Level three please

Repost

Poetry -Marianne Moore
I, too, dislike it.
Reading, it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

"You will never sell more than five hundred copies, as your work demands mental attention."-Ezra Pound



What is it? We all argued that one, no consensus arrived at. Let's try looking at what it's supposed to do. Avoiding all the metaphysical trappings, and lofty ideals that poets like to assign to their profession, let me toss two words to you: Provoke and Induce. At a point the meanings converge, but they are not the same. It should provoke you to some thought, provoke (or induce) you to finish, etc.; but what else is it supposed to induce? Good poetry should induce in some combination thereof an image, a feeling, and a spark to creativity. Better poetry just produces more of it. If it doesn't do it in some degree, I question whether it is poetry.

For new writers the short poem is not a safe area of operations.
Most of the tools available to you in writing a longer poem, will not work properly in a shorter one. Story development is out, completely There is no room for mistakes, no forgiveness, everything is out in the open,so you must produce something extraordinary. On the other it is easier to walk away from three lines than 30.

Poetry in my eye comprises, what I sometimes pejoratively call (song x dance) x (other stuff-cancellations). Song in this instance being merely the surface story. Dance is rhythm Other stuff...well, don't worry about it now, we're just going to pull out three of them.

Ambiguity, there are different types, for here the main example will be one word, used for more than one purpose. The main word is "change"
Juxtaposition the act of positioning close together (or side by side);Juxtaposition (literary), synonymous with contrast, two objects or texts that oppose one another; see also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_juxtaposition
Metaphor is merely saying something is something else.


We all have our litmus tests for poetry. What this next gem may just be a litmus test for how well you will do with poetry. Get rid of all your assumptions till this exercise is over. Focus on juxtaposition (2 types) and ambiguity, consider a pun as ambiguity also.

Click here,
only looking for 10 seconds. Close. Did you see it?
Click here,
only looking for 10 seconds. Close. How did he do that?

Go back and look at it, how many different things can you come up with, remember even if it is not there it counts, poetry should be a spark... did you come up with three. More should come. Close it up.

I'm reposting this, this came from a person who had one of the best definitions of the difference between prose and poetry. It was almost poetical. Of course using poetry to define poetry is absurd. So in the spirit of the absurd, I'll offer mine, poetry must have a least three operating systems going.

Who wrote this, let's just say some one, that if I would define the relationship, charitably I would say strained. Realistically, I would say we live one the same planet. Life is absurd. And then we move on.

The best learning experience for me was seeing what some of the writers here were doing.
So far four writers, all four have broke up the straight linear write. Neo does it with a nice twist at the end. Desejo frames one story inside the other. What Tzara does is quite remarkable, an almost nothing story, that branches off into a memory (wish?), it is when you do a trance back and realize what is being brought off the page, well that I would consider revolutionary. Senna does not have a linear story at all, if you read it though, your reaction would be "what happened?" He forces you to go back, and if you're smart, go back again. What kills poetry is something that is not interesting, these people don't.

All four have different styles, I can almost guarantee that if you read what they have done ( i did the legwork) you will learn something, with the last two you might have to change your perception of what poetry is. Again standard plea, if you feel that any of their work will help yours, let 'em know.

In a few days I'll be back and show you how to piss off everybody, 'cause sometime you gotta do that also.

let me sing a little praise about literotica, you do have good poets and poetry here, a wide variety of styles, and where else could you see the limits of poetry reached?
that's right, folks right here. you missed it, i showed it to you, i failed completely.
Two extremes
From a Box of Dreams
byTzara©

and

1995-12-18 miniature
bySenna Jawa©

the third operating system in poetry, is you my dear reader,
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

often you get out, what you put into it
in both cases the writer did his part, everything is in place, Tzara requires you to go off the page which does put a tremendous strain on the ticket (here I'm also using it as a metaphor for the reader), while Senna gives you everything you need, except a linear story.
I applaud both of them, and despite being pissed at Senna (this was a running gag of mine for about 5 years, he did get there first), was glad to see these things.

WilliamButlerYeats said:

Poetry is known for attempts at expressing the inexpressible using the elegance of our language.

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well now, sir willaim, i think Senna and Tzara did quite well, right now Senna appears to be ahead
if any lessons are to be learned here, it's don't take 'em off the page

like I listen to my own advice

beelzebubba said:

level 5 has been breeched

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ah, beelzebubba, lord of flies and deep frying, true, they did it in unorthodox ways, Tzara used off page references and Senna used an illogical space between two blocks of information.

beelzebubba said:

you could do better boss in our language

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don't flatter me, true, most speak english here, they will have to go off the page, it will piss people off

beelzebubba said:

that is what you do best

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point. did you get my red robe back from the cleaners?

next post the most viscous of cycles, the poem never ends, another first for literotica, all that and backwards masking too

from a thin book of eco, serendipities - language and lunacy
bereshit is hebrew, which means you don't know where to begin

Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe backwards masked
eppela natas natas, sounds suspiciously like...

alright back to level four. i'll show you some more neat things your peers are doing, have done

Is this the thread you're wanting to access, twelveoone? Accessed and BUMPED.

champagne1982 said:

Is this the thread you're wanting to access, twelveoone? Accessed and BUMPED.

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yes. thank you. I wonder if I could get one the mods to put neo's thing here?

it's threads like these that both excite and scare me

so much out there to understand at an intellectual level, and yet i write and read on (generally) a far more basic, intuitive one. mostly 3's.

*keeps reading and hoping to gain from the endeavours of 12 and t'others contributing here*

chipbutty said:

it's threads like these that both excite and scare me

so much out there to understand at an intellectual level, and yet i write and read on (generally) a far more basic, intuitive one. mostly 3's.

*keeps reading and hoping to gain from the endeavours of 12 and t'others contributing here*

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in your case, it may be more the reader's fault and what you do may not be easily transferred.
I hope to continue, Demure has done a whole slew of neat things, I just have to go find them.

Contrast in Context

(this is not the one I was looking for, but I thought I would bring it up)

and perhaps a lesson in reading

In baseless, credulous expectancy.

Is a bad line. All abstraction. It looks like what I usually find in new poems, something trying to say something but not, and then fattened for importance. It almost looks like bureaucratese. As a last line it generally would take a poem down a notch or two by any standard applied. demure101 wrote this, this is an atypical line for this person. demure is certainly one of the people more practiced in the craft, but craft is craft and only rising to art when thought is applied.

Before you read it, just look at it for a few seconds, while reading you might notice two words with suffixes, mindless and restless. Can these words be reduced? Restless maybe. The rest of the poem is clean, so clean it would make Orwell proud.

Here is the poem.

This line jars against the rest for a reason, do you see it? Try just reading the last two lines.

Remember -less? Mindless and restless have now become baseless. Now the rhyme scheme, ABBA. The A shows a progression fire/higher dance/romance said/instead and blowing out at be/expectancy, the first always enjambed, the second always end-stopped. Now the "be" is "there" and "expectancy" is kind of hoping the "there" will come back.

This little subtle contrast (and pointers) raises this poem a couple notches in my opinion. This is what Poetry is all about, This also show a high degree of poetical organization.

A superb piece, marred possibly by a few little things.
wild abandon, dark...restless, switching the two words would give you a better read, better still, something new.

mindless of the smoke...we’d fear that we might choke; logic disconnect, you need a time signature here: UNTIL

credulous is perhaps a stretch, you've covered that with baseless. This is a weak redundancy, I would have considered incredulous, it is an obvious redundant and a contrast to expectancy, while lessing the subtle effect, it fattens the bad line to the point of absurdity.
i.e Baseless. Incredulous expectancy. (you might also want to consider fifteen exclamation points also) line before would also be end-stopped. I did not scan this (not my forte)what I offered seems to be an accepable change. This last bit is tricky, I am not suggesting, because it could go either way. It is a consideration, and an offering as an example of good writers often have to think about.

The first three should have been picked up and questioned by either you, or your fans.

Again, if you agree with my assessment, give demure101 the deserved 5, disagree or find something else, comment either here or there, but please limit comments to specifics on the poem.
The purpose of this thread is to highlight some of the neat things your peers are doing and hopefully learning something we can all grab and use.

In baseless, credulous expectancy.
why is line so important in contrast
It shows by emulation, what is lost, by telling you....

nothing

I refered to Orwell in the above here is the link:

Politics and the English Language

Damn Birds

Poetry must induce; poetry must have something behind...? This one was way out in front.

This one is personal, not because of the subject matter but for an effect that hit me. Sometimes after reading a poem an afterimage appears. I had read this and while thinking of something witty (or at least semi-witty) for a comment, I realized a bird had propped up and screeched at me, one of those rare WTF? moments I love so well.

Here is the Poem:
Chagall's Bride
byAngeline©

Here is the passage:

Crows glide up from the earth
and speak from empty eyes.
Perhaps they see angels.
I do not.

First an unusual dilemma is set up in the first line
Crows glide up from the earth
Crows and earth would be stressed, what about the rest of the line? There has to be at least a third stress, what is it? Four unstressed words are would be very difficult in English.

Next a long vowel pattern is there.
I, E, E, I, E, I

the word "Speak"

No wonder the bird "screeched".
This one was personal, prompting me to further inquiry into the role of the long vowel in poetry, the dilemma of stress, and the fact that words that have a long E and certain constant sounds sc, ch, hard K, always demand attention.

I posted this once before, but my thinking was not complete.

This one had a huge role in my thinking about poetry. One of those turning points?

plus how can you not love a poem with "Zombie Louts" c'mon, 5 all the way baby

but my thinking is not complete...

Crows glide up from the earth
think about this line, crows don't glide up, they are not particularly good gliders airboure, they glide down, so how is this line read? what is this up? Where does it belong? My feeling is it is a subtle mental trick for the reader. This would be what it would look like in a 2-dimensional static representation. i.e. a painting, she is emulating.
Crows glide up // from the earth - technically wrong

Crows glide // up from the earth - my feeling is that is what is intended


Crows glide // up from // the earth - which even, without that much of a stretch could even be iambic

Crows glide up from the earth - cumbersome?

say this slowly, slight emphasis on the long vowels

Crows glide up from the earth
and speak from empty eyes.
Perhaps they see angels.
I do not.

these lines pop, here is a passage I found regarding one of Chagall's brides

The second peculiarity of La Mariée compared to the majority of other Chagall paintings is the choice of colors. The young woman is dressed in a red dress lively, with a virginal white veil draped over her head, while the background is a mix of fresh and soft blue and gray. This effect allows the image of the woman to jump off the canvas and really attract attention.

interesting, superb emulation of Chagall's effect.

I realize I have been cold and mechanical, which takes away from the humanity and humour in each of the above poems, but what the poets bring in from personal experience is not often transferable to you as another writer.

but Angeline's passage reminds me also of this, but I do not have the address of the post


Gerherd Scholem,
‘Gruss vom Angelus’

Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
Ich kehrte gern zurück,
Denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
Ich hätte wenig Glück.

My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back.
If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.


A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel

looking as though he is about to move away

from something he is fixedly contemplating.

His eyes are staring, his mouth hangs open, his wings are spread.

This is how the angel of history must look.

His face is turned toward the past.

Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe,

which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage

hurling it before his feet.

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,

and make whole what has been smashed.

But a storm is blowing from Paradise;

it has got caught in his wings with such violence

the angel can no longer close them.

This storm irresistibly propels him

into the future to which his back is turned,

while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

This storm is what we call progress.

— Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

I do not think she is familiar with either writer.

singing thin hymns to the night.

is a wonderful example of assonance

but perhaps I am not making myself clear

Poetry is more of an associative process than any other form of writing. A word, what sounds like the word, what else does the word bring to mind. How far back does the association of sound go? Probably further back than man,

Dogs "bark", "yip", "howl", and "growl". Why do you think the only time you are going to get hurt are when they growl? Saying it you are baring your teeth, mirroring a visual action. Other sounds are not that visual but are still a form of mimicry, the hiss and slither of a snake.

Here is a sound pattern:

I, E, E, I, E, I

Say it aloud, say it until the cartoon ballon appears over your head.

Aiiii, Eeeeee, Eeeeee, Aiiiii
Generally represent some form of scream. These are predatory, distressed sounds.
Crows glide up from the earth
and speak from empty eyes.
Perhaps they see angels.
I do not.

The central unit is in the charged sentence, two main senses are represented sound and sight, sight again is reprised in the next sentence.

This would not be typical of a crow sound, which would sound more like caw, but suppose Ang wanted to add a foreshadowing effect, she might use words like caught, call, craw, etc.

As it is I see this as an underlay, a sound pattern that adds meaning to the words, I do not think it is representative of any of the standard poetic tool definitions.

Twelvie, a lot of what you've talked about in my poem is unconscious, or subconscious, when I'm writing. But I have much faith as a writer that deep understandings about how to manipulate sound and image (which to me are like the x and y axes of a poem) will come across. I gain that kind of understanding from a lot of reading and thinking about what I do and don't like in what I read and why. The better I become at identifying those things as I read and at being able to explain to myself why they do or don't work, the more they'll influence my own writing.

In Chagall's Bride, I was trying to convey what a particular painting said to me, who that woman in the painting is, and how she might feel about her untethered state (she is, after all, floating in the sky). I think it would be frightening and exhilarating at the same time, so I tried to find words and phrases that would underscore that.

That is usually my thinking when I'm writing: not only what the narrative is (if it's a narrative-type poem), but also what the mood and theme are and what words best convey them. And that's because to me, a poem needs to be more than a story. It should be an experience for the reader. I'm not saying that's what I always achieve, but it's what I'm usually aiming for in a poem.

Thanks for the poem feedback. It is, as you know, always appreciated.

like i said, that was a seminal poem for me, i love it when I get those WTF? moments, in caps with the question mark.

Now a few words about this thread, if pressed I could say 10 good things or 10 bad things about any poem. Eight would be lies and about five would be transparent to anyone that really thought it though. That is not what this thread is about, this thread is about my discoveries in what I have to think about. It may not be right, because part of writing is subconscious, and I can't get in there. It is hoped, that some of it may be usable or at least worthy of some thought.

I have had some confirmation on the efficacy of underlying use of the vowels sounds, by looking at bflagsst's work and certain things chipbuddy said.

onomatopoeia rampant

more on sound

onomatopoeia

L'Histoire du Parc des Buttes Chaumont
bygreenmountaineer©
Mon Gars, this hill, once filled with crossbows,

pointing, king's, hangings, waiting, observing, fanning, thinking, frying, tasting, kings, rings. king's string

maybe
flaunted, Valois feigned, trunk, Valois

What should have been a dead giveaway was present participle fanning, I missed it.

Anytime a good poet (and greenmountaineer is one of the best) does something questionable, question why.

1201, when can it be my turn?

Tristesse2 said:

1201, when can it be my turn?

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You could start your own thread, Tess. I, for one, would be interested on your thoughts about poems, poetry, whatever.

Threads are kind of selfish things, where the OP gets to rant about personal concerns. I have been guilty of this more than often. This is, I think, a good thing.

Threads aren't always rants, of course. Sometimes, even frequently, they are about things that a wider community would be interested in. But they can be very idiosyncratic as well.

I'd guess I'd say embrace the ones that are general concerns and leave the personal obsession ones alone.

Though I'll admit it's sometimes not easy to tell the difference between them.

Tristesse2 said:

1201, when can it be my turn?

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you deserve two, apologies, I do have to work from time to time, I want to stick the Biographer in a separate thread, too complex for here.

And I'm sorry Tzara, do I offend thee? LMAO, thanks bud for the funeral speech last year.
The Object for the most part here, is simple tricks...what to look for...you could do the god damn same, and lordy, lordy,lordy, I invited a comment from you on yours.

twelveoone said:

you deserve two, apologies, I do have to work from time to time, I want to stick the Biographer in a separate thread, too complex for here.

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Please, no apologies called for. My interst was heightened by your intention to un-pick my poem (I can't remember which now) but help yourself. I'm always intrigued by others take on my stuff.

Tristesse2 said:

Please, no apologies called for. My interst was heightened by your intention to un-pick my poem (I can't remember which now) but help yourself. I'm always intrigued by others take on my stuff.

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..
It was 'Erotic Triggers' and I've been waiting to see how that turns out as well

HarryHill said:

..
It was 'Erotic Triggers' and I've been waiting to see how that turns out as well

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Oh lord yes, thank you Harrry, Erogenous Triggers - to my shame. It'll get shredded, quite right too.

HarryHill said:

..
It was 'Erotic Triggers' and I've been waiting to see how that turns out as well

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it was, but in the meantime go here Harry, the comments, the comments are leading the way to an understanding