twelveoone
ground zero
- Joined
- Mar 13, 2004
- Posts
- 5,882
Here is a site
I'm sure I posted it once before...
And like everything else there won't be agreement, from the page.
Self-Knowledge in Poetry
What style should you adopt to most readily express yourself, find an audience, and get the piece published? The current style of literary realism is generally very plain, homely and direct. Will this do?
Literary Realism
It hardly matters what we call it: literary realism, the informal, the contemporary and prosaic. It's the current idiom. If you want to be published widely, to win awards, grants and commissions, then this is the style you'll adopt. It is easily written and digested. It is not burdened by foreign traditions, and enables self-expression to begin immediately. All subjects and genres of poetry are facilitated: meditation, lyricism, social comment, satire and public pronouncement. What more is needed?
Poetry, or at least what many readers consider poetry. Acutely observed, sensibly written, unabashedly direct, and astringently intelligent as many contemporary pieces are, the larger public misses the stillness in the blood that a good line of poetry creates. They miss the excitement, the hallucinatory power, the tightness in the stomach as the words compel attention. The older poetry was no doubt predicable in attack and content, but its few words did re-evoke the great commonplaces of life, those shared values by which a society understands itself. And the older poetry most certainly was not prose: joining together the segmented lines did not create fragmented commentary on private concerns.
That said, if only to distinguish poetry as an art form, what are the characteristics of the style best suited to self knowledge and catharsis? In general, it is:
Short, pithy and personal.
Plainspun, with little artifice, ornament or social nuance.
Can't go wrong there, pithy and little artifice
Built with little of the poet's tool-kit — just lines of approximately the same length, breaks engineered to emphasize the sense or confound expectations, metonymy, a simple sound patterning, structuring to hook the reader's interest and release it on conclusion.
Indistinguishable from prose at times. Informal, even colloquially direct, adopting a conversational diction and rhythm.
Illustrative of an idea or social observation.
Well, there is disagreement about the prose part, but note want he says "Built with little of the poet's tool-kit " , you don't need much, but I will point out he doesn't say "built with none"
2. Win your audience over by bearing their likely response in mind . Read back the work to yourself, and then to imaginary members of your audience. Put yourself in their shoes. Get the tone right, the choice of words, the structure of the piece. Poems must communicate.
Disagree with the word "communicate", that was another thread
5. Engage in a continuous dialogue with your productions. Imagine them being read by others, perhaps people contemptuous of your work. Do they survive?
What my poems, or the people contemptuous...
I would be a little leary of engaging in a continous dialogue...
7. Vary the routine. Take breaks. Type or word-process to give the piece distance. Note the reaction when you revisit a piece a few weeks later, and hold on to that reaction.
Ok, he saves himself, it's always good to walk away
As always Consider with Skepticism
A good site
Really cool advanced stuff here
Even Senna might be interested
Did I see Du Fu?
I glad I find this shit, always good to be reminded, how little I know.
Now if you put ten poets in a room, you have a hundred opinions, 10,000 disagreements, except for one item:
There are tools, use 'em.
It's like "Craftsman", with a lifetime warranty.
I'm sure I posted it once before...
And like everything else there won't be agreement, from the page.
Self-Knowledge in Poetry
What style should you adopt to most readily express yourself, find an audience, and get the piece published? The current style of literary realism is generally very plain, homely and direct. Will this do?
Literary Realism
It hardly matters what we call it: literary realism, the informal, the contemporary and prosaic. It's the current idiom. If you want to be published widely, to win awards, grants and commissions, then this is the style you'll adopt. It is easily written and digested. It is not burdened by foreign traditions, and enables self-expression to begin immediately. All subjects and genres of poetry are facilitated: meditation, lyricism, social comment, satire and public pronouncement. What more is needed?
Poetry, or at least what many readers consider poetry. Acutely observed, sensibly written, unabashedly direct, and astringently intelligent as many contemporary pieces are, the larger public misses the stillness in the blood that a good line of poetry creates. They miss the excitement, the hallucinatory power, the tightness in the stomach as the words compel attention. The older poetry was no doubt predicable in attack and content, but its few words did re-evoke the great commonplaces of life, those shared values by which a society understands itself. And the older poetry most certainly was not prose: joining together the segmented lines did not create fragmented commentary on private concerns.
That said, if only to distinguish poetry as an art form, what are the characteristics of the style best suited to self knowledge and catharsis? In general, it is:
Short, pithy and personal.
Plainspun, with little artifice, ornament or social nuance.
Can't go wrong there, pithy and little artifice
Built with little of the poet's tool-kit — just lines of approximately the same length, breaks engineered to emphasize the sense or confound expectations, metonymy, a simple sound patterning, structuring to hook the reader's interest and release it on conclusion.
Indistinguishable from prose at times. Informal, even colloquially direct, adopting a conversational diction and rhythm.
Illustrative of an idea or social observation.
Well, there is disagreement about the prose part, but note want he says "Built with little of the poet's tool-kit " , you don't need much, but I will point out he doesn't say "built with none"
2. Win your audience over by bearing their likely response in mind . Read back the work to yourself, and then to imaginary members of your audience. Put yourself in their shoes. Get the tone right, the choice of words, the structure of the piece. Poems must communicate.
Disagree with the word "communicate", that was another thread
5. Engage in a continuous dialogue with your productions. Imagine them being read by others, perhaps people contemptuous of your work. Do they survive?
What my poems, or the people contemptuous...
I would be a little leary of engaging in a continous dialogue...
7. Vary the routine. Take breaks. Type or word-process to give the piece distance. Note the reaction when you revisit a piece a few weeks later, and hold on to that reaction.
Ok, he saves himself, it's always good to walk away
As always Consider with Skepticism
A good site
Really cool advanced stuff here
Even Senna might be interested
Did I see Du Fu?
I glad I find this shit, always good to be reminded, how little I know.
Now if you put ten poets in a room, you have a hundred opinions, 10,000 disagreements, except for one item:
There are tools, use 'em.
It's like "Craftsman", with a lifetime warranty.
I do feel I've learned to look at approaches to writing differently: that I don't just have to leave it to my muse. I sort of knew that already, yet I feel more conscious of poetry construction at the line and even word levels now, and how word types and usages can create effects in a poem. 
