You see

[twelveoone]

what you are good at...
Harold Bloom has an interesting series out, humbly titled "Bloom's Major Poets" or something like that. I recommend it highly, despite the fact that all seem to write in the English language. No Du Fu - Maya Angelou (?). Each is a collection of critisms. I just read Poe, I was surprised as to how many poets, critics consider him to be a bad poet (wouldst that I should be as bad). But it is balanced by others that point out some things he excels at and reasons why it works.

I got to thinking about the Do's and Don'ts of poetry and thought I should come up with something. Every Don't I did, about equal between sloppiness and deliberation (and alot of it worked). But this should not imply when someone like Pat Carrington, Senna Jawa, Tzara. et al. say something about poetry, you shouldn't pay attention. Because anything goes, right? Far from it, they have took the time and studied the effects of the tools of poetry. And what the warn about, you should be very wary of, because most of the time it won't work. Everything they say has that value and it is well worth considering.

Probably two questions you should ask yourself when confronted with a poem:
What is it?
What is it doing?

when you begin to come up with answers, you'll have your do's and don'ts, and getting back to Poe, if it does what you want it to do, and remember you have to know what you are doing - then you can damn well write as much "bad" poetry as you want.

 

[bogusagain]

I really don't have the time nowadays to painstakingly edit what I write so I write sort of stream of consciousness stuff which I accept has a lot of crap in it and hope later I will find the time to trawl through it.

However, your comment 'then you can damn well write as much "bad" poetry as you want.' speaks to me. Visual artists have often created bad art as a way of cutting loose from art that has grown tired and trite in an effort to regenerate and renew the visual arts. Quite often when I read poetry and feel I'm rereading the same poem time and again in a different style by a different poet (which is often), I often wonder why poets don't do the same.

I stopped buying and reading poetry for quite awhile because there never seemed to be anything new or exciting being written. I could see all the same old bones propping up the poetry, like a geriatric tied to a zimmerframe.

Hey, I liked your trip to the laundry.

 

[WickedEve]

But this should not imply when someone like Pat Carrington, Senna Jawa, Tzara. et al. say something about poetry, you shouldn't pay attention.
If more poets could get over being offended by him, they would greatly benefit from his knowledge. Hey, I'm an S.J. fan.

Probably two questions you should ask yourself when confronted with a poem:
What is it?
What is it doing?
I don't ask. I poke it. If it jiggles, I read it.

when you begin to come up with answers, you'll have your do's and don'ts, and getting back to Poe, if it does what you want it to do, and remember you have to know what you are doing - then you can damn well write as much "bad" poetry as you want.
I think right now I'd much rather read a gloriously bad poem than one wearing a suit.

smithpeter once gave me a good piece of advice. Some poems need to be turned upside down. He flipped around a few of mine for me. Occasionally, I'll still grab a poem's hem and pull it over its head. Seriously, it works. Makes a more interesting read.

 

[Tzara]

Probably two questions you should ask yourself when confronted with a poem:
What is it?
What is it doing?

I like the question How is it doing it?

I think that when people first start writing poetry, they are often much too much hung up on the emotional aspect of it--that they come to poetry with the idea that blurting out intimacies about one's life is the stuff of poems. Why criticism so upsets them, as criticism of the poem is viewed as being equivalent to criticism of the emotion (i.e., of the poet him/herself). This is probably because of the prominence among poets of my parents' generation with "confessional" style poems (think Berryman, Lowell, Plath, Sexton). Or, perhaps, the Beats and the idea (which I'm not really convinced that many of the actual poets held) that poetry can be spontaneously improvised.

Kind of, if you feel it strongly enough, it makes it poetry.

Which is, I think, crap.

On the other hand, so long as the writer doesn't overvalue what they are doing, why try and force them into work they aren't interested in?

I guess it's a matter of how serious someone is.

If you're serious, or even semi-serious, you need to know something about poetic technique. One way to acquire that is to try and analyze how effects are being created in poems you like.

In my opinion, anyway.

 

[wildsweetone]

Rybka loved ee cummings. ee cummings drove me absolutely nuts. no matter what i picked up of his, i couldn't figure it out. it just seemed like gobbledegook. and then just the other day i picked up a book i have laying around here and let it flip open to whatever page and lo and behold 'my sweet old etcetera' popped out in front of me. i read it thinking it would be the usual confused feeling i get and i was stunned. i actually understood what he said, how he said it.

sometimes people say things and they don't make sense or fit into the mold we'd like their words to fit into at the time; never looking back is our own loss.

 

[Tzara]

However, your comment 'then you can damn well write as much "bad" poetry as you want.' speaks to me. Visual artists have often created bad art as a way of cutting loose from art that has grown tired and trite in an effort to regenerate and renew the visual arts. Quite often when I read poetry and feel I'm rereading the same poem time and again in a different style by a different poet (which is often), I often wonder why poets don't do the same.

I think many of them do.

It's one thing for a painter to switch from, say, a representational style to a non-representational style--that ends up being pretty obvious to even someone untutored in art that they're trying something very different--but other than switching back and forth between free verse and traditional form, it is not so obvious that a poet is doing something else, something different.

There's also the problem that a poet needs to satisfy a publisher or their work won't be seen. And publishers tend to like to print work that is like previous work that has sold. They know how to market it. One of the reasons some authors adopt pseudonyms at times--so they can do something different for a change.

I stopped buying and reading poetry for quite awhile because there never seemed to be anything new or exciting being written. I could see all the same old bones propping up the poetry, like a geriatric tied to a zimmerframe.

Add another entry into my What the hell are the English talking about? dictionary.

 

[Tzara]

Rybka loved ee cummings. ee cummings drove me absolutely nuts. no matter what i picked up of his, i couldn't figure it out. it just seemed like gobbledegook. and then just the other day i picked up a book i have laying around here and let it flip open to whatever page and lo and behold 'my sweet old etcetera' popped out in front of me. i read it thinking it would be the usual confused feeling i get and i was stunned. i actually understood what he said, how he said it.

sometimes people say things and they don't make sense or fit into the mold we'd like their words to fit into at the time; never looking back is our own loss.

Or you just didn't see what they were doing before and now you do.

I'm reading a biography of Anne Sexton and, as a consequence, re-reading some of her poems. Some of them have quite complicated rhyme schemes in them that I had never noticed before, I think because I wasn't expecting it to be there.

 

[wildsweetone]

Or you just didn't see what they were doing before and now you do.

yes. it goes along with what twelveoone was saying. don't completely discount what others say if it has good reasoning. i could easily have never bothered to read that poem, nor to bother picking up any more of cummings' work, but i will now. i may be 'mature' enough to be able to read/understand and learn from him.

I'm reading a biography of Anne Sexton and, as a consequence, re-reading some of her poems. Some of them have quite complicated rhyme schemes in them that I had never noticed before, I think because I wasn't expecting it to be there.

or is it because since playing with rhyme, your eyes have been opened and you've grown enough to be able to understand it?

 

[Tzara]

yes. it goes along with what twelveoone was saying. don't completely discount what others say if it has good reasoning. i could easily have never bothered to read that poem, nor to bother picking up any more of cummings' work, but i will now. i may be 'mature' enough to be able to read/understand and learn from him.

Or because of experience, both in reading poetry and just general life experience, you look at the poem differently. I loved Cummings when I was in high school and first in college and read basically everything he had written. But in all that reading, I did not recognize that something like this

)when what hugs stopping earth than silent is
more silent than more than much more is or
total sun oceaning than any this
tear jumping from each most least eye of star

and without was if minus and shall be
immeasurable happenless unnow
shuts more than open could that every tree
or than all his life more death begins to grow

end's ending then these dolls of joy and grief
these recent memories of future dream
these perhaps who have lost their shadows if
which did not do the losing spectres mine

until out of merely not nothing comes
only one snowflake(and we speak our names​

was a sonnet. In part, that was probably because I couldn't have told you off-hand what a sonnet was, though I'd had classes in Shakespeare and read some of his. A main reason was that I simply didn't read the poem in a way that I saw the structure to it.

or is it because since playing with rhyme, your eyes have been opened and you've grown enough to be able to understand it?

With Sexton, it's basically because the biography talked about some of the poems and when I read them, I knew to look for it. In some of them, the rhyme is kind of haphazard--it's all end-rhymed, but not in a regular way. It's also not metrical verse (or if it is, the meter isn't obvious to me), so that helps mask it as well, as does the enjambment.

But I think the main reason was that the poem looked like free verse, so I assumed it was and didn't listen carefully enough to hear it.

One of the reasons why I think it's important that you read poems out loud, if you really want to experience them. It makes the rhythm and things like alliteration and assonance easier to appreciate.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

One of the reasons why I think it's important that you read poems out loud, if you really want to experience them. It makes the rhythm and things like alliteration and assonance easier to appreciate.

I SO agree.

 

[Tzara]

I SO agree.

Do I detect the nymph-like voice of Virtual Recruitment?

Hey. You should get bogus to read for you, since he's back hanging around. He reads really well.

 

[wildsweetone]

...

But I think the main reason was that the poem looked like free verse, so I assumed it was and didn't listen carefully enough to hear it.

...

that sounds like what i did with cummings. i tried to get his writing to fit in with my expectations.

 

[Tzara]

that sounds like what i did with cummings. i tried to get his writing to fit in with my expectations.

Well, we all come to literature from different places and experiences. At some times in your life, some writers may not fit, for whatever reason. You get older, have other experiences, they may fit very well. Or the other way around, of course.

Emily Brontë is my personal exemplar. The first time I read Wuthering Heights (college, under the influence of a professor I had a crush on) I loved it. Second time, several years later, hated it. Third time, in England, visiting Haworth, loved it. Last time, a couple years ago (also in England), thought it hysterical junk.

So, next time I read it I should like it again, I suppose.

 

[Tzara]

Or you just didn't see what they were doing before and now you do.

I know, sigh, quoting myself. Bear with me.

I've been looking at Robert Lowell's poetry as well, while I'm reading this Anne Sexton bio (Sexton studied with Lowell at Boston University). I would never have seen this before, but reading the opening of the first poem in Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle, "The Exile's Return":

There mounts in squalls a sort of rusty mire,
Not ice, not snow, to leaguer the Hôtel
De Ville, where braced pig-iron dragons grip
The blizzard to their rigor mortis. A bell​

I can see it is written in a kind of loose blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter, with some variations). Why does that matter?

Well, it controls the line length, for one thing. That makes the appearance on the page fairly uniform, it gives the poem a steady rhythm, and it gives the poet a frame on which to erect some kind of structure.

I've never bought into the argument advanced by some poets that poetry can be purely free of structure. Structure, of some kind, I think is what makes it poetry.

But I've been wrong before, and often, and may be wrong about this.

I'm not sure it matters what I think, anyway.

 

[wildsweetone]

...Structure, of some kind, I think is what makes it poetry.

...

in a loose kind of way i think you're right. the more i learn about the writing/editing process, the more i realise i am scaffolding my end result with a kind of structure that gives it stability. and i'm talking only about free verse.

structures don't all have to be set in concrete to work.

 

[Tzara]

in a loose kind of way i think you're right. the more i learn about the writing/editing process, the more i realise i am scaffolding my end result with a kind of structure that gives it stability. and i'm talking only about free verse.

structures don't all have to be set in concrete to work.

No, they don't, of course.

Take me. When I just draft lines, without thinking much about anything, I tend to write four-beat lines: tetrameter. It just seems natural to me.

I can write pentameter, but I have to force myself to do it. The line seems too long. Trimeter is way too short.

So, I think my "natural" rhythm is tetrameter, for whatever reason.

Don't know why, but how I basically want to do my breaks—after four beats.

 

[wildsweetone]

No, they don't, of course.

Take me. When I just draft lines, without thinking much about anything, I tend to write four-beat lines: tetrameter. It just seems natural to me.

I can write pentameter, but I have to force myself to do it. The line seems too long. Trimeter is way too short.

So, I think my "natural" rhythm is tetrameter, for whatever reason.

Don't know why, but how I basically want to do my breaks—after four beats.

thank God for differences *smile* i don't write like you, but i like to read your writing.

AND, i enjoy learning from you.

 

[bogusagain]

I think many of them do.

There's also the problem that a poet needs to satisfy a publisher or their work won't be seen. And publishers tend to like to print work that is like previous work that has sold. They know how to market it.

I was at a poetry reading the other week and one published poet told me something depressing. He said last year there were more books published by the large publishing houses of criticism and poetic theory than there were poetry books. I should have asked him if he meant just in the UK or in the English language as a whole. Stll, its a pretty depressing thought.

 

[bogusagain]

Emily Brontë is my personal exemplar. The first time I read Wuthering Heights (college, under the influence of a professor I had a crush on) I loved it. Second time, several years later, hated it. Third time, in England, visiting Haworth, loved it. Last time, a couple years ago (also in England), thought it hysterical junk.

Emily Bronte is a woman, they have that sort of effect on men.

 

[normal jean]

thank God for differences *smile* i don't write like you, but i like to read your writing.

AND, i enjoy learning from you.

WSO!

hugs

you just stated how I have felt about many poets here. Thank you all for teaching so well, and perhaps, so unintentionally.

 

[annaswirls]

ldst that I should be as bad). But it is balanced by others that point out some things he excels at and reasons why it works.

I got to thinking about the Do's and Don'ts of poetry and thought I should come up with something. Every Don't I did, about equal between sloppiness and deliberation (and alot of it worked)............And what the warn about, you should be very wary of, because most of the time it won't work. Everything they say has that value and it is well worth considering.

Agree. You have to really know what you are doing (or be fortunate with a subconscious talent) to be able to break the "rules" and have it work.

You are one who can do it.

Probably two questions you should ask yourself when confronted with a poem:
What is it?
What is it doing?

Do you mean when you are reading poetry or writing it? I can imagine myself scolding the screen "What is your motivation?" or What is MY motivation. The only thing is, sometimes the poem seems to have it's own motivation... wait, I guess that is your point.... if you are writing a poem that seems to write itself, you should go and ask it "What are you? What do you want?" Would that come in the editing phase? or as you are writing? Before?

 

[Tzara]

I was at a poetry reading the other week and one published poet told me something depressing. He said last year there were more books published by the large publishing houses of criticism and poetic theory than there were poetry books. I should have asked him if he meant just in the UK or in the English language as a whole. Stll, its a pretty depressing thought.

I wouldn't be surprised if that were true in the USA as well. The major publishing houses don't print much poetry--a little, but not much. Small presses and university presses print much of it, even of prominent poets.

But then non-fiction way outsells fiction. There are only relatively few big-name authors of popular fiction. I remember reading that Robert Olen Butler, a well-respected novelist here in the States (Pulitzer Prize winner) normally sold about 3500 copies of a new book (in hardcover). Why almost all writers, novelists and poets, do something else for a living.

I'd bet that selling 3500 copies of a poetry book would be exceptional. I'd be surprised, actually, if even the print run was that big.

 

[annaswirls]

Emily Bronte is a woman, they have that sort of effect on men.

hahah! You are so right

I love you
I hate you
You are my miracle
You are a psycho!

With a little luck, you find someone who sticks with you through it all.

and besides, with the attention span of most men, we know we had better change it up (sweetness, aloof, sultry, bitch lather rinse repeat) or boredom will set in.

Wonder which came first? The male attention span or the female personality fluxuations?

 

[bogusagain]

I love you
I hate you
You are my miracle
You are a psycho!

Have you been listening into my pillow talk?

As the old cliche says, women, can't live wi' em, can't live wi'out 'em.

 

[annaswirls]

Have you been listening into my pillow talk?

Yes I have. Now move over you two, make room.