 02:32:04 2016 No.8478600

Enduring Potential

I would ask for
But a single blade of grass
Tossed into our furnace
To burn
Like the wings of a butterfly
Caught in a spider's web
But remain stuck in a field which,
Though lush and green
Stretching as far as
My arms reaching out to you,
Snuffs out any spark
Before I even strike flint to steel

Anonymous Tue Sep 6 02:45:51 2016 No.8478611

“They dug up the Calvert girl last night,”
As mudblack a morning as I remembered
“No sense to it, they said on Dateline.”
Slipping deeper into the loam and crumbling, spoiled,
I saw her eyes like slack and licorice.
“Never did nothin’ to nobody.”
I watched the hills in the distance rise,
And sleepily close over top of me.
Cold loam and slip tumbling loosely over me,
I saw her face again white as a haint.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 6 07:52:02 2016 No.8478901 File: 136 KB, 400x298, 1463001723261.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >"Yeah, I'm gonna write some poetry!" >Open my notebook >Stare at blank page for hours

Anonymous Tue Sep 6 12:21:02 2016 No.8479525

>>8478600
The repetition of but is uneasy, makes it more difficult to read. Would probably be better to get rid of them all together.

>>8478611
Cool. I like how it isn't as ambiguous as most, it has more impact.

>>8477806
Steel repeated, same issue as above. Other than that nice imagery first six lines are great.

Window.

The window teases
And calls us to change.
To break the cycle,
Experience a greater range.

Those behind it smile,
Remind us of future and past.
Why wait?
It tells you, you'll be last.

But we occupy the present.
Real yet dim, inconsolably.
Where moments move by,
to our dismay, uncontrollably.

A glance at, or out, the window
so all flee.
A reality no better those who occupy it,
and the cynics, and we.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 6 13:33:59 2016 No.8479725 Poetry is shit. No one reads poetry except wannabe poets. There, criticized poetry for you.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 6 13:38:19 2016 No.8479740 >>8479725 Or to put it in a way you fagotts will understand: Poetry is shit. No one reads poetry except wannabe poets. There, criticized poetry.

Anonymous Tue Sep 6 14:13:52 2016 No.8479896

In the country is the city where the great star wakes and sleeps
Ride the women dark and pretty on the horses that they keep
By the ladder in the ground out from which climbs the dawn
Near the children bathing brown in the heat of rising sun
Walk about the tired men with callous on their feet
Careful as to not offend the mounted women that they meet
Such the longest stretch of hours crawls over the baking day
Across the sparkling city towers where it will be shut away
Just beyond a golden bridge journeyed men hide out of sight
They heave it down a jagged ridge and thrust the city into night
And drain the color from the women with the steeds that drink the sun
They ignore the frozen children dancing til the coming dawn

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 6 18:37:13 2016 No.8480828 Blump

Anonymous Tue Sep 6 21:24:27 2016 No.8481370

>>8475963
I truly could not read those in one go. They were boring and overdone. Nearly self deprecating but with less emotion
>>8476047
These were more bearable but mostly because they were easier to drudge through. The second was ok but i personally dislike the repetition. It always feels very cheap to me
>>8476294
You were far nicer than i was and actually gave useful critique. Oh well

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 6 22:19:36 2016 No.8481488 File: 20 KB, 600x394, bstrct2.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] http://pastebin.com/EsRN3Bhi

Anonymous Tue Sep 6 22:22:05 2016 No.8481493

>>8475963
Darling fleet on water floats on diamond:
'Twixt azure blades and golden scraps, the water's
dullness brought to sheen in solemn fire.
That She uplifts, mixed in rays and wind,
A bolt of earthy flight in golden haze;
She flies to arch again in pond and stone.

The stones of creation sit in their centre, fanned
by darling birds and circuits of momentous colour;
Darling fleet on water rests, her eyes
Survey that speedy circuit of men, and off,
further off she flies, that bolt of earth,
away from the glowing warmth of pond and stone.

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 7 05:40:37 2016 No.8482380 I pry the dirt from my fingernails Instead of trimming them And wonder why my plans always fail.

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 7 10:40:31 2016 No.8482770 fwiw, we have a discord for sharing and critiquing original work now (as well as discussing literary works) join us brahs https://discord.gg/fQxwa

Anonymous Wed Sep 7 11:37:29 2016 No.8482864 [DELETED]

>>8475963
how about a poem about anime
even though that's kinda gay
so what if I like to masturbate
to little girls who are barely eight
they got big eyes and big asses
*adjusts glasses*
all these fair lasses
they get me so erect
I know I'm being direct
but I want to directly insert
my dick in to Illiya
even if I'll go to jail
I'm sure I'll get mail
from all of my fans
in this pipe dream of mine
I wake up
so it was never a crime
this ending was sublime

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 7 15:12:51 2016 No.8483471 Why is this thread so shit

Anonymous Wed Sep 7 15:40:51 2016 No.8483563

Dead fish eyes staring blankly ahead,
The tank glass glares back, glowing instead,
The dull fire of a thousand boy din.
Lit, but now mere ashes.

Wanton slaughter of unwanted babes,
Virginal sloths with unseen names,
Viral tapestries burn in torn wind.
Lit, framed between slashes.

The philosophers' moans drown the foul
Tao of irony voiding its bowels,
Smirking shirkly through old blooms' abyss.
Light, blinded enchanter.

Thomas's Gospel and David's sling
Gather infinite dust, whispering,
"Only the dead can know peace from this..."
Light, dimwitty banter.

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 7 18:08:00 2016 No.8484075 >>8476891 reminds me of hart crane, the first one

Anonymous Wed Sep 7 22:32:44 2016 No.8485008

These are song lyrics but I trust your guys' judgement more than /mu/'s/

I haven’t words worth to say
No melody worth to play
No reason for someone to stay
I’m asking you to take my hand,
Even if my legs rot out, I’ll stand
Even if my legs rot out I’ll stand
If only you’ll take my hand

I never figured out love
Couldn’t piece together a hug
One day I learned to strum
I don’t know you well
I know you know lovin’
I don’t know you well
I know you know lovin’

Mom lost her mind
A few to many times
Maybe that’s why I whine
She’s given me a many good song
You’ll make many come along
I know you’ll have many come along
Many a many good song

No job would give me pay
No motorhome of mine has stayed
Didn’t feel like sleeping on hay
Now I put my all into a guitar
Played it out some stars
Played it out some stars
And put my all into the guitar

Babe, sometimes I sink
But I see you and think
We could have ourselves a drink
It’d send my demons far away
We’d have lots of ways to play
Wed have lots of lots of ways to play
It’d send my demons far far away

I don’t got words worth to say
No melody worth to play
No reason for someone to stay
I’m asking you to take my hand
Even if my legs rot out, I’ll stand
Even if my legs rot out, I’ll stand
If you only take my hand

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 04:39:25 2016 No.8485730 >>8485008 It's shit. Rhymes are simple as fuck and you changed the lines to make the rhymes work. Should be the opposite.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 05:13:33 2016 No.8485785 >>8485008 >I haven’t words worth to say >words worth >wordsworth literally dropped on the first line

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 05:51:03 2016 No.8485852 No discernible talent. It doesn't even rhyme.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 06:25:50 2016 No.8485907 >>8485008 Truly this is not good but it sounds like you put a lot of heart into it so don't get discouraged from something you enjoy. Just write for yourself.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 06:30:16 2016 No.8485915 >>8479896 Can someone crit this. It's a first draft, ignore the first few words because i couldn't figure them out yet

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 10:20:36 2016 No.8486391 >>8485730 >Rhymes are simple as fuck I'm taking all the other considerations into mind but I don't see how this matters in the slightest.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 12:47:22 2016 No.8486820 >>8481488 pls crit

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 13:26:19 2016 No.8486926

I really want to get into writing poetry (I read a little bit of it) and I understand that I need to read it and write it to learn but there's one thing I'm having difficulty with. I never know how to make a poem progress. Like I can write a first stanza but after that I don't know what to do. It's like I have the initial idea but nowhere to go from there. Any help?

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 17:33:21 2016 No.8487736

Detainee

The bloom of heat
Sleepless and deadlined toward
that which floats, bobbing with
A little lead’s hidden stability
Surfacing over and again
But never sinking, only pulled
Down and noiseless
Maybe the sound of lapping or rain
And really it’s indoors
My metaphor is a yearning for outdoors
More of an analogy
Now that we can compare the two
Thinking the between is tiring work.

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 17:56:19 2016 No.8487808

>>8487736 is me

I ain't much for detailed analysis/critique because I don't know what I'm talking about. I'll provide a few kind words and gut reactions instead:

>>8476891
Fun. I hope you keep at it. It's confident, but could perhaps be a little more careful.

>>8477806
Fun. I like repetition, but I am highly suspicious of its motives. Be suspicious of yourself.

>>8478569
Portentous, but I think it may justify itself. I'm not entirely sure. It had a nice rhythm when I read it. What exactly is Duragh Sin?

>>8478600
Reads a little undercooked. I didn't hate it. Sorry, wish I could say something better. Don't stop writing.

>>8478611
I like this. I'd be very happy if I wrote this.

>>8479896
Not sure what to say. It's poetry as a sort of condensed prose. Have you ever read Michael Ondaatje's poetry? He does something a little like that. Maybe you could be inspired.

>>8481493
Not sure what to say other than I couldn't really get into it.

>>8483563
A little heavy handed. Some of the adjectives seem like afterthoughts.

>>8485008
Gross

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:03:41 2016 No.8487824 >>8483563 >>Wanton slaughter of unwanted babes, >Virginal sloths with unseen names, Is this a comedic poem. You sound like a silly faggot.

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:12:28 2016 No.8487840

>>8487736
I'm honestly not sure i even understand this and i don't like the use of me and we all of the sudden at the end, it cheapens it. I do though feel a certain like towards it like its a glimpse inside someone else's consciousness.

>>8479896 was mine, it isn't at all my usual tone of writing so I'm trying to get some better idea of it. I haven't read him, do you have a specific recommendation?

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:17:20 2016 No.8487851

>>8477573
>I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that you're literally

In publishing.

It's okay to imitate traditional forms and even anachronistic vocabularies when you're in college and before you're serious about composing decent poetry. But don't pretend that recognizing what every major poet of the last one hundred years has recognized somehow makes me a caricature. The sonnet as you conceive it no longer responds to our material conditions - our way of living. I hate Bukowski as much as the next intelligent person, but that doesn't mean poetry is a zero-sum game between potty-mouth free verse and 'serious' traditional formalism. Read Williams, read Oppen, read Ashbery, read Simic. It's entirerly possible to be 'smart' without being stodgy.

You've already namechecked Stevens so I know you're not hopeless. But you know that Stevens is being ironic, being playful, when he slips in to a high or classical registet, yeah? Your poetry seems to take the attitude at face value.

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:19:59 2016 No.8487861

>>8487840
Perhaps "The Cinnamon Peeler" or "There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems". I'm reaching though, it might not be relevant at all.

I appreciate your feedback. It's not really a poem I care for. I'm too scared to post anything I've written that I enjoy. I'm a coward.

I think the poem I posted just falls apart into a sort of commentary on the poem itself, which is not even an idea I appreciate all that much. I wrote it in a sitting, and then revised it a little once of twice. I'll take your advice on the me to we issue. It does cheapen it.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:28:07 2016 No.8487896 Fuck it I can write better poetry than y'all off the top of my head. There once was a boy from Alberta, Who committed a horrible murda: He sliced up his neighbor When she went into labor And laughed while her parents interred her.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:34:51 2016 No.8487912 >>8487896 Shite limerick lad. Almost there, but the second to last line sucks the air out of it. There once was a man from /lit/ Who wrote up some talentless shit He posted it up Although it did suck And sat back in delusions of grandeur

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:37:22 2016 No.8487916

To love a leaking faucet is to love an open door.
The silent drip-drip of the nozzle
As it puddles on the floor.
The noisy creaking of the hinges screams for my attention.
Though dark may make a child wince
I shut it with conviction.
The tools a’come and out they hop to find a dripping pipe.
With many bolts, a bucket, mop:
A bond is turned too tight.

A day has passed and now my towels have no use.
The light is lit throughout the night
And sleep has ‘come obtuse.
No longer do I feel a need to scowl at the hunger.
The faucet water tastes a’fowl
And food’s for those who slumber.
To love a leaking faucet is to love an open door.
Without the drip-drip of the nozzle
I’m a puddle on the floor.

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:38:44 2016 No.8487919

Nights whimpered in silent fear of what might become of them.
War slithered in, with sinister intent, speaking in eager whispers
In the ears of looming shadows that wept dry tears for sunlight.

Murmurs of discontent sprinted throughout: your home; your clique; your self.
Inching further for anger, blindness swept beneath your skull and latched into you;
Your sins are not your own.
Luring you further with malicious speak shrouded by a veiled innocence:
Hysteria lit the path with shadowed light from an envious lantern.

Cheered on by coats of tainted wool, and assailed by coats of tainted challis
You become conflicted.
What now?

Leering from platted comfortability, shadows hiss at you to further on;
Indeed, you do. In fact, with many hesitations, and many trepidations,
But indeed, you do.

March

Splintered bones sizzle under a foreign star,
Trickles of sweat blister, embroider, and furrow your brow.
Misguiding you moreso than pockets with a pretense avowed.
Schoolgirls hand-in-hand, capped-‘n-gowned.
Outspoken words nested in fear choke on bravado…

Bravo, Bravo!
The term is done!

Wormwood parties in your pit,
Your feather withers at the sun,
Enthralled in fear and shadow’s shit,
Your blindness turns to deaf’d the young.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:42:32 2016 No.8487929 >>8487912 There once was a gibbering midget Who drooled when he spoke and would fidget Whenever his views On Descartes or Deleuze Were exposed as the spew of an id'jit. Fight me.

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:48:16 2016 No.8487949

>>8487916
Do you think you could try to get across your ideas and images with the rhyme? The poems not really for me, but I still tried to figure out what facility was lacking, and I think if anything it's rhyme.

I have some other things to say, but unfortunately they're all negative. I'll only post them if you ask me to.

>>8487919
Portentous. In a bad way. Sorry. I'm not feeling charitable so don't take it too seriously. I might have something better to say if I read it at another time.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:52:08 2016 No.8487958 >>8487949 I'm >>8487916 Yes, please tell me. Negative feedback is the best feedback for me to get better.

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:53:42 2016 No.8487964

Quiet little families in short houses
With large backyards and white picket fences
Stood side-by-side other short houses with equal amenities.
Sitting on streets, that crisscross, like Sunday crosswords;
Neighborhoods protected by tight-knit communities
From undesirables

But those don’t exist in our town,
No not ours.
Men who drink their coffee and
Read their paper and
Kiss their wife and
Leave their home to go to their work.

women who raise the kids and
cook the food and
clean the home; and
love the Husband.

Tiny blue-eyed children who go to that school and
Play at that park and
Laugh at that joke and
Study that math and
Love that family.

Every little person,
In little old Crittleton,
Played Their Part, as they should,
and
Every Boy and every girl
Married each other, and
Life was good.

But that was not in our town;
No not ours.

Loud, broken-down families in shabby shacks
With shattered glass windows and tattered tarred rooftops:
Timidly hidden from all men and Women fearful from anger and nothing at all.
Littered with refuse the sidewalks they crack,
The drunkards are sheltered by nightfall.

men who crouch on knees and
snicker on wrinkled aluminum and
crawl on fractured bones and
sleep on beds of bullets.
Women who work all weekends and
Feed all mouths and
Fight all ghouls and
Toss and Turn all night,
Loathe their beds of bullets.

AND WHEN ALL THE SANGUINARY TRACTS ROT

children are children no longer than cattle,
children are animals that growl and that battle,
children are scholars forsaken by knowledge,
children are boogeymen, shrouded under beds of bullets.
And this was in our town:
You pray not yours

. . . . . . . . . . . .

day-up, and day-drop,
you ponder our death.
agog for the answer how
the middle of your city, the middle of mine,
is equally evil, and also, benign.

So travel to Crittleton for all of it’s green.
And stay out of Crittleton for all of it’s mean.

Though alleys shake and light posts tumble and fracture,
We don’t all see the darkness.

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:55:54 2016 No.8487975

The day after you stole my heart I tried to call the police.
The phone rang, but I couldn’t get through.
I went to the station to describe them the thief.
But the doors were tightly glued.

I ran down the street in a frenzy,
Screaming and pleading for help.
But the roads were broken and empty,
And the wind had muffled my yelp.

My eyes burned with a need
And my skin started to peel.
The hole in my chest began to bleed
And the sky seemed surreal.
Afraid, I clawed at the dirt and filled the hole with worms.
Afraid, I glared at the sun and burned the edges of my eyes.
Afraid, I prayed my heart returns.
Afraid, I struck the air with cries.
And as I lie there, sobbing in the mud like a dog, the air replied with the sound of your voice.
And my eyes no longer burned, for in the place of the sun, there was your face.
And as the tears gently struggled to roll down my cheek, your heart wrung the worms from my chest.

I stood, and the sky fell atop my head.
Stiches and staples mended my bloodied wound.
A glowing coat of skin started at my fingertips and began to spread,
And I saw the world around me, and very nearly swooned.
My voice returned with a thunderous bellow,
And I began to stroll down a clean-cut sidewalk.
With every step I took, I whistled hello,
And in another moment, I’d passed another block.

I swung open the doors to the station with ease,
Looked around, and chuckled too.
My mouth spread devilish wide, suddenly pleased:
The day after you stole my heart, I could only see you.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:56:04 2016 No.8487977 >>8487808 Duragh Sin is the last surviving settlement of sentient life in a universe that's in the mid-stages of heat death. It orbits one of the few last white dwarf stars that outputs appreciable light.

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:59:03 2016 No.8487983
File: 95 KB, 600x612, elmo remembers drinking.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Warning of incoming Bukowski-lite

"Goo"

There will always be a cutting cold wind
coming from the North, and another
similar, twin wind, coming from the South,
and both will sometimes meet, but mostly
they will come by themselves, and hit you
when you are with your friends at a barbecue
in a warm day, and suddenly
a cold wind appears
so chilly
and out of nowhere

There will always be some kind of dark
goo, a pitch-like substance, being fed
to the ground, during the rain
The goo, created when the water
washes the earth,
feeding the earth, so that potatoes
and fruits can grow
and be reaped
and be burned and fermented
and turned into alcohol
paired with the grapes
the earth birthed after being
fed the dark matter of the world
the tears of God above

And the wine will come to us
in bottles at the stores and at collections
and we will drink it
and find ourselves dizzy and relaxed
and calmed by it
By God's soothing tears
and primordial goo and all the
substances he fed the earth with
to feed us with the wine

Whenever we drink, we are not sad
nor angry, most of the time, nor
do we remember that things are
fucked beyond what us mere mortals
can start to try to solve without
getting out of it dead

When I drink, I'm never angry

Half a bottle of wine a day
keeps Azazel at bay

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 18:59:44 2016 No.8487985 >>8487929 There twice was a failing poet Who redeemed himself would you know it? He came back in full swing (and aside from the name-dropping) Now has a limerick to show for it

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 19:01:12 2016 No.8487986 >>8487977 Cool.

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 19:05:17 2016 No.8487992

>>8487851

I've only portrayed you as a caricature because you blatantly are one, my friend. 'Material conditions' of this particular time (which I admit I must not be intelligent enough to meaningfully relate with poetic form) are only one minuscule part of what poetry must answer to. But I guess I no longer find the Classicism/Romanticism or traditionalism/experimentalism dialectic to be interesting anymore; it is that dialectic which is really dead, because who can kill Milton? I don't see why a modern poet should limit himself to one mode or another. Poetry as art form--but not, importantly, as state of mind, for the state of mind that is poetry is immortal, and I would want to say is what define humanity--has been utterly marginalized and devalued by the public arguably since World War II, so I actually don't see why contemporary poets should in any way limit their particular mode of expression, since the public will none of it anyway. No amount of experimentation, formalization, prosaicization, or any other change in form can make poetry 'relevant' to the general population unless they come back to art of their own accord.

As for Stevens, I'd like to point out that many of his most affecting poems also utilize some sort of formal principle, be it rhyme or meter (he often likes to slip anapests in thee). Stevens can be beautiful with or without rhyme, and he can be funny with or without rhyme. If you are really arguing for the appeal to 'material conditions,' I would think Stevens to be the LAST man you would go to: he is a totally unabashedly bourgeois poet of the imagination, and he chooses whatever poetic technique seems to him most fit at that particular moment, and for his particular subject--indeed, sometimes the subject of the poem effectively is the form, although all of his poems which rely purely on verbal play are lackluster. Stevens is being just as playful when he makes a rhyme as when he breaks it; he is already beyond the formalism/experimentalism dialectic, and I think that any poet working today must be quite beyond it, although I'm not in any way advocating that all poets working today must be Wallace Stevens. It is sufficient that they be poets who know what they want in an age that fundamentally doesn't know what it wants, culturally speaking. Then again, does any age?

And as I said, I DO NOT consider myself a serious poet. Indeed I don't consider myself a poet when I've written perhaps ten pages of versified babble. I am just doing metrical exercises for the most part here (though the thing on Shakespeare is something marginally more to me), but my philosophy does not exclude metrical exercises as a small PART of what makes poetry. Why must we be so arbitrary in these matters?

Also Williams is tedious and vastly overrated.

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 19:05:47 2016 No.8487994

>>8487958
I'll just a couple examples from parts of lines that seem a little thoughtless:

"The light is lit" Can you see where i might take issue with this?

"And sleep has ‘come obtuse." here's an example of a lack in your rhyming ability. It feels like the rhyme entirely dictated the line, rather than the other way around.

Sorry man, I don't have much more to say really. Keep writing.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 19:05:48 2016 No.8487995 >>8487985 : - ) thanks senpai you've released me from my snares

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 19:08:42 2016 No.8488001 >>8487994 True the light is lit is fairly redundant. And I understand what you mean. I'll put more effort and time into future poetry. Thank you.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 19:11:22 2016 No.8488009 >>8487992 Lmao all that bloviating and your poem still sucks U 'wode' bro?

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 19:11:44 2016 No.8488011 >>8487919 Name one thing you've done here that wasn't done literally 100 years ago. The diction is easy but not too bad; the subject and imagery, however, is a yawn. >>8487992 he often likes to slip anapests in there*

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 19:12:50 2016 No.8488015

>>8488001
It's a tough racket man. I don't know if you read mine, but I'm sure you could be just as negative about it as I was of yours.

here:>>8487736

It's far easier to critique than it is to write well. In fact, I don't think anyone should be allowed to critique here without posting their own crap.

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 19:14:45 2016 No.8488020

>>8488009

Not particularly. Thinking about poetry and writing it are two different skills. I think the ultimate source of my poems' badness is that I am trying to exercise the first skill while writing them. But it doesn't bother me greatly; I have time, and if I can never write decent poetry, there are other things for me to do.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 19:24:13 2016 No.8488041 >>8487995 You wrote a nice Limerick. Credit where it's due f a m Do you have any non-limerick/more serious poetry to show me?

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 20:00:57 2016 No.8488118

>>8487861
I'll check them out. Don't blame you for not posting your other work. I feel like as soon as i post anything it loses a lot of its initial glamour(? I don't know if that's the word I'm looking for) but it's kind of helping me improve i think to have people give their reactions.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 20:11:07 2016 No.8488148 >>8488118 Anything else you want to share?

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 20:26:57 2016 No.8488190
File: 4 KB, 56x56, vile.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>8475963
Sous le sol d'abord de la mer
Vers le ciel, s'envole en plein air
Toutes mes pensees, pareil que mes reves
Disparaissent juste avant le soleil se leve
Ils sont oublies dans un seul moment
J'aurais exige pourquoi?-
Quoiqu'ils feront

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 20:43:23 2016 No.8488236 >>8488190 Bon Je ne sais pas français

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 21:00:39 2016 No.8488279

>>8488148
Maybe it will encourage you to also so here's another. I've never been able to finish it because i think i need to change up the tempo or it will be boring but i haven't figured out how. It's a bit wild so I'm not sure the reactions o might get

See the prince of lilypads
with stilts and armoured goldfish lads
a shining burst of coal and glass perched on his foolish head.

And hark the bullrush mossy queen
atop her seashell submarine
the windows of her jellied fins melt in the seaweed bed.

Can you catch the antelopes
who scream with glee but melt with mopes
the chattermonkey stablemen make sure that they stay fed

The little crickets chickadee
they're calling for a mutiny
the tortoise with his nervous beak is sure we'll all be dead

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 8 21:06:38 2016 No.8488293 These threads need the Ashbery fags. They may be the only ones fit in here.

Anonymous Thu Sep 8 21:29:23 2016 No.8488349

>>8488279
Prefer this to the last one, although I feel a little lost in interpreting it. I like something about it though. It has a nice range of animalistic imagery.
So yeah, a few lines don't still so well with me, but I enjoyed it.
Sense you were brave enough, here's another of mine:

A digit splits the padded cell on either side
and either side again
Dunes stretch up and fold back
Sliding down to flat foot and bullet extremities
Paralysed, in view the spirant back and forth
An explicit invention
as a dotted line surrounds
The intimate ringing of the impenetrable that is the pain in all longing
Close-up, the curves are a desert, but with a lightless sun within
So the hidden folds are warmed and colourless.

Turning away from all this
the eyes only slightly this way or that
The spread of cool ruffles is brilliant white, nothing.
The hands stream in to meet the coolness
and close-up, the myth of a mistaken animal
A nervous creature that makes a mess before
From boredom’s fascination springs fear
And it remembers itself
Too late

It could not be said that it is the same to turn back toward it all
The lie is made petty by it
The heaving, rising, falling betrayed by the face that
Forever believes it can decide beyond its station
In the now expanding world
Crawling out to touch and take responsibility for every corner of itself
The heart rendering nymph lies beside the dog in a barrel
An artefact placed within, seated, orderly, the birth of principle
Freedom’s claim that restrains the viewer
Producing a temptation to sit back, unhook, and only look
Well behaved

.
>>8488279
Are your referring to a few John Ashbery fans who post good poems here?

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 00:37:01 2016 No.8488815

OP here again. While I've not found the critique in this thread especially helpful (I hope others do), I've tackled what I take to be the essential problem of obscurity. Here I've adhered to a strict ballad form, but I think the meaning is fairly clear if boring. But inanity is better than opacity. I call it a dissatisfied lyric because it's a lyric with which I am dissatisfied. I would like to expand it, but I realize that's a foolish ideation given my work ethic in these matters.

Dissatisfied Lyric

The solitary flame will bore
All us, who think the same
Of evening’s repetitious lore,
As of exhausted Fame;

For flames can only symbolize
One poet at a time—
Yet he is sea and sun, whose lies
Will make each sky and clime;

Make darkness be coterminous
With its Self-feeding flame;
Or do away with cóncrete fuss,
Distilling only Same;

Or metaphysics he might scold:
‘Come let us speak alone
‘Of furniture that’s new or old,
‘Of flowers of our own;

‘Or, grander, of our mountain-range;
‘Our special speech of Sea;
‘You’ll find therein—don’t think it strange—
‘Your next nativity.’

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 01:01:36 2016 No.8488863 >>8488815 If you look inside this man You will find a maggot. Posts across the board all ran: OP is a faggot. Garrulous and full of gas His doggerel stung like whiplash; What he wrote came out his ass, What he thought was mishmash.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 04:13:25 2016 No.8489227

>>8488349
There isn't really an interpretation. It's actually meant to follow the bizarreness of a dream. After i wrote it though i feel like its taken on this picture of some kind of great animal war. In my mind, the frog prince is madly in love with the jellyfish.

I actually enjoyed this poem much more than your fist but also i just really liked it. This sounds weird but it is very crudely delicate.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 04:24:20 2016 No.8489242 >>8487824 I don't think it's possible to write a poem about /lit/ and not be a silly faggot

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 05:22:40 2016 No.8489329

>>8489227
I enjoyed it a lot more on the second reading. I think I was trying to compare it to the previous poem you posted at first.

Thanks. Your description fits my own sense of the poem well, which is really encouraging. I also wrote this one quickly, but I had a very distinct sense of it beforehand.

I'd be happy to read anything else you have too.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 05:38:54 2016 No.8489349

>>8488815
It's nice. Flows about right to read, although I don't know much about form, so I'm only responding to my internal meter.

I don't trust myself to tell you how good it is, but my impression is that it's a little fussy. The expansiveness of this older style is often justified by a kind of taut lyricality. I mean to say that the imaginative quality and the sense of control legitimizes the form, which can be a little stuffy.

To write like this you have to be really good.

>>8488863
Forgive him. He came back.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 05:47:04 2016 No.8489360

>>8489329 here

Just another point, now that you said the poem followed the "dream logic" of sorts, it reminds me of the director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. particularly some sections from Uncle Boonmee. It's only an association, but it might be of interest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpMVh0OoJ9s

from about 4:45 onwards is part I associated with your poem.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 05:48:47 2016 No.8489362 >>8489227 sorry, this was meant for >>8489360

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 05:50:00 2016 No.8489365 >>8489362 SHIT The other way around. this >>8489360 is meant for >>8489227

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 07:55:52 2016 No.8489551
File: 35 KB, 341x432, image.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

The radiant countenance
Of an ancient frog
Rises through Judaic fog:
Praise be unto KEK! His stance
Betrays his royal elegance.

He'll lead us out of Plato's cave
With magic memes
and shining beams.
Symbol of the Aryan race,
To KEK I give the highest praise!

Green as unadulterated jade;
Green as the verdant
Valleys of Europe;
Green as the newly birthed cicada;
Green as KEK: the alpha and omega!

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 09:09:10 2016 No.8489689 >>8485008 Holy..... I want more..

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 09:13:31 2016 No.8489699 >>8485008 Holy shit, I sang this to myself and it's hilarious.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 09:18:29 2016 No.8489712 >>8485008 >I haven’t words worth to say Profoundly ironic

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 09:23:00 2016 No.8489725

>>8489329
I honestly like that one of mine a lot i find it very fun to see words my brain comes up with. It's not particularly brilliant. Here's a couple short ones

The daffodil man with his soft coat and tie
With his glorious hands and his eyes to the sky
As we watched in redemption and left him to die
And we cleansed ourselves silly and suckled the lie
But we were just sheep
At the end of the day
We were just people and god was to blame

Jesus Christ the blackness seeps
With terror winds and nightmare teeth
And jolts of doom and death and dread
Poisons dreams and inks my head
And turns the laughter into cackles
Life's decisions into shackles
And permeates through every thought
Dredges up the cruel forgot
Melting any glimpse of goodness laying just beyond my bed

>>8489360
This looks fascinating I'm going to watch it

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 09:29:43 2016 No.8489733 File: 12 KB, 407x286, 1472702579349.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>8488815

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 09:54:55 2016 No.8489782 The king of crickets, Stupid in the moon, Plays a monotonous song Through eternal antennae

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 09:57:14 2016 No.8489785

>>8489725
Not as fond of this one as I was of the second poem you posted. It's easier to follow (just a comment, not praise, not criticism), but I would prefer if the lines were a little more idiosyncratic and lyrical. There's also a lot of overt theme there that needs a little more cooking to pull itself closer to the poetic. The ideas should both make and say something. Some of this poem borders on just saying.

"Life's decisions into shackles
And permeates through every thought" - this for instance, it says something, and even metaphorically attaches the idea to an image, but I think there's something further needed. The expression needs a little more inventiveness, or daring maybe.

Sorry I'm babbling on like I know what I'm talking about. I do feel strongly about what i have said though.

And do. It's a wonderfully bizarre film. His most recent effort "Cemetery of Splendor" is also worth a look.

What poets do you read?

here's a prose poem I wrote recently, again, not something i worked on for very long,although i hate to say that like its some defense of whatever might be lacking in it:

I passed through the first quarter century of my life sceptical of the image. That was how long it took to brew. Having beaten the dust off every imaginable naivety, the picture is left with only its initial provocation. I am filled with it, not because I trust it, but because I trust myself. It can do me no harm that I would not willingly do to myself tenfold. I will get there first. I will be there waiting for it, and then dismiss its efforts with the callousness of the casual reproach. The menacing reticence, the poisonous bog of stinking thickness, the dead cells of doubt’s early blooming contempt. I come now to the image, thoroughly worn, and with sere-eyed patience I will feather cut it and pull out what’s best for both of us.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 09:58:53 2016 No.8489787 >>8489782 Cute idea.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 10:15:31 2016 No.8489821 >>8489785 Sorry, I actually read it what you posted as one poem with a split first. It makes MUCH more sense as two obviously. I still hold to the same criticisms, but I can enjoy them far more as separate pieces.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 10:21:18 2016 No.8489847

>>8489785
I'm not sure if you realized they are two separate poems. I actually agree with you about the almost statement-making lines. To be honest (and I'm completely sounding defensive as well) i write things as they come out and then leave them be. I usually write prose actually but like you, I'm generally more reluctant to share because i actually like it.

I don't particularly read poetry to be frank. I'm not a very well versed person so while i love poetry i generally just read whatever i come across or am recommended. I hate to confess it. I'd probably incense lit/ because i really have no discipline or education in writing or reading. I read anything and everything and write whatever i feel.

I much prefer your poems. Your same tone carries through in all your work i think and i feel it is better exposed in poem form. Although i really like the end of this piece it almost feels like it could just be the first paragraph of a book.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 10:30:22 2016 No.8489860 I am sad You are sad He is not That is sad

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 10:31:25 2016 No.8489864

>>8489847

I did read them as one. Sorry about that. See:>>8489821

I admire the honesty. I'm not the most well versed person either, although I have spent the past year or so trying to become one.

I understand, /lit/ can be so snobby and defensive. It's like a photo negative of /tv/.

Maybe you're not motivated to do so, but based on what I've read I think you should further develop your poetry. I get the sense that you are not too many steps away from writing a pretty decent poem, which is more than most people can say.

Cheers for the comments. I'm constantly trying to work out whether I should be writing more poetry or prose. Comments like this are clarifying.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 10:32:26 2016 No.8489867 >>8489860 is this /lit/ bait?

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 11:02:13 2016 No.8489925 Soft flesh emerges From the center of water: Man curves outward, and settles back into the breast Like fish flutter At opposing ends, and bend back into them

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 11:20:21 2016 No.8489967 >>8478049 not OP, but I've been reasoning alongside you throughout these tirades seriatim. verdict: OP is insecure and had a pitiful wanting to impress anonymous users but got on the defensive JUst a massive W H E W L A D

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 12:20:04 2016 No.8490125

>>8489864
I'm not particularly motivated especially because like i said i mostly write prose anyway. I suppose everyone enjoys their own work but I'm content with just that enjoyment. Thanks though. I think you definitely should keep writing if only to describe your thoughts. I personally like your poetry better and it does have a more prose-like feel to it

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 14:30:40 2016 No.8490518 >>8490125 And there's no prose you would be willing to share? Maybe something you're long finished with?

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 15:59:12 2016 No.8490815

Are you a retail park?
Retail park, are you granite?
You glimmer.

Old friend walking towards me,
your torso is an open fridge.
Coolness wafts. Ah,
what pale light and chilled drinks
are in your cavity. I reach.

Mannequin in the window,
in balaclava and dark clothes,
what is your crime?
You stand up and crouch down.
Who taught you?
Mannequin, are you conscious?

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 17:15:52 2016 No.8491119 >>8490815 reads like a character (one that the author is making fun of) rhapsodizing to himself as he goes window shopping. It's like someone inanely whistling to themselves because they're in a good mood, except with words.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 17:17:38 2016 No.8491129 >>8490815 I'm sorry friend. Hate to be so brutal.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 17:21:42 2016 No.8491147

>>8490518
I may as well take advantage, these threads truly are usually shit. I won't give any defense or background although I'm tempted.

We walked away, passed the gates of solitude. you let my fingers slide along the bumpy bars and led me away from the animals as lost as I. The key men, long gone, had left the foyers open to the deadened breeze. Ivied nests now jungles roamed by imposters. First the elephants died with their soft winged ears and useless broom tails because they knew too much. And then the cats and then the snakes. And by the time the undentable flies had dropped, you had covered my eyes and kissed my sobbing lips to give me life. But I had been gone a long time and the world had ended.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 17:25:01 2016 No.8491153

Let me start off this letter saying I don't like you

Scared of you but I will fight you

I stare at the ceiling and think about you

Curiosity killing me, thinking of when ill meet you

You introduced yourself to so many others, mothers, sisters and brothers, children and babies drive me crazy I wonder

Why you love people that love people that do right?

Is it rocket science to you or is it just your type?

One of my biggest fears, is waking up at 4 in the morning and gotta hear you met one of my peers

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 17:25:30 2016 No.8491154 >>8491119 >>8491129 I'm not offended. Thanks for the feedback, interesting reading.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 17:44:22 2016 No.8491197

>>8491147
I like it. Would read more. I might have organised the sentences a little differently, but that's neither here nor there. I'm the last person should be giving sentence composition advice.

Here's a passage of mine:

Clarity and blueness unfolded in the pool as it caught the last of the true light, a thin sunset bled out from its horizon, which might be forever diminishing were it not for our experience assuring us otherwise. A veranda of deep mahogany hung from on high to face a remote inlet nestled in rough cliffs covered with tufts of pink tipped heather. A large structure of heavy glass panelling, a modern and thoroughly subjective vision of rectangles and squares, stood behind, roofed in glossy aquamarine ceramic. The silhouette of Abella was reflected in the tempered glass as she lay outstretched on a deckchair, the forward tilted brim of a beige hat shading her severity. The lightest mist speckled her feet and thighs, evidencing the sea below. Eyes shut and brow strained, she was listening through her own silence to focus on the flocculent pat of the waves far below. These light rhythms occasionally suspended what was otherwise a constant awareness of her wealth, the story of it, which almost bore its own instinct. Its habit was to multiply the means by which it slipped reminders of itself into every conscious thought. It was still there, a steadying hand of callous and spirited entitlement, but it was tamed by the abrupt quiet of the cliffs and the sea, some beast half asleep with its paws limply hanging from between the bars of its cage.

Is there any aspect of writing you would like to discuss? Something that bothers you that another amateur perspective might help clarify?

I'd be happy to read/critique something more substantial if you have it to post.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 18:08:26 2016 No.8491283

>>8491197
I loved this. It was so lazy and thick. I would love to read more. I guess if I'm admitting I'll say that i think I'm probably a relatively good writer but like i said i have zero discipline or education. I'm not sure how to go from just words that i find beautiful to works that might be read by other people. Anyway here's some more. Technically they weren't written together but i found after the fact that they flow into each other. It's somewhat of a continuation of >>8491147

The lazy oceans froze and left the great whales beached on their endless shores. Styrofoam eddies where once waves teased and licked the soft sand, the meakest leftovers of a breathing world. Once, I stamped the glass and cried for the monsters that might exist below. Gasping. And cold. The frosted air was dead. We walked through, across to the monuments of god and men. The city of love where I once had vowed to let you free though you never knew.

We trudged through the museums of beauty where the Rothkos slid from their walls. Where white turned red and orange melted into the muddied floors of ruin. nothing was left, no matter what was there. And I cried.

For a long time you did not move. Nothing in you moved but I couldn't have known the world I had just lost you to. And when you did stand and padded through your maze, I could not follow and I stood still watching you pass

The toilets overflowed and added to the stench and slosh of ground beneath our feet, yet you hung on to hope and grabbed at the idea that this was not the end. but betterness disintegrated in your already dirty hands and cause whispered away before you could hear its feeble gasp, and as you clawed for anything to prove the world could change, your unwashed soul tainted the naive dreams that lazily dangled and died in front of you. and no matter what you tried to build or would try to grow or could hope to change, the floor was still sewage and nothing could be clean again. And i sat, small and alone, in the corner of understanding while you left me behind for nothing.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 18:12:06 2016 No.8491295 >>8491153 http://genius.com/Kendrick-lamar-i-hate-you-lyrics

C.W Smith Fri Sep 9 18:21:58 2016 No.8491324

This ones for you special flake
Though you had scrawny arms
You were quite the brave
And though you not no good
Your anxiety shaked
Follow your heart
Spread your love through your feet

I saw you without eyes but I hear your story
It wasn't you who crossed them shoes no need to be sorry
And this worlds got fingers to point
And they'll point'em at you
But it happens to everyone
No need no worry

Basket case
You've got an idea, one you can't erase
And we're fallen slow
No rush on the race
Sparkle'ds hittin' the dow
Let your fingers trace
Mark your name
On a wall
for
against the paint
Admired they'll read
But they'll scrub it all away
Just abit like water
off the dow' pane

2

Your wierdness comes, from the knowledge in the hallways
To the observant self, you were always
The smiling boy, who stared at the ground
Who knew the day, when this would turn around
So gifted to the brain, you charm with the exellence
Of a boy who never growed, but only intelligence
Find who you are, and you'll be on the way
As just as the Cheshire Cat said
"The path you go, is the path you take"

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 18:52:38 2016 No.8491413

>>8491283
Some great images and powerful sentences. It does read a little unedited, and some ideas would be more powerful if they were reigned in a little.

I loved the first sentence. And I liked the fact that it moves. You often manage to get the balance of details omitted correct, not always, but often.

I hate to say it, but the most noticeable thing is that you could could write better if you read more. No doubt. It would be a worthwhile undertaking because you already have something. Reading even just enough to develop a more sophisticated sense of the superficial elements that go into a sentence would make a vast difference. (I cannot recommend "elements of style" enough. Read it, digest it, and then disregard it if needs be.)

Other than that, the only issues I have are that it gets a little overwrought at points, which can be fine executed properly, so I'm not trying to tell you to change what you write about.

I hope you don't mind me going into detail here, and being fairly critical. I only do so because I think there could be something there.

I'm glad you liked what I wrote, and especially that you appreciated the slowness. That's not intentional, it's how I write. I have a problem, actually, I wish I could move things along faster. Instead I'm sort of stuck trying to figure out how to make slow and over-detailed work.

here's the next passage for you:

Like someone pushing softly against the grain so as not to feel it, she fixated upon anything that signalled the remoteness of her situation. She would stand at the threshold of the veranda’s sliding glass doorway, inching the glass just open and pulling it home softly to close. As she shifted from the interior’s absolute silence to the soft waking sound of the outside, it became apparent on each occasion that after a quarter of an hour or so, the outside could grow quieter, and the sealed house become an airless threat, with a soundless volume. This house had been built as another marker of her class and wealth. People were supposed to talk about it, cynically and behind her back, but impressed. It had come as an oversight when her colleagues asked how it was to sojourn there. Of course she lied that she had been, but not without a twinge of humiliation. It was a lesser person’s lie, nothing to be gained from it that could not be achieved honestly if she had simply done what anyone would do and go. She hadn’t done so because it was not in her nature to take time off. Vacationing seemed a misuse of time. However, it was important that she keep up with the behaviour of her colleagues, to best them in the language of their pleasures, not her own.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 18:55:18 2016 No.8491428

>>8491324
First one read more like song lyrics than a poem to me, unfortunately. Some nice lines. I like "Spread your love through your feet." I wish more of the poem was concise in an idiosyncratic way like this.

Not so keen on the second at all. Sorry.

>>	C.W Smith Fri Sep 9 18:58:45 2016 No.8491440 >>8487964 I liked this a lot, and I barely say that. You should feel proud because this is very original.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 19:03:14 2016 No.8491451 The father's guts stream through seaweed: Blood under foam As the river grows His lifeless seed Caput

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 19:07:21 2016 No.8491466

r8 my blank verse

An Early Morning Drowning
The flooding season came to wash away
A silted body wrought from crumbled earth.
The flooding flooding ground her bones to ground;
It’s all the same, It’s all the same, It’s all
Around the bended oxbow scars. It’s all
Deluged in glassical attempts. It’s all
A fragile lasting mess. Aten can comb
The dunes, that shade, as I will brush your hair
Away to see your whirling eyes. It’s all
Too still. I beg the river crashing down.
I beg it down, as though the wheat will grow
On sandy bank. As though the figs were cursed
Already, burnt by combing hand to ash.
And as your eyes begin to slow their whirl,
The world begin to spin again, again.

>>8491324
the rhyming is hurting your free-verse a lot

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 19:08:37 2016 No.8491471

>>8491451
Ehm. Not quite. Needs to be a little more terse. The little lines need to say more, somehow. I think 'lifeless seed' contradicts 'caput' in an undesirably way. true it would be more straight to say His seed, caput. But it would certainly fit the rest of the poem better.

So basically one of two directions, either plump up the whole poem, make it richer, more allusive. Or keep the very straight faced tone throughout.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 19:13:18 2016 No.8491487 >>8487964 Good. You can improve on it though. I feel that you haven't reached the conclusion of this style just yet.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 19:16:47 2016 No.8491496 >>8491466 Not sure what i think of this. I'm skeptical of the repetition. Some nice images.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 19:25:16 2016 No.8491512

>>8491413
I really appreciate the critique. Actually it you could it would be great if you give examples. This is the first real traction I've had you can go into as much detail as you feel like. I know i overdo it and i never really edit anything. I basically write as fast i can type and then never touch it again. It's not a great way to learn to write well I'm sure.

I can see how you are very slow. I liked the passage but i can't imagine much more melting along at this pace. Also to me this really is a story or essay now, not a singular piece. The first paragraph was just so fat and smooth and now you're getting very regular.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 19:35:06 2016 No.8491522

>>8491512
the best i could do is edit it and then try and give reasoning for my edit, but it would be MY reasoning, you know? So it might destroy your story.

Does that sound good to you?

Yeah, I'm so very very slow, I'm a philosophy student, not lit, you know? So I learned to write by making fine grain distinctions, which are very, very slow.

When I'm waxing lyrical it works better than when I'm going through talking points and more mundane shit. I'm still trying to figure out how to make those parts work better. It's like, the crisis of my writing at the moment.

It's actually an excerpt from a chapter that is intended for a stupidly over ambitious novel. I have about five main characters, and I wrote a little chapter on them each to test them out. This chapter was the first I wrote. Testing out Abella. I have so much story plotted out, probably too much. I never have a shortage of ideas, but I'm not sure I write nicely enough. I want to figure out how to make the action prose, the from here to here prose, more accessible and pleasing. I DONT KNOW HOW.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 19:42:43 2016 No.8491534

>>8491512
Here's another poem I wrote a good while back. Kek Sorry, I'm just enjoying posting really.

Before Tiring

Unsettled and creaking in the upper back
a man would have to clamber back down, thought
to uncover a pivot

The cold air tussled with a dangling Catmint leaf shrunken to ashes
severed in amongst and survived by the nettled others

The blooded faster than the lung caught on
How to catch and stand
to pause the will

Over eyes none come negligible
not enduring stillness
Pushy and shaking infuriate
The molten brow merging the coolant palm

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 19:44:41 2016 No.8491541 >>8491496 thanks, I tend to abuse repetition

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 19:56:22 2016 No.8491572

>>8491522
It's really not much of a story, it would be interesting to see your edit although you really don't need to if you're not in the mood.
Everything you're saying here comes out in your writing. I really don't have any good advice (obviously) i have no idea how to fix your own writings. I guess if it were me, although i would never try to write a novel, i would just allow them to be disjointed if they needed. I'd view the overall effect as a universe with five characters in it (i don't mean you should do that horrific shit where each chapter is someone else though)

>>8491534
I particularly like the second verse and the last line of it. And it is really nice to post and get a response, you can keep them coming. Here's another of my blurbs although I'm afraid they all sound the same and are boring

The trees are blackened against our brightening sky and we roll past their endless branches. Roads and trees and sky and you. And whichever direction we go the world will lift and you and me will still be, if nothing else. Oh Dan, the web of telephone connections lead to everywhere but you're looking at me and I'm looking down and we miss the miles of whispering people that never leave their homes and it's better this way. Once, I roamed the exact same highway far away alone and you were inside me cradling my dying heart and I was running to you and nothing was more pure and every ounce of me that melted down and died was filled with parts of you that swallowed me up. but it was too late wasn't it, when I finally looked up, and you were gone and only we were left

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 20:03:34 2016 No.8491588

>>8491522
here's an example of what I would change. Bear in mind a lot of it is going with my gut, and there's absolute answer to the question of the edit. I'll but my reasoning after each sentence.

Those lazy oceans froze and left the great whales beached on their endless shores.
>Something about calling the oceans "lazy" is hyper-idiosyncratic (if you'll pardon the jargon), as such it 'those' is less anonymous than the definite article, and as such eases the reader into the personal sense of the "lazy" description.
Styrofoam eddies, where once waves teased and licked the soft sand, now meek leftovers of a once breathing world.
>The commas just split the sentence more comfortably for me. I chose to lose the superlative "est" of "meekest" because the sentence is already a wide ranging expression. Basically, toning any unnecessary emphasis down increasing the impact of what is already powerful in your sentences.
Only once, I stamped the glass. I cried for the monsters that might exist below, gasping. Cold.
>Just a gut thing about the sentence structure.I could be off in a different way.
The frosted air was dead, and we walked through it's [adjective] and across to the monuments of god and men.
>I feel like you might need to balance your short static sentences a little more, so I altered this to be longer as an example. It also connects the environment and the people moving through it more clearly, giving a stronger sense of story.
The city of love where I once had vowed to let you free, though you never knew.
>comma felt necessary.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 20:04:35 2016 No.8491590 >>8491588 *there's NO absolute answer

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 20:19:46 2016 No.8491617

>>8491572
I think you're right. Maybe I don't need to learn to write differently, so much as be far more selective. Leave half the thoughts I have, out. I've thought this before, but I haven't been committed enough to practice it.

And yes, unfortunately! Each character has their own chapter. It's not so crude as a one by one thing, like a chapter each. Their stories intersect, but I will be writing in third person deep pov for each of them. When they interact I will privilege one character over the other obviously, and some characters will have far less chapter than others. It's a big undertaking and I have this long complicated story ready for them. Not a big action adventure, but a sort of intricate character study/development. There will be problems to solve, but, you know, literary "existential" problems. Although, I gave them some very genre literature traits. Abella is a diagnosed high functioning sociopath. Sounds pretty tv-showesque, but I trust in the story enough to believe I can make it more than that.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 20:24:58 2016 No.8491626

>>8491572
I agree. The second verse is the good bit, if there is one. Notice that it's the most particular and imagistic line. It's the direction I'm trying to push in with my newer poetry.

Your prose is very romantic, almost apolitcal bleeding heart, but in a good way. if you refine your prose, you'll be someone who can do something that most people fail at. This sort of raw emotionality is the easiest thing to get wrong.

Please take yourself more seriously and get into this. You could be pretty good.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 20:27:55 2016 No.8491634 >>8489712 Anon who wrote that here. I'm much more self aware then you give me credit for if you think there's any irony in that line being used.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 20:28:06 2016 No.8491636

don't know if it's too intrusive to ask, but how do you all get your writing ideas. i've been writing poetry for a few years and have recently completely run out of anything to work with? it's been going on for about three months. i try writing something but it turns out to be completely directionless and crappy so i put it away to try to mess with it later but i never succeed. how to leap over writer's block? i would post some of my poems but i'm not from an english speaking country and translating would be a hassle

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 20:29:27 2016 No.8491642 >>8491634 Not him, but it's still a crappy sounding song buddy. Are you a singer? Sing it to yourself and see what you think.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 20:33:49 2016 No.8491649

>>8491636
1. Reading poetry. If you can't write, you should be reading.

2. Read your old/unfinished poems aloud. Get every possible feel for them that doesn't not come from the writing process itself.

3. Learn technical/formal elements of poetry. Get to grips with meter and form. Even if you write free-verse this will be endlessly helpful to you.

Do any and all of these things and if ideas don't start to flow again, you'll at least be improving your skill for when they do return to you. Although, I doubt that anyone who has a genuine predilection for writing poetry wouldn't be inspired by doing any of those things.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 20:39:46 2016 No.8491661 >>8491634 You think self-awareness redeems these piss poor lyrics?

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 20:39:49 2016 No.8491663

>>8491617
I went fault you for it, it's an interesting perspective when you give each voice it's own podium but it's usually very cheesy. Please god don't name the chapter after them haha. Also, i immediately understood that was where you were going with her character so you're definitely doing something right.

>>8491588
I really appreciate you actually took the time. I liked the how you changed the second verse. This is going to sound so romantic and stupid but it's hard to see the verses changed from flowing thought to something so ordinary sounding. Even though the words are the same they don't look like how i feel which is a ridiculous thing. I think that's my huge problem, i can't figure out my own balance between a conscious stream and something actually worthwhile.

>>8491626
Thank you very much. I'd like to try to really write but I probably won't because I'm a truly lazy person in the way that i have these grand ideas that I'm either naturally gifted or I'll never sit down and do something as tedious as practice. I'm working on that flaw haha

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 20:43:53 2016 No.8491677 >>8491626 Oh also, of course i liked your second verse, you're right it is the next imaginistic and obviously something that i gravitate towards. Do you have more of that style or is this your budding debut

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 20:59:24 2016 No.8491725

>>8491663
nah they won't be. I'm toying with the idea of only naming certain chapters, or not naming them at all.
The chapter I'm working on at the moment is called "The Weakly Left Handed Universe".

Stole it from a science article. I'm not a science buff, but basically Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu figured out that if a God made the universe he/she/it had a slightly dominant left hand.

The chapter is about a guy who manages to seduce a stranger into cheating on her boyfriend (just a kiss and some vaginal fondling :3) while his right hand is tied to a rail behind his back.

I don't know why I detailed all that out for you, but, there it is.

Glad you could pick up on her character.

I feel a little confused. When you say verse you mean line right? Is it meant to be straight up prose or a sort of prose poem? Anyway, I think I understand you. I'm glad you got something out of it.

Thank me by getting to work. Seriously. I hope to see some more from you in the coming weeks. I'm going to save what you posted so i can try and find you again.

I'll tease you out by posting a line (I'll choose a good one don't worry).

Ehm, well. I do have some others, but I don't like them at all. I'm only very recently back to writing poetry.

>>	C.W Smith Fri Sep 9 21:01:27 2016 No.8491730 >>8491466 That's because its not free verse, because it follows a consistent rhyme at most

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 21:07:35 2016 No.8491749 >>8491730 let me rephrase your pieces would work better in free-verse, unless you want to start showing some interesting rhythms.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 21:12:21 2016 No.8491763

>>8491725
That's a great name for a chapter and I'm going to look up the paper.

Yes i meant line.

I hate to burst your very encouraging bubble but i don't think it will play out how you imagine. For one i don't come on /lit/ often enough and also I'm not yet convinced I'll actually do anything. I will try though. Honestly. I guess people like sit down at designated times and try to write? Maybe I'll try that instead of waiting for words to just pop out

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 21:17:06 2016 No.8491774

>>8491763
Ah, I'm a little excitable about these kinds of things. Think nothing of it.

But yeah, if you were to write that's how you would do it. Reading is so essential though. I dunno, maybe try and see if you get bitten. Sometimes a week of doing something that feels like a chore transforms it into something indispensable to your life. I'd be very surprised if (with a little effort) you didn't become addicted to writing.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 21:23:09 2016 No.8491785 >>8491774 Haha it was a very romantical idea. I'm an avid reader (again though not a very well educated one, i went to a tiny private religious school) but i don't know where to start with poetry

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 21:34:48 2016 No.8491814

>>8491785
Ah I see. Good. I knew something was amiss. It didn't seem right that you could turn a phrase without being a reader. You meant poetry specifically, now I see.

A good mind and a poor education is often a fertile mix. Trains the wit.

My mother is a poet, so I sort of have it crammed into me all the time. She writes very very differently from me. I'm not the most voracious reader, not by a long shot. And I spend a lot of time with very difficult philosophical texts. So, I go through periods in which read about as slowly as my prose moves.

Anonymous Fri Sep 9 21:53:40 2016 No.8491854

>>8491785
The Poetry Foundation website is a nice place to read a a little from a variety of poets in order to figure out who to read more seriously.

At the moment I've been reading the poetry of:
John Berger
Michael Ondaatje
Mark Strand
Ted Hughes

I would recommend any of them.

>>	Anonymous Fri Sep 9 22:42:57 2016 No.8491971 >>8491785 READ EVERYTHING OUT LOUD AND POETRY WILL MAKE MORE SENSE MORE QUICKER

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 00:03:36 2016 No.8492117

[Adjective noun contraction verb parenthesis X parenthesis.
Up, up, somewhere and go. Away, then come and do it again.]
Where is the poem? I could have sworn I saw it jump the cliff. (When?)
I do not know. Where will I go? I do not know these premises.

I'll ask around, ask a local maybe.
A brief - a briefing, please yield to me.
Yes? Oh, thank you. You see, I am lost.

TURN AWAY AND CUT ALL LOSS

All I need is a sense of direction.
A finger will do, then I'll make a correction:
Adjusting your path to my taste of heresy.

LEAVE THE TRUTH AND LIVE FOR HEARSAY

It does not even rhyme! Leave me be but blithe.
Then I will

QQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQ
thun-un
doo

falls down in the water
the water
the water
the water
falls down in the water and cannot pick himselfselfself

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 02:32:17 2016 No.8492412 The smell of shit on my finger As I just rubbed my asshole Do we really think we are better Than a rabbit or a mole?

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 09:43:47 2016 No.8492977

>>8491814
That's pretty cool that she is.
>>8491854
I'll definitely check this out. You've been seriously helpful. I'll admit that i was very inspired and (way too ambitiously) started something that i might try to make a (very) short story out of

>>8491971
This actually sounds like its very good advice

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 10:14:14 2016 No.8493035 >>8492977 it is good advice, but for some reason I put it in caps. Reading aloud is the only way you'll ever really get meter.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 11:35:20 2016 No.8493235

LABIATHAN

Hors’ d’oeuvres are the hoarse oeuvres
As the horse devours – the horrorshow
Chattering somnolent elegiac verse
The maleficent hearse of d’pproachment slow

The rain beats round the balustrades
As could not be higher – than the rest –
The highest balustrade reaching plenary night
Which arrests my air to the restless unrest

Of the tone – Scheherazade – your serenade
You – lord of stories – my immolate muse
Now you immolate to the highest estate
As the raised stair of fire beckons your shoes

To the empty stair – unkind debonair
When I languished your chest – I remembered the stare
The silent, pronounced – regality
“I will not be there. Sarabande, mon cher”

Sarabande, sarabande – exquisite one
Your governance of the dead, permeates
Your shoes sink upon the cemetery floor
And the zombii uphold their escalate

To the Danse Macabre – to beauty after death?
Is there beauty after death – the motionless rouge?
The solemn pallor of the Lily Field
Where the beetles squirm like ornament rogues

And in that final field – I waited for you
With my sacraments borne – against my chest
Where the dark horses reigned on the oceanless dust
To the foggiest realm – the nocturnal crest

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 12:41:55 2016 No.8493380

>>8476294
>>8478049

I have problems with OP's poem, but your critique is extremely stupid.

>I'll get through this, but the first line already strikes me as incredibly pretentious (which I think you want as you invoke an image of a tof, right?) and artificially formal. Maybe this is part of the effect, too. I'll continue.
>The struggle in sonnet writing since the Romantics at the latest has been trying to strike a genuine and natural tone and language usage while still conforming to a very contrived a structured form. Keats can do it, though most people's earliest attempts are too formal and consequently come off as wooden and insincere.

So basically - don't be pretentious, don't be artificial, and have a natural style while keeping to construction. Wow - such banalities covered in the air of being the ‘kin to the lover of Romanticism'.

>Lines 3 & 4 have one syllable each too many and the metre is broken in both. The "It'd" already upsets the iambic pentameter established by the first 2 lines, while the "too" of line 4 has to be spoken accented.

Correct, but irrelevant - had the additional weight been of any use. You can clunk words extra to provide unease.

The problem with these lines - the lightness of the first two is weighed off by the third. "Monocle" & "acquainted" are light, and "aeroplane" & "piston", despite having the mechanical air, are light. “ages’ gloaming with its cry” is too heavy, but the “too-enchanting window-pane” is light.

I can see the reasoning behind this – to provide the aural twist (light, light, heavy, light), but it’s dead because there’s too much clunk in the line.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 12:43:00 2016 No.8493383

>>8493380
> What is flooding the gloaming of the ages with its cry? The aeroplane? Modernity? Industry? Whatever it is, the syntax of line 4 strikes me as nonsensical. What is suffering the window pane? Is the cry suffering, as in patiently abiding? How does that work? Or does the window suffer from the cry? There's a play on words between suffering and pane/pain, and maybe a romantic/modern dichotomy developing.

But the whole message is kind of obvious – in fact I’ll even say the whole thing in plainspeak for you: “If to the monocle-wearing gallant of the olden days the aeroplane and piston was profane, then they’d cry throughout the ages would they be able to see our current technological achievement – the computer screen – or, window pane. But it would be madness to call it a windowpane because a computer screen, is opaque. And the opacity is the abode of heinous and horrible vermin things, and all those banal sentiments about not being able to connect properly through a computer screen as well as the death of language from online speak. Anyway, let me quote this ode: “Turning blankly toward the blank page, churning, with desire, stranded in a house on fire… , ‘I abandoned fecund learning, for mere abstraction; a sterile, lustful mire.” You can see the obvious connection between the computer screen and a ‘blank page churning with desire in a house of fire’ – as well as a growing ‘love for abstraction, a sterile lustful mire’. But anyway, let me get to the main point of my poem. It is this. You can’t be saved from it by mere abstinence – only the beautiful gems of verbal poetry kissed upon the lips of angels”.

I don’t get why you’re so puzzled by its contents. Other than the archaisms, it’s bloody obvious.

> Again, there's too much language occurring here, and though it seems like the poem wants to comment on its own wordiness, I don't think it's sharp enough for that. Wode? The hell? Archaisms smack of the self-agrandising amateur. If you plan on intentionally writing archaically, line 6 should begin Th'analogy to accompany the unnatural accenting of opaque. What is the analogy of line 7? I don't feel that it's clear from lines 1-4. Line 8: The wording is not destitute, though the feeling is fake.

Grammatical critique, or pure ‘style critique’ is useless. It ignores the contents of the poem and its effects.

The problem, in fact, is this

“Aboding vermin and the verminous ode,
The wording destitute, the feeling fake.”

‘Aboding’ and ‘ode’ reek of rhyminess for its own rhyminess – but this sentiment is a fucking cliché. Saying that an image of beauty/glamor/mystery actually hides bugs and filthy shit like that, and fakery and whatever is so fucking cliché, even if it’s slightly subversive in the setting of the poem (the computer). There is no turn done to the images.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 12:43:17 2016 No.8493384

All the inevitable realities which I have to face, it seems that the one illuminating light I carry with me like a small fire is my bitterness and cynicism. Without that, what would I be living for? It’s that bitterness and cynicism which reminds me what it is I want, it’s what keeps me from delving into the absolute depths of lostness and hopelessness. It’s been so long, but I remember there was a time where I didn’t know why I was feeling bitter, but I felt that I should feel bitter about something. It’s almost as though I couldn’t help myself from becoming bitter, but at the same time almost willed it. But if bitterness doesn’t stem from feelings of lostness and hopelessness, how would it be the opposite? It’s the reason to live, it keeps you bitter when the world is at odds.

To not be bitter, what would be that much different from not caring? Hopes and dreams and aspirations, these things aren’t merely concepts, they fill up a part of you. Is pain a reverberation from the depths of these unfilled caverns, the sound of hallow echos from these deep chambers? Would being content with nothing simply be to have no aspirations, to truly be detached from the physical world? The consciousness doesn’t run on emptiness, it runs on your deepest emotions, which play out in dreams as a depiction of these inner plays of fears and desires. To end with bitterness, shut it out and ignore it, and instead say “no, I am happy”, is deception. To end with bitterness, to shut it out and say “no, I am through”, is giving up.

To be consciously aware of what stifles feelings of peace, begrudging these stifling factors, is something you can always say belongs to you. If nothing else belongs to you, not your aspirations, not your freedom, you can always begrudge that which stifles you, with just as much power as all the combined factors against you combined. Life, death, justice, society, matter, all of it can be rejected. The freedom of the mind is true freedom, it’s the only true freedom, it’s like a limb. Perhaps that’s why I felt I needed to feel embittered about something, because perhaps what I felt was that I was missing a limb, and perhaps to feel that bitterness, to this very day, is the continued struggle of finding that limb which seems to be missing when there’s despair.

Struggle against despair, bitterness against despair, not despair against peacefulness, not struggle for despair. When I delve into uncertainty, my inner compass will be my bitterness and cynicism.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 12:44:04 2016 No.8493389

>>8493383
> If it is, it's the unsexiest and least sensuous way of describing sex.

Once again, lame critique which basically adds up to – it doesn’t feel nice for me. I can’t wank off to it.

The actual problem is that, OP – this turn narrows your poem. I don’t agree that it’s merely linked to sex, but you can see how the classicist-cocksucking read it narrowly to the idea of porn. That’s because you linked ‘vermin’, ‘feeling fake’, ‘house on fire’, ’churning’, ‘sterile, lustful mire’ – and matched it up to that kind of sentiment. It may not be strictly porn but desire/emotional bondage in general – but these are the most banal ways to talk about something like that.

In other words – the only way to better the poem is to enhance lines 6-12

The blankly upon a blank page part is good though.

> Again, a sonnet should have ended at 14.

Agree, but for different reasons. Ending on ‘amethyst’ leaves the strange image, while the last two merely adds an old poetic sentiment about verses and angels kisses.

>The final couplet of Sonnet 129 could serve as a model... end in sensual despair, wanting escape but overcome by your own desires. Instead there's something like a puritanical turn to language and poetry with some promise of further abstraction. Given the terms of the poem, I prefer burning to death in the house on fire. It makes me think of St Jerome, who learned Hebrew to distract his own lustful thoughts and desires, giving us the Vulgate as a result. Or Augustine, who also struggled with both literature and desire in his attempts to know God. These lines dismiss christian virtue as a means of controlling the desires, but instead turn to completely hollow language and images. Where's the consolation there?

Just shut the fuck up

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 12:45:06 2016 No.8493393

>>8493389
>>8475963

My edit completely changes the center of the poem – so it’s less of a strict edit and more of how I would have done it:

Sonnet: An Evening Online

If a monocle acquainted to the eye –
Had seen aeronaut and piston as profane
It would flood the aged gloaming with its cry
To suffer upon – enchanting window pane
And yet to call it window pane were wode
The analogy would fail this opaque lake
Of boredom bored into the bearing ode
A reach was destitute – a feeling fake
But turning blank upon a blank page, churning
An evening boredom’s – mistook the fire’s heat
I ran the ode – abandoned fecund learning
For mere abstraction – desired into flakes
As such would drift the wintry hedonist
Who, by monkish virtues – goes unsaved
Yet – by verses will be Angel kiss’t
And turn these fake words into amethyst

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 13:02:20 2016 No.8493422

>>8475963

For the Schoolboy's Exercise

Better! Starting with an old literary motif – but changing it into an abstract rumination on eternity, sense, whatever.

This part, especially, can be extremely light:

“Outpacing music’s evanescent light.
Think how the amberlaid soprano cleaves
Unto the accompaniment, yet still is heard
Above that mumming beat commanding leaves
To hang and fall in sepiatone, and bird
To sing piano.”

Your music still had holes though – so I’ve done it up for you.

Edit:

Though I count the clock that tells the time
I still may call that hue unto my sight
As shows in earth in spite of burning lime,
Outpacing music’s evanescent light
Of how the amber-laid soprano cleaves
Unto accompaniment – yet, still heard
Above the murmur – beat commanding leaves
To hang & fall in sepiatone. A bird
Will sing piano – and we two lives will make
For never will we live as long – nor so
Inter eternal visions – but forsake
That which perjures fire and/or snow
But life that shines the dark on blazoned Sense
Shall mire me – and send you baptized hence.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 13:13:46 2016 No.8493457

>>8476047
The epigraph is so general that it’s pretentious as hell. Kill it. If you want to focus upon the ‘Think’, there are better ways to do so.

Anyway, otherwise good, though ending lacking (and in a bad way):

(The Sorrow of Literature)

Think – the brawling song in which achieves
The milky violence of a poet’s sigh
A thought that fosters harmony in sieves
And yet the image – ‘milky violence’ – Why?

Because the myth of mournful cadence dips
Beyond the living, loving World that leers
In laboring hands – every page would rip
Would murder – becomes domains of fears

It dips, and now the clamorous Muse achieves
The fully empty heart that cannot sigh
On dead leaves – the fruit of myths are sieves
Whose sighs are brought to silence singing – Why?

Because, the milky violence that forgoes
The World – would hold it in its throes.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 13:32:51 2016 No.8493503

>>8476138
Trying to aim at Supreme Fiction there - but needs to be sharper. The hard part is trying to segue the start into the shift, because it will always feel off when you start lengthening lines.

Edit:

(Commandment in Reverse)

Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
--‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, §IV

The banyan tree was fed
Upon an empty husk;
This poem, though born dead,
Shall smelly up the dusk.

It can’t do any better. Smell –
Though find itself upon the senses low,
Can by the figgy tree do ever well
I won’t presume to use incenses though

Poetic inspiration, I’ve been told,
Is like a heightened epileptic fit:
Pressed tongue. The New assumes; the Old
Expires. And once Heaney said – ‘I’ll dig with it’

Or Beckett snatching grey ideas from foam
Or Joyce engraving Host on sooty face.
The entire enterprise as onyx dome
Astride in emerald – a faery race.

And yet – without that dome and race, the verses – nude
So Stevens pulses metaphysics’ strings;
So pavement square
Comes to be haunted by white legs,
And mind’s first quietude
Burnt by shroudless Personage or concept
These all dare –

Towards actual expression. But Shakespeare knew
That absolute Construction must conceal all things – revealed as One.
Obscurity should take its strangest Self: “Girl of dew –
Put Life, they say, to shame – be verse first gathered ‘neath the Sun”

“From then on, prose will grow to rule the Earth. The dome’s obscuring tint that overwhelms
The necessary hopelessness of nude ideas, dead in the heart – should now Enjamb
Till verse glints its bitter claw. No more the promise made by emerald helms
That house heading into hollow, marching but to Poem’s simple realm.”

No poet claims this as the story of his Fall or his Decline: What is it then?
List, traveler: it is the grave of thought and self-appointed Creativity,
Who hails from indices and stars instead of rebel Bacchus and the Spirits’ din.
From this point on let these my lines flow backward –
And the dangerous Truth my doctrine be.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 13:48:18 2016 No.8493543

>>8481493

Being an image, can’t aim for much – so might as well have better music and be tighter

Edit:

Darling fleet on water – floats on diamond:
The water's dullness sheened in solemn fire.
Uplifting – mixed in rays and golden wind –
A bolt of earthy flight in golden haze;

The stones of creation sit in centre – fanned
By darling birds – circuit momentary
Darling fleet on coloured water rests,
Her eyes survey that speedy curl of men,
And further off she flies, that bolt of earth,
Away from glowing warmth of pond and stone
Away to sunny ardor mixed in hearth
Away from men, bearing cinder bone

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 13:54:13 2016 No.8493559

>>8491466
Repetition like screaming sounds too much like pure shitty confessionalism. Thus - you must have more trust in your pure images

Edit:

The flooding season came to wash away
A silted body wrought from crumbled earth.
The flooding flooding ground her bones to ground;
Around the bended oxbow scars – the pall
Deluged in glassical attempts. Its form
A fragile lasting mess – Aten can comb
The dunes – a shade will brush away your hair
Away, away to see your whirling eyes.
I beg the river crashing down – “too still”
I beg it down, as though the wheat will grow
On sandy bank. As though the figs were cursed
Already, burnt by combing hand to ash.
And as your eyes begin to slow their whirl,
The world begin to spin again, again.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 14:01:22 2016 No.8493571

>>8492117
Too precious without music!

Edit:

Up, up, somewhere and go away.
Up, up, then come and do again.
Where is the poem? I could have sworn it jumped.

I'll ask around – a local maybe ask
A brief - a briefing, please be yield to me.
Yes? Oh, thank you. You see, I am lost.

TURN AWAY AND CUT ALL THE LOSS

All I need is a sense
Of direction.
A finger will do, then I'll make
Correcting:
It does not even rhyme! Leave me but blithe.
Then I will

Q-Q-Q-Q-Q
thun-un
doo

falls down in water
Water down in water
Down the water falls in water
Down, the water
Falls down in the water
Falls

And cannot pick himself himself himself

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 14:09:15 2016 No.8493590

>>8489725

Edit:

The daffodil man – soft coat and tie
With his glorious hands and his eyes to the sky
We cleansed ourselves silly and suckled the lie
Jesus Christ the blacknesssheeps
And jolts of doom – death (& dread)
Poisons dreams and inks my head

And permeates through every thought
Dredges up the crude forgot
Melting glimpse of goodness laid
Beyond my socks – beyond my bed

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 14:13:23 2016 No.8493608

>>8490815

Edit:
Are you a retail park?
Are you granite retail park?
You glimmer fondly in the dark –
Old friend walking towards me,
Your torso is an open fridge.
Where coolness wafts – and Aha
Is in your cavity. I reach
In balaclava and dark clothes,
You stand up and crouch down
With pale light, and chilled drinks
Mannequin – in a window dark

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 14:18:55 2016 No.8493623

"POETRY ITSELF"
"You are not the poet I love most...."
-Marina Tsvetayeva

There is the feeling beside that which is felt,
as if a great artwork beyond consciousness,
whether gazing a church tower, or being sifted through its panes
like alluvial photons. There in a bowl of opening roses,
made majestic by a slice of sight reflecting
the spoke of sun upon a slab where something dead may lay,
is an abstract of insight grown well within your wreath of verse,
brief episode of touch, still opening endlessly and growing,
self-illumined, silent paladins of the muse,
like nothing that ever was:
I know nothing of life.

Yet handfuls of this distanceness flash subtle signals
kissing gently my eyes, my mind which wilders yet prompts
the words which core, then filter, sweetly a stumble of laughter,
themselves into the subject's smile, removed from thought,
as if you, inflaming the gestures of what may occur within,
as if still seemingly supple to God's will,
the many illusions of its breath:
I know nothing of it.

And then this love- of life, of it, of you-
as if I were what you are, so strangely
itself, like you:
I know nothing of you.

Then, as if newly formed and felt,
unexpectedly.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 14:28:40 2016 No.8493657

>>8489551
It’s merely the courtesy of wit to not betray your turn in speed.

Edit:

The countenance
Of an ancient frog
Rises through fog:
His stance
Betrays an elegance.

He'll lead us out
With magic memes
and shining beams.
Of Aryan race,
To KEK I give the highest praise!

Green as unadulterated jade;
Green as verdant vales of Rome
Bigger than the stars of Vega
KEK: the alpha and omega!

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 14:43:00 2016 No.8493701 >>8493608 I'm the guy that gave you a scathing review. You have certainly improved your poem in my eyes.

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 14:45:43 2016 No.8493708 >>8493701 Gave me a review? I only contributed: >>8493235

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 14:46:48 2016 No.8493710

>>8492977
It's okay. I feel a little overshadowed.

No worries! Glad I could be of help, and I do look forward to reading your effort.

And that guy's advice is very good advice indeed. Listening to poetry is another great way of getting into it. There are quite a few nice readings of poetry books online. Go for a walk and listen to a few, it's a privileged exercise that most of history's poets could not participate in.

You were very helpful too, by the by. More helpful than anyone else on this board has been.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 14:54:27 2016 No.8493739

>>8493708
Shit sorry.

I meant: >>8493608

Seeing as I disturbed the waters:

I found the poem inaccessible, so it's difficult to form a strong judgement. However, I will say that the some of the adjectives feel like an afterthought. Like meter makers. And the wordplay doesn't work for me.
I feel the song and dance of the whole thing, but it feels a bit glitz and glam, questionable sincerity and bombastic.

Not terrible, by any means. I'm just not sure you've mastered this style.

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 14:56:16 2016 No.8493748 >>8493739 Wait, now I'm even more confused. Did you not post a version of the "retail park" poem way back in the thread?

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 15:03:55 2016 No.8493768 >>8493748 I'm a different poet who edited that one.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 15:04:56 2016 No.8493771

EDEN

Boys are kicking soccer down the fields
And the world is as large – as soccerball to den
But what gathers the counting of den?

When your monochrome lobs towards –
The brief vernacular of your motion
And skipping fish do keel – what then?

Boy – wherever you are found upon
The fields of clear under the sky
And rocks swim malevolent –

What den? Where will you be found –
Until the wishes of Starfleet build to moon
Where the cornucopia vanishes away

At last – do bring yourself up to me
You – vanishing child – where I once lay
Upon the fields – upon the loosed rock
Up to the brickhouse – and faster, faster – then –

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 15:08:44 2016 No.8493782 >>8493380 >>8493383 >>8493389 I like the way you critique Will you please critique the poem I posted earlier? Hurt me, I can take it. Here: >>8488349 I've posted others, but I'm sure they are worse.

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 15:09:49 2016 No.8493784 >>8493768 Understood. Sorry for the confusion.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 15:13:55 2016 No.8493798

AN IDLE MIND IN TIME

In my workplace – lips collaborate
Although the rips are signify of time
And lips collaborate inside my mind

As sometimes stapleguns do wish for words
To tell the papers – “here’s my marking seen
I loved you once – I bore you down to me”

But printers print their secret sighs to me
And I may read them – but trajectory
Were meant for desks, and thus they never last

Still – love’s allure makes orgy – mockery
As these loves would austere – slightly seem
Like barking dogs to curious rabbit-dreams

To curtain up the lightly stain on thought
Which boredom makes to overwhelm the sense
I totaled up my stationary thoughts
Through couplings of stationery trance

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 15:53:12 2016 No.8493912

>>8493782
Stanza 1:

I was certain I read a poem before on /lit/ that used – curves, sun, desert, spirals, dunes, and madness.

Anyway – the narrative:
Begins with an image of madness (bad sign – confessional),
Changes into desert (not a particularly far subversion from the last image – but let’s see where it leads)
An act of motion but using a combination that invokes various violences (still not too far a subversion from desert & confessional style)
Uses a stopping action, then adds a curling motion (still not far a subversion from the image of madness or pain or whatever)
A strange metaphor that seems to invoke barrier or contract (but still not a far subversion from
An aural sensation mixed with an epiphany of pain (all the confessionalist cues)
And then changing the desert/place of pain – into a place of calm/warmth/comfort (see Sylvia Plath’s Nick and the Candlestick)

Stanza 2:

Motion away (not much of a subversion)
Continuation of motion, to add more motion
Continuation of comfort idea x 2
Aha – an interesting phrase “myth of a mistaken animal” (but, then again, it depends on where you take this)
“A nervous creature” (and merely draws back into that shuddering mad poetic theme)
Talking about emotions (yaaaaaawn)
Slowly narrowing into a two-word ending (yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn)

Stanza 3:

Synthetical idea?
Slightly more abstracted, but still within the realm of like boundary/freedom stuff
Weird image that invokes rawness ala Confessionalists (heart/nymph/dog/barrel)
Returning to boundary/freedom stuff
Ends on another two-word ending (yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn)

Conclusion:

Standard kind of mad-seeming poetry w/o any twist or music. Corrective? Remove repetitious images or lines that build up only images and not ideas. Remove the tone of direct madness and skew back to a cleaner vision. Still, even after the cleanup, it would only be limited to that boundary – that standard kind of poem about existential not-being-able-to-do-ness.

Edit:

Dunes which stretch up and fold to back
In view the spirant waving back and forth
Close-up – curves of desert, but within
A lightless sun warmed and colourless.

Turning away from all – this way or that
The spread of ruffles cool is brilliant white
The hands stream close to meet the cooling grasp
A mistaken creature coming out of myth
A nervous creature that made mess before
From within boredom – lucid fear
And it remembers itself - by then too late

It cannot be turned back to it all
The lie is made petty by the face
The heaving, rising, falling that betrays
Forever in an expanding world beyond
Crawling out to touch and take itself
The heartless lies beside the dog in chest
A centerpiece placed in orderly,
The birth of principle enters well-behaved
Freedom’s claim that strains the visitor
Producing me to sit back – only look

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 15:57:07 2016 No.8493924

>>8493912
It's actually about watching a girl masturbate. The digit splits the padded cell. Seeing as you spiraled off in what to me is the wrong direction from line one, I'm not sure how seriously to take the rest of your critique.

Thanks anyway.

Which is yours?

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 15:59:29 2016 No.8493927 >>8493924 Why do you fill the poem with "-". It's kind of ugly. I feel like I'm watching the guess the phrase section of wheel of fortune.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 16:01:58 2016 No.8493938

>>8493927
Personal rhythm. Slightly longer than a comma, and based off Dickinson. With the dash you can cut off certain things and leave lingering:

e.g.

Producing me to sit back – only look
Producing me to sit back and only look
Producing me to sit back, to only look

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 16:03:32 2016 No.8493943 File: 39 KB, 500x281, image.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>8493912 2/10 would not accept as critique.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 16:06:14 2016 No.8493952

>>8493938
I like the muscularity on the comma though. The dash feels hygienic and surgical. If it's personal it's weird that you edit everyone else's poems to look that way. It suggests you have no ear for an immanent critique of the poem.

Anyone can paint the walls of a room a colour they prefer, fill it with their own personal affects, and call it home. But it's a stretch to call it an improvement unless you're extremely arrogant.

I'm not saying you don't have advice to offer, I'm saying the advice you are offering is poorly designed.

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 16:07:55 2016 No.8493958 >>8493952 *effects >inb4 hung up on tiny errors.

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 16:11:38 2016 No.8493966 >>8493943 Have to agree. He equates diving in to manhandle a poem he didn't even fully understand with critique. I think this guys this he's Ezra Pound.

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 16:11:49 2016 No.8493967 I like apples, k? They are pretty good to eat They fill me up good.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 16:14:23 2016 No.8493977

>>8493952
True, but I also gave an immanent critique of the poem. I merely translated it into my view, but you can see which parts I excised.

>>8493924
If you want to convey that, then you have to push for more movement.

If you want it to be masturbation, then go all the way like Rimbaud - and in that case then sensuality must be manifest.

But that is limiting - your intention is masturbation but your final product has all the standard cues of a lot of other things that have been done in a lot of other places.

If you want to do that and also stick to that theme, you need the kinds of turns that Anne Sexton can create - http://genius.com/Anne-sexton-the-ballad-of-the-lonely-masturbator-annotated

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 16:24:07 2016 No.8494022

>>8493977
You translated it into your view and then complained about your misreading. can you see how that's a bit laughable? I'm not saying you have to see it my way, or that you can't critique. But you are just so damn certain, and there's nothing in what you have said that makes me think I should trust that confidence. Seems more like arrogance.

The masturbation is supposed to be indirect and allusive. It's a lyrically viewing into the the image of the girl, detaching itself from the actuality of the situation. It's watching a girl masturbate from from the unraveling perspective of dissociation. It's not madness, just an abstracted mood. Hence the turning away to the sheets on the bed, being absorbed into the particulars of it, Then it turns a little more metaphysical, cosmic narrative, and then there is a coming back to oneself.

Turning back to the girl is then altered by going through all this.

Anyway dude, I appreciate the advice, I just think you assume the fact that you have advice means you have good advice. Your advice is basically "think like me". I don't want to, I'm afraid. Not to be rude, but I've read your poems.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 16:25:33 2016 No.8494029

Carpe Diem

I stayed within my room
For I had no place to go.
Explored the world by reading
Goethe, Frost, and Thoreau.
But the feelings not the same,
I still feel quite stuck.
Should I abandon all my plans
And attempt to test my luck?
Two questions then arise;
Will it work and is it right?
Work in that I wont go hungry
And have a place to spend the night.
Right in that I owe the ones
Who gave me this bold chance
To live a life we deem successful
Even if by circumstance.
Yet these appear excuses
And I debate if they matter.
For life is short, “carpe diem”,
And theres roses I must gather.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 16:42:00 2016 No.8494093

>>8494022
Okay then, let me critique it based on that 'abstracted mood' - although it's weird to do that kind of argument from intentionality on me given that I, the reader, have no obligation to care about your intentionality.

Let me list the images:
Padded cell
Dunes stretching up back and forth
Flat foot & bullet extremities
Spirant back and forth
A dotted line surrounds
Curves of a desert
Lightless sun
Hidden folds warmed and colorless
Cool ruffles in brilliant white
myth of mistaken animal
Nervous creature makes a mess
Heaving, rising, falling betrayed by the face
Heart rendering nymph lies beside the dog in a barrel
Artefact placed within
Sit back, Unhook, and only look

These are used to describe masturbation then - let's take that interpretation

See Anne Sexton:

Slippery Eye
Finger to Finger
Beat like a Bell
Flowered Spread
I marry the bed
joint overturning, beneath, above
Abundant two on sponge and feather
I am spread out. I crucify.
My little plum
black-eyed rival
The lady of water,
piano at her fingertips
a flute’s speech
knock-kneed broom
bargain dress off the rack
I broke the way a stone breaks.

And final stanza:

The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Witness - variation, force, subversion, power, lyricism.

Aka - I don't care about your intention but one skims around a same general satellite of narrowed imagery linking to desert, and abstract movement - while the other is always changing while still building up the meaning within her own poem.

Of course, you can choose not to write like that - in which case that's okay too. If that level satisfies you.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 16:46:04 2016 No.8494116

>>8494093
Incidentally, here's imagery from Rimbaud's Sonnet to an Asshole:

Dark & puckered like a purple floret
Humbly amid the moss
Moist with love
Gentle floss
Snowy cheeks
Heart of its skirt
Filaments like strings of milk
Cruel wind
Russet marl
Little clots
Suction cup
Musky trough
Tear-filled nest
Ecstatic olive
Tender flute
Tube
Celestial fruit
O womanly Canaan in moistures fenced!

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 16:53:29 2016 No.8494158

>>8493771

Boys are kicking soccer down the fields
>kicking soccer itself? That's forced poetry.
And the world is as large – as soccerball to den
>Den? again, If you want to work with soccer as a conceit of some kind, then balance between using the mundane terminology e.g. "soccerball" and your (fairly unimaginative) transformed goal, "den" needs to be address more carefully. The world is as large? Why not do you need to tell us? To make sure we understood your metaphor? It reads like you were nervous about it yourself. If the space between is AS large as the world it might as well be addressed AS just that, the world. Would have had more punch.
But what gathers the counting of den?
>The verbs mush against one another like semantic porridge.

When your monochrome lobs towards –
>monochrome...dome? all this forced omission doesn't make your poem more direct like you think it does.
The brief vernacular of your motion
>vernacular of something. A lesser addressed cliche at best.
And skipping fish do keel – what then?
>so here come the fish, out of nowhere. Are these flying fish? they skip? You should have used the name of a fish that resembles the motion instead of just grabbing from the washed out and generalized phyla of "fish"

Boy – wherever you are found upon
The fields of clear under the sky
>Would saying clear fields just be to "common tongue" for you? Again with this forced poetic inflection. Justify it with better content or leave it out.
And rocks swim malevolent –
>"Malevolent". A sudden and uncalled for shift to the heavy. The last refuge of the unimaginative.

What den? Where will you be found –
Until the wishes of Starfleet build to moon
Where the cornucopia vanishes away
>I don't even know. Startrek? What is this vanishing cornucopia? It all feels cobbled together.

At last – do bring yourself up to me
>Where is this "at last" coming from? There is no build up in your poem to justify an "at last". There is literally nothing to be resolved.
You – vanishing child – where I once lay
>Those gross dashes are gross. Far too many of them.
Upon the fields – upon the loosed rock
>Which is it?
Up to the brickhouse – and faster, faster – then –
>cannot believe you ended with a dash. It looks like a fetish in your poem.
This is what a critique looks like when you pay no heed to the author of the poem. When you decide that reactionary commentary is the same as critique.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 16:56:39 2016 No.8494172

>>8494093
You can't even follow when I make it explicit for you. They are used to describe someone watching someone else masturbate.

>>8494116
I accept, these are nice. But if your advice is to improve the imagery, you might as well just be saying "write better". I can give myself that advice.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:00:50 2016 No.8494194

>>8494093
Also, I made a point of saying you don't have to read it my way. I'm not pushing an "intentional" argument on you. I'm just saying, you don't know how to criticize it as a poem. You only know how to criticize it as your own opinion on it. You ignore the ambiguity that lies between poet, poem, and reader completely, which could guide you toward a more useful critique. Instead you just shit all over it, unable to tell the difference between not liking it and it being bad.

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:10:40 2016 No.8494243 >>8493912 I'll give you one thing. Having the last two words of the second and third stanza as separate lines was shit. I edited them into the end of the lines, which makes it less emotionally serious, which I like.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:14:31 2016 No.8494262

>>8493798
Is the first bad grammar intentional? It's so explicit. You do so much telling in your poems.

"The rip are signify(really?) time."

Okay. It's just like a statement. All I can do is accept. Okay. That's what they signify. Okay.

See what I mean? It's poetically dead.

This criticism holds generally for the poems you have posted.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:21:20 2016 No.8494291

>>8494158
There's quite a difference though. My critique was based upon subversions - in other words how far the meaning skews from the original while keeping to the original parameters set up.

Which is why I spoke more in motions and general trajectories (even if its about masturbation, there is still the element of madness and motion solely from the satellite of words) than is actual things like grammatical critiques

Your critique, for example, draws out things like 'verbs mushing' or 'monochrome being a forced omission' or 'gross dashes being gross'. Furthermore it addresses things line by line, rather than dealing with the buildup. I do that sometimes, but I also talk about the terms that were set before hand.

If he began with padded cell, and then changed to dune, and then changed to sliding, and spirant and fold back - That's 2 objects indicating either solitude/madness/boundary or a smooth surface - and two motions.

In other words, if it was a poem about masturbation, then it is limited to the realm of smoothness and a few motions for those 3.5 lines. If it is trying to be more than that - the limit is created from the buildup of images, which, even abstractly and ambiguous, are stuck to merely talking about such a limited experience.

Beyond that, in the whole stanza, rising away from that satellite of connotations are 'invention', and maybe 'dotted line' slightly, and the last two lines which switches over to a warmer sense of the word. This is the limit of the poem. An area of poetry well demarcated and exhausted by the Confessionalists. I was merely following the trajectory that was decided by the poem's beginning.

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:23:59 2016 No.8494304 >>8493590 They were two completely different poems (i guess the religiousness of the first and the Jesus oh the second were confusing juxtaposed) but it's a wonder the way you forced them together.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:30:18 2016 No.8494331

>>8493710
Of course, i get it. My dad is an artist by trade and i always get anxious when i show him my paintings

I'm not sure i have useful critique but i think just talking about your style and writing in general probably helps. These threads would be so much better if they were like this more often. Obviously I'm already self conscious about what I've written so i guess I'll have to work on it more first

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:35:22 2016 No.8494351

>>8494262
You're getting there!

The next step is to create a linking statement between that "bad grammar" and the structure of the whole poem.

If the bad grammar is incongruous with the structure - for example if I wrote, as a 3-line poem.

I didn't no like you
But President Obama is going to the White House
And afterwards Donald Trump is running for president

I would have to say: "Well, he had bad grammar, but then he started talking about politics. That is incongruous, but there is no buildup that grants it significant meaning. You can read it as, for example, saying that politics is babyish, or something like that, but even then - it didn't say it in a good way."

In other words, if you can prove that the bad grammar has no bearing on lyricism, or meaning - then I will accept your critique. These are what you have to do.

1. Prove that bad grammar does not fit in the meter or consonance.

2. If it does - prove that this lyricism has zero contribution to the atmosphere of words within the poem or its meanings.

3. If it doesn't fit - prove that the lack of lyricism also contributes no meaning to the poem.

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:36:33 2016 No.8494357 >>8494351 Actually I shouldn't use 'zero' - I should say lackluster meaning or contribution.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:38:45 2016 No.8494374

>>8494331
Hey! Good to see you back. I'm just about done arguing with this anon (I'm sure he/she means well) about my poem (which I don't even think is particularly great).

He/she has such a bizarre way of reading it.

Talking about you>>8494291 dude.

I've taken some bits of advice from what you've said. Thanks. I've had enough.

Your dad's an artist? You paint (excuse it, came naturally) yourself as a little bit more outside the loop than you are. You sound well endowed!

You're right, these threads could seriously do with some more balance. It's not about pandering to poor writing, but the opposite of that is not particularly useful either.

Hope the writing goes well, but most importantly that it "goes" at all. Keep at it cabron.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:44:27 2016 No.8494398

>>8494351
You are such a fucking tof.

So now I'm supposed to take your "intentionality" seriously? What if I read something completely different into your poem (like you did mine) and as such the bad grammar transgresses all three of your "rules" based upon my reading? This is why your whole approach is wrongheaded.

You make the rules in bad faith.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:47:43 2016 No.8494413

>>8494398
No, I was taking your own critique seriously, and I didn't say you had to use my intentionality. I merely said provide a statement which shows that a bad grammar in that line does not provide anything to the whole structure of the poem - based on the other words in the poem.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:51:36 2016 No.8494425

>>8494413
For example: Imagine if my poem was cut into

Although the rips are signify of time
Like barking dogs to curious rabbit-dreams
As sometimes stapleguns do wish for words

An example of an argument would be:

Well the words 'barking dogs' and 'rabbit-dreams' and 'stapleguns' stuck together in such close proximity are kinda whimsical in atmosphere - and that may be why the grammar is bad. But if it was merely whimsical then it wouldn't be new ground because ee cummings has about 1000 of those. Therefore it is bad.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:51:58 2016 No.8494426

>>8494374
He is. He mostly does his carpentry and stain glass now because that actually pays but he's a very naturally talented artist and it's honestly infuriating because it adds to my stubborn idea that i should just ooze with creative talent (my painting is much like my writing if that gives you an idea haha). I'm not sure what you mean though?

I don't even mind the terrible stuff as long as it seems genuine. I try to be encouraging because i think everyone secretly wants to and thinks of themselves as a hidden gem and it makes me sad to think how tarnished that gets

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 17:56:19 2016 No.8494439

>>8494413
What hot steamy garbage that is.

You don't have critique by the horns like you think you do. If you're taking my criticism seriously, and now wish to further deconstruct your poem based on my prompting, go ahead. Glad I could be of help.

I'm not going to play into your condescending bullshit. Giving me step by step on how to critique your own poem. If I don't follow it, you can tacitly discredit me. If I do it, I've decided you are basically right about critique. Absolute toff behaviour.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 18:02:11 2016 No.8494467

>>8494426
My probably with the very aggressive Scathing critique (which I myself am guilty of from time to time) is that it sets up the poem in question in terms of the critic's idea of "poetry", which on an anonymous forum is usually formed in bad faith. I hope that makes sense. I try to critique bearing in mind that I'm not the sovereign of what counts as poetry.

Also, what you said. I have a basic compassion for the curse of preciousness. Although, sometimes being torn down is important, obviously. I just don't think that's what goes on here a lot of the time. It's more like different approaches and schools of thought talk past one another without realising it.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 18:08:23 2016 No.8494485

>>8494426
As for your dad, I can half relate. I enjoy my mother's poetry, but our sense of art and the world in general differ so much that I never feel like the right person to judge her work.

So my conflict is more feeling like I want to do something that's in the family, but somehow feeling utterly disconnected from the actual poems she writes, and her, eh, mode of creativity. We don't understand each other, yet I'm supposed to think there's some sort of transmission of ability there? It's weird.

I'll get one of her recent poems and post it so you can have a read. I think she published one recently in some German magazine.

It's really cool that your dad works with wood. My own dad is really into turning bowls at the moment. I hope we start doing it together more soon.

Stained glass though, I imagine that's a rare skill set. Does he get commissioned often? Is it individual pieces, or would he do the windows for a church? Full of questions here.

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 18:13:58 2016 No.8494509 >>8479740 Hey, that was decent. You could be a poet.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 18:19:29 2016 No.8494535

>>8494485
If love to read it.

I love curiosity don't worry. He designs and builds synagogue interiors (i mentioned before i went to a private school, i grew up strictly orthodox Jewish). He's a natural born artisan through and through its pretty crazy actually but he a poor broken man because he doesn't have a mind for business and can't keep anything else in order either. He never went to school but he's built entire houses from scratch (he built my childhood home which he then lost to my mother when they got divorced) and he's done the interiors of very prestigious synagogues the us and Canada. I should honestly write about him. It would be a tragic tale unfortunately

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 18:29:10 2016 No.8494573

>>8494535
He sounds ripe to become a storied individual. I think it could well be a shame if you didn't write about him. The need to write about something significant always trumps than the need to write, as trite as that reads.

Perhaps I could email you? I have one that she hasn't published that I like a lot, but I wouldn't post something unpublished online. I'm not paranoid or anything, but it's just sort of bad conduct.

just email my "don't give a shit" email address and I'll respond with my real email.

thendudleycame@gmail.com

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 18:34:35 2016 No.8494596

>>8494439
Wait a moment. At the very least I dissected yours in whole, but you only dealt with mine in a single line.

Furthermore, I even edited your poem. Which you disagree with. But merely comparing the parts I picked out would provide you with information that "Oh, he thinks these parts are excessive".

It is true that I may have done it solely - if you think - out of pure condescension in an attempt to showcase myself as 'poet-victor' or whatever like that. But I still provided you with tons more information on my viewpoint than other people who merely give single line critiques, or attack merely a few lines and dismissively throw out the rest of the poem.

I cannot convince you that the words and images you have used in your poem are trite and generic and used elsewhere (and not just the images, which are unessential, since a good poet can use the same images again and again with a different sense each time). That would require a full catalogue of many other poems out there. But, at the very least, comparing my version with your own will tell you "he thinks that these parts have been trod on in the past"

But with my poetry, you have not even given me that information. If you want to destroy it - destroy it fairly, on your own terms. Do as I did and destroy it with the full force of your ego. Edit it. There is no point in whining and accusing me of bad faith if you have not even done at least that work. At the very least, provide me with the same information in return that I have provided you. If you say that my critique is flawed, that means that you understand the nature of a critique better than I do, which means that you are in a better position to edit me than I have done to you. So do so, and stop being a ball of meandering rage.

If you believe, on the other hand, that there are no such things as better or worse positions - then you have zero need for critique in the first place.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 18:38:53 2016 No.8494612

>>8494425
Sorry, friendo. I just can't relate to your sense of critique.

I'd prefer to be civil if possible. Ultimately, I think you damaged rather than improved my poem. I'm not saying my poem was great without your input, just that I think it became a lot worse after being subjected to it.

Here are some useful things I took from our extended back and forth:

You are correct about needing to improve my images. Some images are a little cliched. Dunes. Deserts. I could at least change Dunes. My only issue is trying to figure out how to do that organically,without it being a Frankenstein job. I wrote every line of that poem, one after the other, in a sitting. You know? It came to me. I get the feeling you spend hours twiddling your poems into being in all directions. If this is the case, perhaps I could learn from it.

Secondly, the last two word lines of each stanza were overwrought and a little silly. I meant them to be there, but their placement emphasised them in a silly way.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 18:49:35 2016 No.8494661

>>8494573
I guess my own life never really interested me much actually. I might though.
I completely understand, i wouldn't actually suggest posting it. I really mean no offense at all but I'll think about it? Haha i might just make up a lit email address.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 18:52:16 2016 No.8494672

>>8494596
We're talking past one another.
You have misread me several times on simple thing so it feels useless to continue

see:>>8494612 and take it or leave it.

I don't want to aggressively edit your poem. I don't think that helps. I'm not going to treat it like so much lego to be diddled. If I edit it, all I'm doing is making it more what I would want it to be. And if I don't enjoy the poem in the first place, I don't want it to be anything, so I'll end up sabotaging it, just negating its effect (however poor) wherever I can see a way to do so.This does not equate to a better poem.

I think your approach is wrongheaded. I don't doubt you know a lot (more than me) about poetry, its history, etc. But at some point what you're saying just becomes bad dogma.

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 18:53:17 2016 No.8494678 >>8494661 No offense taken! I get it. Next thing you know I'll be sleep

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 18:54:23 2016 No.8494682 >>8494678 cont. -ing on your couch. Can't be too careful.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 19:01:48 2016 No.8494709

>>8494612
As I said, it isn't about the images. Rilke has used Rose 500 times and he still makes it new each time. It's images that are cohesive and yet new - done through connections.

Actually I wrote the three poems above in about 5 minutes each. And I only just wrote them.

But I will tell you why I edited your poem as such. You argued that I was closing off things to ambiguity. I, on the other hand, write with the opening of ambiguity in mind. In other words I aim to choose images that leave the widest realm of possibility without falling into chaos.

If you had placed 'padded cell' in the first stanza of your poem, you lock it into a certain set of criteria. Abstractly - madness, for one, as well as boundary. These are the over-riding meanings no matter whether you want it to be about a vagina.

All the words used, furthermore, with the repetition of motions and creatures, and boredom, and fear, and longing - point towards a certain type of atmosphere mastered by a writer like Kobo Abe. You went too far in that direction. Either you scale back and focus on the sensuality, if you one to keep the original, or you push that all the way. You can try to maintain both - but that would require a higher amount of variegated imagery so that you can go beyond without making it boring or meandering.

Seeing that limit, I chose to push it all the way. So my poem looks different from all your intentions, but I view it as the best choice I would have done. Focus on scaling the imagery of one aspect over the other. That of the 'boredom & fear & alienation' part. At the very least, the poem will have staked that domain, rather than trying for so much and falling apart through repetitious meandering.

>the heart rendering nymph lies beside the dog in a barrel

Why so much lingering? A simple image that splits apart surreally will do the trick. For example, you can get rid of 'heart-rendering'

>the nymph lies beside the dog in a barrel.

Given that you already pushed that emotional aspect in the words beforehand, like "boredom fascination springs fear etc..." or "intimate ringing of the impenetrable etc..." In other words you chose it because you just wanted quantity, and not quality. You wanted heart-rendering because you wanted to push that message all the way.

It is the same in everywhere else. Mere continuation of things already established. No cohesiveness. Only people who like it would be people who like surrealism and disjunctive imagery, and those people will be happy as long as you throw them any jumble of images. Thus writers like the Decadent movement and poets like Hagiwara have done nothing but build up that sensibility.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 19:13:23 2016 No.8494743

>>8494672
Don't be silly. Even if you 'sabotage' or 'negate' its effect - there is not really a minus sign given that it is a mere layering over. Anything you do can only be addition. You have not come into my room and erased the poetry from my brain after all.

Since you believe that everything is approaches - then show me your approach. Don't play this kind of humility game. You say it is wrong but you are not willing to take the greatest step in showing so - and who is acting in bad faith then?

Poems are not sacred in the sense that idols are sacred.

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 19:31:49 2016 No.8494793

>>8494709
Okay. I understand a lot of this. I confess I have no grip on the connections between the images other than my own intention. It's a difficult skill to develop, but it's good that you pointed it out to me so I can begin to focus on that. It's exciting, even.

>You argued that I was closing off things to ambiguity.
Not sure how to unpack this sentence. My argument was that by swallowing the poem entirely to your absolute interpretation you were critiquing things that weren't there. To my mind.
It's an excellent example of how I need to tone down my the naive pleasure I take in my own lyricism. Or perhaps, even worse, ensure that I am not lazily using an image because I can't figure out how to word it both lyrically and clearly.

If I had written:

>A finger splits the padded humps on either side

would that have been better? Or, more to the point, would that have then led you to seeing the 'dune' imagery 'on either side again' as thighs folded back and then the lower legs bent at the knee coming back down to "flat foot and bullet extremities"?

You have a very strong idea of what a poem must achieve to be a good poem, and I won;t deny you that. But at the risk of sounding like a simpleton. Do you care about how I feel when i read your poem, at all? Do you care about the reaction of the initiated reader? The passing reader, so to speak. Just curious. Because your poems did not do much for me at all, but I wouldn't be averse to the notion that with a little more understanding they might suddenly be illuminated for me. The point I'm making is that I think you're ignoring a whole other side to the reality of poetry. You talk about it like it's a game with rules, and now that you know them all that's left to do is shut up and play.

I'll look up Kobo Abe and have a think about what you have pointed out here.

But those themes are not exactly what I aimed for... One particular issue of mine, as I pointed out earlier in the thread, is that my main area is philosophy.

As such, I'm constantly making fine grain semantic distinctions, you know? What is (to take from the themes you pick up in my poem) boredom? It's not obvious, but the boredom I'm thinking of is Heidegger's boredom (I can ramble on about that if you want clarity). Suffice to say that it's a very specific and finely tuned definition, that cuts against commonsense connotations, etc. I should be more careful and think in terms of themes. More widely. I shouldn't simply leans on philosophical distinctions that themselves rely on tomes to establish. I hope that is understandable to you.

>Focus on scaling the imagery of one aspect over the other. That of the 'boredom & fear & alienation' part. At the very least, the poem will have staked that domain, rather than trying for so much and falling apart through repetitious meandering.

Can you explain this more plainly please?

>the heart rendering nymph lies beside the dog in a barrel

Definitely an improvement.
word limit.more to come

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 19:45:36 2016 No.8494828

>>8494793
So I meant to say:

>the nymph lies beside the dog in a barrel.

is a definite improvement.

The lingering is just creative uncertainty. I'm not claiming to be an expert poet here. But yes, I see what you're pointing out. Duly noted.

I don't follow this idea that I'm pushing the same message over and over, because I do not relate the words together the way you do.

The poem is really a condensed and lyrical narrative. The fear literally only exists in the moment of the line. So, is this a bad thing in poetry? The idea is that gazer gets lost in the white sheets, and the boredom is the beginning of a sort of dissociated fascination that comes to a snap back to the actuality of the present that is a little frightening. It's an unfolding mood. That's the theme. Not the moods themselves. More the movement from one to the next and how when he comes round full circle the same is no longer the same. the masturbating woman is now filtered through the tail end of the gazer's shifting moods.

You say "mere continuation." I guess the value judgement lies in the mere. I'l have to thin about that because whether you know it or not you're clashing against my own sense of value as much as you are my own genuine ineptitude. One I'm willing to change, the other I'm not. There is, of course, some crossover between the two, and sometimes one stupidly defends some trivial particular because it connects to a larger pattern in their creative sensibility. But that's just the way it is.

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 19:51:59 2016 No.8494852 >>8494793 *uninitiated reader

Anonymous Sat Sep 10 20:10:04 2016 No.8494898

>>8494743
Okay. Perhaps tomorrow. I don't have the energy now.

How does the poem read with these changes? I just made it more literal.

A finger splits the padded bumps on either side
and either side again
Skin stretches up and folds back
Sliding down to flat foot and bullet extremities
Paralysed, in view the spirant back and forth
An explicit invention
as a dotted line surrounds
The intimate ringing of the impenetrable that is the pain in all longing
Close-up, the curves are the inverted desert, with a lightless sun within
So the hidden folds are warmed and colourless.

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 22:58:05 2016 No.8495379 >>8488815 >cóncrete The first syllable is already stressed?

>>	Anonymous Sat Sep 10 23:14:04 2016 No.8495431 >>8494029 I liked it but the misuse of the semicolon threw me off, it should be a colon. Other than that pretty solid poem.

Anonymous Sun Sep 11 00:51:08 2016 No.8495717

I once did think the humans good
and at moments dance and sing
but then I wept and understood
that we were no such thing.

For once did flowers spell to me
the freshness of the air
but then would petals withered be
the bulging of despair.

And in death, notes of a song
the first and last that bleak exists
the guiltless fattened human throng
the herd of the abyss.

Their footsteps fold the darkness
I hold the blood of all thoughts followed
Into the maw of cold starkness.
The blade I plunge into my insides hollowed.

Anonymous Sun Sep 11 00:54:25 2016 No.8495724

>>8494898
While it's more literal, I don't really feel any concreteness, nor do I have the desire to create my own, as I would with a poet I respect. "The intimate ringing of the impenetrable that is the pain in all longing" may describe something you feel but it sure as hell doesn't touch me. What's a sense we can all connect to?

Anonymous Sun Sep 11 03:45:33 2016 No.8496077

sunburnt man, on sun strewn sand,
said, to sunborne Anne:
what a day to lie here with you
and plant our toes in grains of silica
and run to and from those ocean tides
and love you until the waves don’t crash
to love you evermore

And sunborne Anne, with voices grand
said, to sunburnt man:
what a day to lie here to you
and speak of the great untruths
and keep you from the world away
and protect you as best I can
to love you evermore

Anonymous Sun Sep 11 14:03:33 2016 No.8497365

>>8495717
>and at moments dance and sing
This line doesn't really make sense, or is really awkward at best. If you change it to "and at moments did..." it's still weird, but at least we know who's dancing.
>That we were no such thing
This is fine in my mind, just the rhythm is a little awkward.

The whole second stanza could be reworked, if I might try my hand at it.
>the flowers once spelled to me
>the freshness of the air
>but now I, in petals withered, see
>the bulging of despair
Last line is still al little weird in my mind, but I'll leave that to you, if you even take those revisions.

>And in death...
The phrasing of this implies a juxtaposition to some sort of life, which you do not have, at least not as explicitly as you need for this kind of line.
Furthermore, you don't go anywhere with the "notes of a song" idea. While I think that the idea of a song spanning from life to death, beginning to end, however you have it, is good, you don't even elaborate a little bit. It just kinda switches to the next part of the stanza.
Going with my previous comment, I don't think the last two lines have a place, at least not as it stands. They're both superior in tone and don't accomplish much.
>their footsteps fold the darkness
is probably my favorite line in your poem. Sadly it doesn't go anywhere, and ends in a stereotypical edgy fashion.

Overall, this is an overdone, and somewhat juvenile style of poem. It contains some decent prose, but that prose suffers from a lack of cohesion; it's a lot of flow-y language in a short space, so you can't get as much from it as you would a longer poem.
Again, some of the ideas are good, and you've got a handle on constructing pleasing lines, but your topic and structure are holding you back a little bit.

>>	Anonymous Sun Sep 11 15:09:22 2016 No.8497509 >>8493571 I thought my original had music.

Anonymous Sun Sep 11 15:14:09 2016 No.8497525

the sky was yellow with a hint of pink
maybe it rained smelling of tangerine
but i can't tell whichever way
it's time to sleep my spoil

(a man sees a tree and walks right past it
a bluebird is perched on a high ball basket
it looks down lordly on the other birds
and the man is safe in loss of his words)

and i'm just too tired to tell it strong
i'll wait my hundred words apiece
vowels will whisk out the buttersky
until it ails red and yields in peace

>>	Anonymous Sun Sep 11 16:07:22 2016 No.8497675 >>8492117 What would you call this style of poem? Is it just stream of consciousness, or something else?

>>	Anonymous Sun Sep 11 16:09:15 2016 No.8497678 >>8497675 >What would you call this style of poem? Lost poetry.

>>	Anonymous Sun Sep 11 17:34:40 2016 No.8497958 >>8488011 Compared soldiers to schoolgirls. Who did that 100 years ago? BOOM

>>	Anonymous Sun Sep 11 17:38:00 2016 No.8497969 >>8487964 Anyone have anything else to say about this?

>>	Anonymous Sun Sep 11 17:39:05 2016 No.8497976 >>8487975 Critique?

Anonymous Sun Sep 11 18:50:59 2016 No.8498192

It was in my formative years that I first found myself madly in love with The Jew. Sitting with my mother on the train, thinking goyim thoughts of trucks or pork or Good American Football, I saw him! There, on that gangly, malnourished frame I saw my first instance of true beauty. The Jewish SCHNOZZOLA! SCHNOZZOLA! SCHNOZZOLA! SCHNOZZOLA! A lovely word for a lovely thing! My lord, even as a child I knew my poor WASP nose could never grow to be so magnificent! So long and thin, almost blade like! This was a schnoz you could practically kill yourself on! But oh! Stop me before I exhaust myself for the nose is but one facet of what enraptured me so by this perfect gentleman. I mentioned his frame but let me mention it again for it is a frame worth mentioning! Growing up Catholic I found myself surrounded by big, strong men, and supple, joyous women. Even at my tender age, and I must not have been older than 8, I was developing nicely into the stocky Christian you know too well, all buzz cuts and almond eyes, beefy arms from football and hot dogs. But here this man defied everything I had known, and did so beautifully. Not an ounce of fat, but no muscle either! I was amazed that he could lug his ample briefcase around, full, as I'm sure it was, of legal documents or the papers of his many patients. But how he moved! Cautiously and gracious, like a deer walking a tightrope. So slow that he had not even passed me by the time the train began its motions, and sent him sprawling to the ground. It is here that I saw the first fault, but no fault of his. Too cautious, too afraid to move, to do anything without triple checking it twice over, but that is the Jewish Way and I think we could all do well to learn by it! So here is this incredible mensch, fallen prone and my feet, and how does he recompose himself? Not like the goys, I assure you! With a nervous chuckle and a small mumble, he pushes himself up and stares right into my skull, grinning widely at his own misfortune. What power in those back eyes! But how much more came forth from that mouth! "Essuze me, young'un," he says in that perfectly lilted Jewish English, and looks quickly up to my mother. "Maaam," he says, as a goat would bleat. He stands quickly, and lands quickly again in a seat opposite us, occupying himself with the advertisements above us, mouthing the words along as he read.

>>	Anonymous Sun Sep 11 18:54:47 2016 No.8498199 >>8498192 Wrote this on the tail end of a long train ride. I share no feelings with what I wrote, but I think it's an interesting character, maybe.

Anonymous Sun Sep 11 18:59:42 2016 No.8498211

Teddy Bear Baby
What have you done
It's only you and me
And that's the real fun

Teddy Bear Baby
So irresistable
Like suger maby
And so kissable

I'm so very very high
In my own special way
I think I'm gonna die
But in life I have to stay

Teddy Bear Baby
How prity nice
Teddy Bear Baby
Think it over twice

Teddy Bear Baby
Useless information
It's only you and me
A real situation

Teddy Bear Baby
Sweet and permissable
At Memphis Tennessee
You are all but touchable

I'm so very very high
In my own special way
I think I'm gonna die
But in life I have to stay

>>	Anonymous Sun Sep 11 23:40:19 2016 No.8499051 >>8498211 This reads like a bad pop song

Anonymous Mon Sep 12 09:19:14 2016 No.8499986 [DELETED]

I wake up
The heart dashes.
With the wall of real it clashes
As bit by bit the dream flashes:
The smile, eyes, lush eyelashes.
The dream I'm supposed to live in crashes
And burns to ashes.

The heart aches.
Running away from past mistakes,
Seeking refuge in the smiles he fakes,
Though he can't ignore the heart as it breaks,
Goes ahead, tries and does whatever it takes -
And then turns and flakes.

Anonymous Mon Sep 12 09:21:00 2016 No.8499991

I wake up

The heart dashes.
With the wall of real it clashes
As bit by bit the dream flashes:
The smile, eyes, lush eyelashes.
The dream I'm supposed to live in crashes
And burns to ashes.

The heart aches.
Running away from past mistakes,
Seeking refuge in the smiles he fakes,
Though he can't ignore the heart as it breaks,
Goes ahead, tries and does whatever it takes -
And then turns and flakes.

Anonymous Mon Sep 12 10:11:17 2016 No.8500093

The smoky summer evening
By high glazed mesces flares
with shadows
It leaves in my heart a burning seal.
But who (on the terrace on the river turns on a lamp ) who
At the Threebridge cross who is who is who lit the
[lamp? - there is
In the room a smell of putrefaction: there
In the room a red plague languishing.
The stars of pearl buttons and evening dresses in velvet :
It flickers the fatuous evening is fatuous in the evening and flickers but there
In the heart of the night there,
Always a red plague languishing.

Anonymous Mon Sep 12 14:04:48 2016 No.8500892
File: 234 KB, 2208x1242, 1470351237779.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Never before had I been faced with the dangers
of peeling a kohlrabi.
The tiny smile growing across your face confessed
your excitment for the stout cabbage.
You danced around the kitchen, taking leaps of faith
at which ingredients might taste best.
You decided upon the finest knife on the highest shelf
and stretched skyward.

My body finally released the wind from my lungs,
as if it no longer had a use for it,
when I saw you standing there
in high arabesque.
You were a photograph, skin of stone
carved from the earth and dirt and
soil where you bathed and grew up,
now in lasting repose.

We never saw the house Nana raised our mothers in,
that stonepile whose walls ached to learn that
eight children weren't enough, nor nine,
nor ten or eleven.
Twelve children slept upon the floor,
kitchen to the door, and never felt warmer
than during the coldest winters when
they felt so closely the love that I'd forgotten.

That summer, there were seventy-nine milking goats,
coarse-haired and cloven, each you cared for,
each trusting in your judgement and grace,
each willing to share your time with me.
You taught me their names
and we watched them graze
the only fields they'd ever know,
content with their eternity in that single, happy acre.

The blade slipped,
cutting my hand and then yours,
our blood separate for a moment,
then coalescing into a single, crimson pool.

Anonymous Mon Sep 12 18:01:04 2016 No.8501634

It's like I've fallen and i can't get up
I'm going hard and i can't let up
So raise up your hands
And lend me your energy
I'm gonna spirit bomb this fucker
And read him his eulogy
We're talking rocket punches
And buster sword lunges
Hot lunches after late mimosa brunches
Getting busy hunting mons with Misty
Short shorts too hot to unsee
Maybe my eggs will get lucky
Play it right and i might get a chancy
Act now and get more than a glance
Don't move and stay limp in your pants
Fuck like you fight and fight like you fuck
Don't get left in the cold like Steven and Buck
Take in back to the barns
Roger that
Get your horse out the stable and let's do some harm
A knight with princely charm
But fucks like a fable
So sound an alarm

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 12 18:24:05 2016 No.8501691 >>8500093 I like that

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 12 20:41:15 2016 No.8502206 this thread is terrible

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 12 21:13:08 2016 No.8502345 >>8502206 three quarters of this thread is terrible, a quarter is pretty decent >>8500892 >kohlrabi my nigga

Anonymous Mon Sep 12 22:27:33 2016 No.8502596

Underneath the hum of new friends being made,
Boy sits alone reading Bible.
He’s just left the parents that taught him to read it,
but he doesn’t stop with the habit,
he knows it is right.
He wants to be the best he can be,
even as the world around him grows so much worse.

When Boy’s son has just left Boy’s home
does Son sit alone reading Bible?
times change,
parents’ long-held beliefs rejected by their children.
what Boy knows to be right
slowly crumbles even in his own mind.
the foundations are smashed
their loss doesn’t topple the church
but the masses evacuate
leaving stained glass windows broken and forgotten
while the new friends in their new buildings
stretch into the sky

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 12 23:54:10 2016 No.8502833 >>8502345 What quarter? Give me some examples.

Anonymous Tue Sep 13 00:38:14 2016 No.8502972

Thoughts on this?

Black hair gracefully descends
Past snowy denim shoulders
Past a farewell smile.

She goes another way
To catch a bus across Lethe
Maroons me on the shore

Still can't think of a good title for it, so any ideas for that would also be appreciated.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 00:39:23 2016 No.8502978 >>8502596 It seemed decent - idk, maybe it's just me but I'd prefer it if the boy had a name, or at least the definite article in front...

Anonymous Tue Sep 13 00:58:06 2016 No.8503031

>>8475963
Wrote this about a friend of mine

Ali tells me
To try and call her every week
At least once
Just to say hello
Just to check up,
Make sure I’m doing alright
I think I’m doing alright
My walk to class is quiet now
I’ve found a path nobody really takes
The place I study is peaceful now
I’ve found a place nobody really wants to be
But I don’t tell her that
I tell her that I go out on the weekends
And that I drink and get into trouble
That i
Am having the time of my life
Like I’m supposed to be
And it makes her happy
The stories I tell make her laugh over the phone
It’s good to hear her laugh
Even over the phone
But sometimes maybe I want to tell her
That I sit in the back of my classes
So I won’t feel their stare on my back
That I walk to class with my eyes down
So I won’t make anyone avoid them
That I smile at every unfamiliar face I see
And they never smile back
How hard is it to smile back?
Maybe I want to tell her all this
But all she could do is worry
And right now she is so happy for me
I want people to feel happy for me
Even when they shouldn’t be
But maybe I want her to know
Maybe I want someone to know
And try
And understand
Because I can’t
Maybe I will tell her
I don’t know how to tell her

Anonymous Tue Sep 13 01:18:36 2016 No.8503075

>>8502972
I like the second stanza a lot more than the first. it just seems a little cliche to start out describing hair, and then add 'gracefully' on top of that

i really like the second stanza tho, particularly the break from the narrative in the last line

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 01:37:02 2016 No.8503119 >>8502978 thanks for the feedback. I was trying to give it a sort of religious feel by writing in that manner. I will probably not name him but I could see "the" working. It's more a style choice than anything else

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 01:45:55 2016 No.8503134 >tfw I can't seem to write anything good when I stick to particular meter How did classic poets do it?

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 01:53:28 2016 No.8503146 >>8503134 they spent more time on it than you do

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 02:17:05 2016 No.8503182 >>8501634 reads like it would be the lyrics to some grainy mixtape

Anonymous Tue Sep 13 02:36:26 2016 No.8503208

Crappy poetry incoming

Why does a man kill another?
When he is nothing but his brother?
Why does a man kill another?
When his own death fills him with fear?

It is in pursuit of his desires
Greed, Power, Money and Lust are the sires
Of his own life, filled with strife
Finding solace only in his knife

The pleasures of life are everything to him
Someone else's misery is nothing to him
Yet he is never content with what he has
What he has can always be surpassed

Of these men are those who are shunned by society
Blasted cretins, villanous murderers who kill delightfully
Who revel in the chaos they leave in their wake
And do not remember the compassion that they forsake.

Of these men are also those who are adored by society
Wonderful heroes, noble souls, champions of humanity
They sing the praises of their heroes, marveling at their piety
Knowing not, in their ignorance, the similarity
Between their heroes, and barbarity.

I'm a girl btw Tue Sep 13 02:59:57 2016 No.8503249

>>8503208
I kill people when I want to, buddy
I like to get down like I like to get bloody
I don't give a shit about mo-ral-i-ty
I'm livin life R, bitch, not PG

You wanna know what I think about you?
Your asshole's loose and your balls are blue
You gotta girlfriend that likes to tie you up and whip you
She locks your cock up and then she tapes up your lips too

So before you act a fool and start whinin and crying
About all the people killing and all they posse dyin
Unzip your pants and take a look at your panties
Know your place, pussy, fore I put you in grannies

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 03:01:08 2016 No.8503250 >>8502345 Okay you were right, there are only two that I like.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 03:02:08 2016 No.8503251 >>8503250 >>8502833 Replied to the wrong person.

Jeff Mangum Died For Your Sins !rAl8Mz2mp2 Tue Sep 13 03:07:59 2016 No.8503259

To see the lamp in glowing phosphor. Vast
Particles shining brightly across the black
And freezing night. Nothing could be right
When our inactive senses, dull and slack,
Refuse to see the splendor of ignored
Delight.

I have entire notebooks of this garbage. I practice my iambic pentameter to better understand reading it more than anything else

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 03:13:52 2016 No.8503267 >>8477230 When will the free verse meme finally die?

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 03:30:18 2016 No.8503288 >>8503249 Not bad, I can tell you wasted quite some time on that.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 04:08:16 2016 No.8503329 >>8503075 Yeah I can see what you mean about the first stanza. Just trying to find some sort of introduction for the second stanza - I'm not sure if it's enough to stand alone cheers, I was proud of the second.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 04:09:40 2016 No.8503332 >>8503119 Oh yeah I see what you mean. For me, it just came off like a sort of Jack Kerouac stream of consciousness ramble (which isn't bad, just not really my thing)

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 04:42:34 2016 No.8503384 >>8499051 It is a song. https://youtube.com/watch?v=XN8ntbFgk90 I don't remember why I posted it.

A Tue Sep 13 04:47:50 2016 No.8503388

Heroes of old rejoice, there are none to usurp your place upon the mantle of destiny,
Today recruits no desire of the heart, only that of the mind, and in this your place is secured.

Homer, you doubt with intrepid doom what is, now, this forlorn world; a place without great deeds.

Lessened hereto, against the need to be so, our humanity lost.

Glimpse into the fog, peer upon the state of what will be and see nothing but base desire reflected on a higher form. If I had then I would, if I could then I shall, the ideas of respectable human nature fall away in the face of unrelenting reality.

Trials seem too harsh, now, to face; the lessons learned fade from memory as quickly as they are taught, what world did we inherit than one of vice and disobedience.

The demons overrun us, and the light of the future dims against the wanton need for ease, for submission to a higher will; nothing remains.

You great poets lived when the world was something to understand; yet you could never envision a world understood: and then we come to the end.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 05:46:40 2016 No.8503449 >>8503182 It's like you knew what i wanted to hear I appreciate the feedback Anything you want me to check out?

REAL POETIC GENIUS HOURS WHO U(...) Tue Sep 13 15:24:16 2016 No.8504781

Two coats hang outside the workshop, glowing cigarettes and snow,
sipping smoke on arid throats. The first recites his latest poem
overwrought and overwrote, his florid tone is faux baroque:
“I’m reaching like an asymptote for meaning in this life,
and hope-” He bites his tongue, prepared to sell it as a joke.
but the second’s smile’s charity. Her lips are flavored red
like maraschino cherries (bulked to save on overhead).
Reassured, the first confesses: “I don’t know what to write next.”
“It’s good so far.” She monotones, to hide his poem’s effect,
taking a pointed drag from her protracted cigarette,
she conjures him, a memory she hoped she could forget
his yearning subpoetic lines, his mawkish silhouettes,
his affections, his affection, his repetitive sestets...
“I’d enjamb and hope” he prattles on “but with which infinitive?
to have, to give, to lose, to take, to love, to live, to die,
to be born again or (how about)
to catch it within a rhyme-”
He misscans the stresses on the stanzas in her eyes.
“Any could work fine” she sighs.
“Or if I left it as it stands?
with just the stem enjambed!”
Self-satisfied, slicing the line with his hamhand,
he titters, sputters, takes a drag, then rubs his swollen glands,
hawks up phlegm, then spits it out, inspects its impact as it lands.
“Well, if I were a minimalist
ha ha
you understand.”

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 15:27:01 2016 No.8504793 y'havta reaD Joyce's Ulysses 20=times

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 19:10:02 2016 No.8505676 Prophecy prophecy It's become too bright to see I can't get it out of me I only speak blasphemy Only see catastrophe Help Please Cuz the end of the tunnel Is more like a funnel Melting Cheese Aged to perfection But not given attention Fuck Me

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 13 23:59:45 2016 No.8506605 I've literally never written poetry, /lit/. How the fug do I write 25 lines of it?

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 14 05:15:40 2016 No.8507101 >>8506605 for me, it was read the Decadent poets, get emo and write shit teenage poetry. Practise made me slightly better

Anonymous Wed Sep 14 09:17:19 2016 No.8507520
File: 103 KB, 698x920, ss+(2016-09-13+at+08.05.53).png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

This isn't really poetry as much as it's just my writing, sharing my thoughts. I'm not really looking for a critique either, as I much as I am just looking for a sharing of ideas, which is a point that I should have probably made the last several times I've posted my work on this website. People often don't really know why I am posting this, but I am actually just looking for a sharing of ideas, if you have any pertaining to the ones that I've made in my writing. I'm sure that there's many here who are much more capable and clear thinking here than I, who can can understand what I am saying perhaps better than even I can.

Anonymous Wed Sep 14 11:48:49 2016 No.8507987

>>8506605
think about why you break lines
think about why you use punctuation
think about why what word has the strongest connotation and history for what you're trying to write.
think about how it will sound out loud.
think about each word's need for the work
think about how the structure lends itself to the work.
think about why you want to write that particular piece

here's one of mine:

For L.

Light through light
like through glass
That lilting beam crosses.
That lilting rhythem of El
Shaddai. That lilting rhy-
me of El Cid’s glory in
lyric. Valencia I’m coming
home. Valencia is my El
Dorado, that golden light.

Let that light lift you
on your horse.

how should I expand on this?

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/lit/ - Literature