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I Wonder All the Time if I Would Stop Walking at the Lakeshore or Collect Riprap in My Pockets I think I would like to die in an art museum, milling in Toulouse-Lautrecs and Monets, then sitting on a bench to admire a bulbous Rodin and simply falling asleep. Just resting my eyes for a moment. Is this what self-exile is supposed to do? I’d like to at least see some things on the way. The thought of drowning is frightening, I admit. Just walking ‘til I need a long expository nap seems much more pleasant. We always talk about inertia, never moving but expecting.
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Feb 7, 2020 08:40
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Isotopes The frail and lonely halves of lives do ooze with breath out-gassed. The soul, a piece released, so thrives as atoms, first and last. How small these deaths that slip away, but fractions lost forebode a grand decay when parts give way from flesh I have borrowed. Disintegrate – this body dies, returned to reform stars, a consolation sun to rise and cast a light on Mars.
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Feb 7, 2020 20:02
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Fear and Fancy At night while lying in my bed The day’s distractions flown and fled You prance unbidden in my head My Belle Dame Sans, my death Your spindly fingers play a tune That gnaws at me with grating gloom Yet bids me flutter, flit and swoon You sing it with my breath In the gap twixt sleep and wake Your spell on me begins to take Your truth upon me freshly breaks My fate, my future, death Before me all my paths are laid And as I go to bed each day The roads not taken fall and fade To nothing in your hands As I lose the roads forsaken My solace is the paths I’ve taken Perhaps still there when I awaken Down another grain of sand I want to burn your truth and fake it I want to scream I want to break it I’ll run from you but never make it We run together, holding hands When all the roads get too drat much I fantasise I’m in your clutch You’re so close we can almost touch And you’re ready to embrace me I can’t say I understand How you can fill my heart with sand While holding out a tempting hand A hand ready to take me So I might fight till my cessation And I might beg for scant salvation Or I might come in supplication And lean in as you embrace me
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Feb 7, 2020 22:59
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A Tanka Cycles The seed is planted. Roots take hold in fertile ground; Sproutlings soon erupt. Branches form, and blossoms bloom, Then fall for Winter's silence.
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Feb 8, 2020 05:09
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Subs closed.
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Feb 8, 2020 17:03
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Heed this to prevent our begrudging Fast judging is good judging
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Feb 8, 2020 18:33
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Apotropaic Magic Blood of the Lamb smeared above the lintel, Carved Hippopotamus ivory wand, Cylix keeping a watch on the party, An unbroken circle drawn in the sand: So we sleep, give birth, get drunk in the night, Pleading to Death with our terrible art In the hope that he, ashamed or amused, Forgets and discovers a human heart.
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Feb 8, 2020 20:04
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RESULTS Lots of poems I liked, none that I loved. The winner is rickiep00h. Their poem isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly the most original of the lot. The loss goes to Azza Bamboo. Nothing terrible, just obviously low effort. I’ll do crits soon. Everyone who judges needs to crit, by the way. These things live or die on how much individual attention writers feel like they get when they submit.
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Feb 8, 2020 22:24
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Congrats rickiep00h prooooooooooompt
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Feb 8, 2020 23:42
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I'm not mad. I made the verse and when I tried to add to it, it seemed to subtract from it, so I threw it out as is.
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Feb 8, 2020 23:44
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Azza Bamboo posted:I'm not mad. I made the verse and when I tried to add to it, it seemed to subtract from it, so I threw it out as is. This is a healthy attitude I wish I had, and that I need to practice. I see the same people win again and again and it’s like, why can’t I be as good? I should just quit. BUT! I understand that’s not healthy. Getting over the brain worms is tough, though. I think Saucy has an excellent point re; feedback, too. Me throwing poems into the void only to feel lovely and not improve is a bad process. Word battles are supposed to be fun and have a sense of progress! So thanks Saucy for pointing that out. Also Azza, wanna brawl?
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Feb 9, 2020 00:26
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PROMPT Post right on my parted tits, please rose ovals meet pearl tears' pouring release overflowing melting pathways that pass right over my plumpish tummy, pulsating round overwhelming movement pleasant tasting, prime raunchy odour, my person tires, pants, relaxes, offers my "post" too
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Feb 9, 2020 00:29
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sephiRoth IRA posted:
Let's go!
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Feb 9, 2020 00:32
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Some other poor soul give us a prompt and then judge, please? Sorry in advance for the bad words.
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Feb 9, 2020 00:37
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sephiRoth IRA posted:This is a healthy attitude I wish I had, and that I need to practice. I see the same people win again and again and it’s like, why can’t I be as good? For the last four or so years I've played this stupid online collectible card game that I have never spent any money on. When I win, it is because I have superior strategy, which makes me better than my opponent. When I lose, it is because they paid a lot of money to have the best cards, which makes me better my opponent. I hope you can understand what the application might be here.
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Feb 9, 2020 00:46
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On the other hand I have spent a lot of money on poetry books so I should probably be winning every week, but letting other people win is a sign of my magnanimity and it makes me, you guessed it, better than my opponents.
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Feb 9, 2020 00:48
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cda posted:For the last four or so years I've played this stupid online collectible card game that I have never spent any money on. When I win, it is because I have superior strategy, which makes me better than my opponent. When I lose, it is because they paid a lot of money to have the best cards, which makes me better my opponent. I hope you can understand what the application might be here. I’m not saying those people didn’t deserve to win, it’s more akin to “I am trash, will always be trash, into the landfill with me”
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Feb 9, 2020 00:56
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sephiRoth IRA posted:I’m not saying those people didn’t deserve to win, it’s more akin to “I am trash, will always be trash, into the landfill with me” All the greatest artists are tortured souls, so you're just fitting in! I'll judge the brawl. To offset the fairly wrenching prompt we've just had, I want to see pleasant poems about wholesome nature things like trees or brooks. Extra credit if you fit in a pleasant meter such as iambs or anapaests and some sort of rhyming scheme. E: deadline is midnight GMT next Saturday I guess Maugrim fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Feb 9, 2020 |
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Feb 9, 2020 02:17
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Maugrim posted:All the greatest artists are tortured souls, so you're just fitting in!  in
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Feb 9, 2020 02:29
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in I’m gonna pleasant all over this place
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Feb 9, 2020 02:33
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Aw I had one, I just didn't get to my computer til now. I have dishonored my family and dishonored my cow.
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Feb 9, 2020 04:01
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Death Crits Anonymous Amalgam Interpretation: the cycle of the seasons mirrors the cycles of life and death. This is technically good. The imagery makes, the point is clear, and it’s a good example of the form. The problem is that using the seasons as a symbol for the circle of life is the opposite of original, and I can’t see what your version adds to the symbolism. Where’s the new Anonymous Amalgam here? What’s your take on the wheel of death and rejuvenation? Low mid. ArbitraryFairy Interpretation: anxieties of death intrude when we have no waking activities to distract ourselves with. This is pretty good. I like the ideas presented here, I can relate to thoughts of mortality intruding during moments of complete stillness. Your word choice evokes a certain sadness, you make a rhyme that doesn’t sound too sing-songy. Well done. I think this is missing a sense of progression; I don’t think the poem would be changed much by changing the order of the stanzas. There’s some redundancy here—the third and fourth stanzas has no ideas that are not present in the first, for instance. To improve this, you’ll have to kill a darling and pick just one of them. High mid. Sephiroth IRA Interpretation: our physical bodies are returned to the cosmos at death. This may have won had you not tried to convince me “forbode” could rhyme with “borrowed” without making one of them sound weird. I like the contrast between the cosmic grandiosity of your imagery and the lyrical, almost comical rhyme/syllable scheme. You also balance nihilism and hope nicely. The necessary fatalism doesn’t end up being too depressing. High. rickiep00h Interpretation: the narrator wishes to die peacefully and unexpectedly. This is the only poem here where the imagery feels both exacting and completely original. It would be easy to be explicit about your themes, but you wrote something more vivid and elusive than that, and you won for it. Sometimes your line breaks don’t quite feel intentional, like you got to ten syllables and started your next line regardless of whether that worked in the context of the poem. Also, I will die on the hill of pronouncing “admire” with three syllables, and thus your fourth line is eleven syllables. Shoulda disqualified you for free verse. High, obviously Maugrim Interpretation: the narrator tries to explain death to their child, and it’s not registering. I’m not sure what you’re going for with your rhyme and syllable scheme, feels sing-songy in some places and overly clunky in others. Also couldn’t tell whether this was supposed to be sad or funny, and it didn’t achieve the elusive “both.” The progression of the story is good. The last line seems cruel, and doesn’t really add to the themes of the rest of the poem. Low mid. Azza Bamboo Interpretation: unclear Limericks have a bouncy rhythm that lend themselves to comedy, but this feels too serious for the form. I’m not exactly sure what’s going on here, not in a mysterious way but a literal one; it’s incoherent. But at least it’s pleasant to read and hear aloud. Low mid. cda (disqualified) Late poem, short crit. Don’t get what the mythology references are for. I like the second half of the poem that’s a little more forthcoming with your ideas.
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Feb 9, 2020 04:27
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Thanks for the crits!
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Feb 9, 2020 07:24
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rickiep00h posted:Aw I had one, I just didn't get to my computer til now. You can and should still do the main prompt!
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Feb 9, 2020 07:32
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I knew it was a bad rhyme! I spent a solid ten minutes saying that stanza out loud, slowly convincing myself it worked.  Thank you for the crit
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Feb 9, 2020 07:33
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Fair crit, thanks Saucy, no complaints there! What I do object to is that after explicitly forbidding free verse you gave the win to the only submission written in free verse. This is stupid and I want to brawl you for it. Rickiep00h, nobody can steal your prompt! I just stepped up to judge a minor side contest.
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Feb 9, 2020 08:23
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Maugrim posted:Fair crit, thanks Saucy, no complaints there! Every line had ten syllables except, artfully, the last (even if I insist “admire” is three). It isn’t much, but I said it didn’t have to be.
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Feb 9, 2020 15:41
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but r u accepting the brawl
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Feb 9, 2020 18:50
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Saucy_Rodent posted:Also, I will die on the hill of pronouncing “admire” with three syllables, and thus your fourth line is eleven syllables. Shoulda disqualified you for free verse. How many syllables do you think "fire" has? I think it definitely has two, but I can hear "admire" with two or three. For consistency's sake, I agree that it should be three. Saucy_Rodent posted:Late poem, short crit. Don’t get what the mythology references are for. I like the second half of the poem that’s a little more forthcoming with your ideas. Oh poo poo, whoops, I'm sorry. I didn't realize. Thank you for giving a crit at all!
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Feb 9, 2020 19:10
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A lot can depend on accent. In my accent (non-rhotic, close to British RP) I'm more comfortable treating fire as one syllable than two "The fire had fed my furious lust" is 8 syllables (four iambs) to me But I'd be OK reading "the fire made me furious" as eight syllables too if that was required to make sense of a poem's metre. E: personally i would go so far as to say individual syllables are meaningless to poetic form except insofar as they are used to make the feet, which are the true building blocks of metre. I think this is why I don't accept that rickie's poem isn't free verse - breaking the lines into ten syllables doesn't change how it's read, and without those breaks it's (admittedly nice) prose. So my brawl challenge remains open Maugrim fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Feb 9, 2020 |
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Feb 9, 2020 20:33
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In the interest of not being a snooty elitist I'm going going to respond except to say that I don't think we understand poetic formalism (or line breaks!) in remotely the same terms. For my prompt, I'd like to consider genre this time: documentary poetry. Pulling from Joseph Harrington's essay "Docupoetry and Archive Desire": quote:Usually “docupoetry” designates poetry that (1) contains quotations from or reproductions of documents or statements not produced by the poet and (2) relates historical narratives, whether macro or micro, human or natural. Clearly, such writing is part of a long tradition; without even going back to Virgil or Lucretius, one can see that the poems of Pope and Dryden had everything to do with documenting (with a very definite point of view). To put it another way, documentary poetics takes original documents that are traditionally not considered of literary interest--histories, newspaper stories, government records, receipts, all that personal ephemera--and crafts a poem out of it. For a personal example, my thesis advisor, Tony Trigilio, wrote a book of poetry called Historical Diary (referenced in Harrington's essay mentioned above), which quotes and reinterprets Lee Harvey Oswald's diary from his time in Russia. Another example would be Nicole Cooley's The Afflicted Girls, which use as a starting point the judicial records of the Salem Witch Trials. Like, the actual records and testimonies. A more ambitious version of the idea might be Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder, which creates an investigation into her aunt's murder through newspaper stories, police reports, letters, and interviews. It is, I think, a kind of ekphrasis--art directly inspired by other art. What I'm interested in, then, is what is interesting to you. Find a subject you think is worth exposing to poetic consideration. While you don't have to say what it is, or what your sources are, I think it would be interesting to see where you're pulling from, whether in the poem or not. For an example, here's Maggie Nelson from Jane: A Murder: Of Her Blood By her second year of college, her parents told Jane she was no longer welcome in their home. That same year Jane wrote in her journal: Mother, the Christian hypocrite and I, of her blood. Under her influence--how much am I-- and I love her-- at least if I can love at all I do. I'll give a deadline of 11:59 Feb 16 for this, no deadline on signups, just say if you're in or not so I know how many to expect. Form does not matter, write whatever you want in whatever way you want in a way that works as a poem for you.
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Feb 10, 2020 00:46
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Firstly, in. Secondly: I'm going to ask for a bit of an elaboration on this, because it's a completely novel concept to me and I don't want to get this too wrong. I get the feeling it's like you're sat with the book, a pair of scissors and a glue stick trying to arrange a text into poetry. Are we allowed to add any words or is it just that: cutting, pasting, arranging like a collage only with words instead of images?
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Feb 10, 2020 01:04
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rickiep00h posted:In the interest of not being a snooty elitist I'm going going to respond except to say that I don't think we understand poetic formalism (or line breaks!) in remotely the same terms. Cool, I love this poo poo. For my Found Poetry prompt I included a bit from M. NourbeSe Philips' Zong which uses the text of the Gregson v. Gilbert case as its source text. I don't know whether I'd call it ekphrasis though. Ekphrasis is typically, as James Heffernan defines it, "a verbal representation of a visual representation," so it's not art generally, but visual art specifically that ekphrasis represents. Anyway, I'm in.
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Feb 10, 2020 01:42
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In
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Feb 10, 2020 01:48
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Azza Bamboo posted:Firstly, in. You're welcome to add or subtract whatever you want. In the Nelson example, she gives some temporal context. In the Cooley book, she takes on the personas of those she quotes and gives them new internal monologues. In Harrington's poetry, he often attempts to bridge his own impressions into the work. (His book Things Come On is a juxtaposition of the Watergate scandal and his mother's coinciding battle with cancer.) My own experience in it was trying to arrange various bits of things from the early Trump administration--tweets, news commentary, photographs, etc--into something more considered. (Ultimately I think I failed because 1. the reality of the whole thing is absurd to the point I have problems imparting form to it, and 2. I feel like being this close to it right now gives it a legitmacy it doesn't deserve... both of which are issues that were discussed while writing them.) In any case, I approach it a bit like an essay, but, like all poetic n poo poo.
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Feb 10, 2020 01:55
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rickiep00h posted:In the interest of not being a snooty elitist I'm going going to respond except to say that I don't think we understand poetic formalism (or line breaks!) in remotely the same terms. Please do school me, I'm here to learn! PM me if you like. Or don't. In for the prompt. What time zone is the deadline?
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Feb 10, 2020 02:10
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Maugrim posted:Please do school me, I'm here to learn! PM me if you like. Or don't. No don’t PM! This thread would be an appropriate place for discussion. Also in.
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Feb 10, 2020 02:52
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Maugrim posted:Please do school me, I'm here to learn! PM me if you like. Or don't. Central. sephiRoth IRA posted:No don't PM! This thread would be an appropriate place for discussion. Okay so! Everything in the writing of poetry is arbitrary! Several forms have nothing to do with metrical feet. The easy, obvious one is haiku. But pantoum, villanelle, sestina, and several others have nothing to do with meter, and are still formal. Form is a matter of intent, an arbitrary constraint, a means to an end. An abecedarian is just as much a way to make an expression as counting syllables and stresses, and as far as meters are concerned, there are enough "allowed" substitutions in metrical feet to make adherence... arbitrary. Syllabics, therefore, are as important as any other formal consideration. As for line breaks: incredibly lovely English teachers love to tell students that line breaks are unimportant, just read through them! This is hilariously wrong. White space is an organizational/emphatic consideration. My "nice" "prose" wouldn't be near as nice (and indeed wasn't) before being broken into lines and then re-written to conform to the ten syllable count. So what of emphatic consideration? When making a line jump, your brain is automatically going to create a space AND an emphasis on the first syllable/word of the next line. Robert Bly (who I'm not a huge fan of, personally, but a fan of a good many of his friends) called this jump a sort of leaping spark of energy. Metrics and rhyme might pull you through a line, but the breaks are what pull you down the page. A lovely break--and I'll admit to a couple in my submission--is far more noticeable than a good one. My primary undergrad professor was adamant about not ending lines with crap-rear end words like "and" and "of" and poo poo like that, but sometimes that's wrong, too... personally I like the bad breaks in my submission, because the shift in emphasis is in service of the content. I'd probably lose that argument in a workshop, but I don't care. All this is, of course, why I don't particularly enjoy metric forms (and indeed a number of forms in general), because I'm loving bad at them (for starters) and because I'm entirely too impatient to hammer the expression into a pattern without it sounding like absolute unnatural poo poo. There's a quote near the beginning of Richard Hugo's book on writing The Triggering Town--which I highly suggest to literally everyone to read about four times (because that's how long it took me, a particular sort of idiot, to get it)--that goes like this: quote:When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music. If you believe the first, you are making your job very difficult and you are . . . limiting the writing of poems to something done only by the very witty and clever, such as Auden. Anywho. That's, like, the extremely short version of a creative writing minor and MFA in poetry with some very, very specific people as mentors and peers. As with all things on the internet, ymmv.
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Feb 10, 2020 07:49
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A thoughtful post, thank you! I am envious of your MFA. I didn’t discover the joy of poetry until recently and my days of going back to school (without squandering the nice job and degree I already have) are behind me. The idea of fitting to the music is something I’ve struggled with, as most of my writing to date has been scientific.
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Feb 10, 2020 08:46
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sephiRoth IRA posted:I am envious of your MFA. Don't be. I was one of those idiots that knowingly and intentionally took out a shitpile of (federal, thank god) loans to get it, and my plan to pay them back is to wait until the collapse of the US financial system or my own death, whichever comes first. I loved every moment of my program and my professors, advisor, and cohort were all great, but I have basically destroyed my future in order to have access to them. You might want to check your local library or nearest post-secondary institution to see if there are any workshops or classes you could hop in on or audit, or check low-residency or otherwise flexible programs. You don't need a degree, just patience, practice, and the ability to get rejected dozens of times a year while receiving little to no money for the things you write that do get accepted because there's a billion poets, a million journals, and no money for or in either of them. As for my poetics in general, four books have been absolute rocks for me: Hugo's The Triggering Town, Jack Spicer's The House that Jack Built, Stephen King's On Writing, and Jeff Vandermeer's Wonderbook. Honorable mention to William Stafford's Writing the Australian Crawl. All of them are pretty straightforward excepting the Spicer, by nature of Jack Spicer having been a drunk, entirely too smart, and insane, but the lectures that comprise the book have some extremely good metaphors to the process in them. Anyway, I don't really want to derail this thread too badly from the writing and critiquing, so if anyone has specific questions I can take them in PMs, but most of my responses will probably be some kind of variation of "Truth be told most of my influences are comic books, 'The Waste Land,' and remix culture."
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Feb 10, 2020 09:43
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