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I get the not wanting to derail so I'll just echo thanks for the thoughtful/thought-provoking post and reading recommendations. I personally enjoy the process of wrestling words into formal structures and have a strong preference for reading poems with simple lyrical metre but that doesn't at all mean I look down on other forms. I was just absolutely convinced that what you'd written was free verse and I guess you've persuaded me otherwise.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 10:36 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 14:19 |
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in
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 10:50 |
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Forgotten British Rule We don’t wear armour suits in parliament. We should practice archery once a week, then drive our geese through London’s city streets. These rules, still in force, many remember. Forgotten her Majesty’s government’s Official Department for Transport is. In particular their Highway Code’s most forgotten Rule One Hundred and Three. Signals Warn and Inform other persons of your intended actions on the road. Road Users should always give clear signals With plenty of time before changing course, stopping, or moving off, remembering one thing: Signalling does not give priority.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 15:37 |
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Maugrim posted:I get the not wanting to derail so I'll just echo thanks for the thoughtful/thought-provoking post and reading recommendations. I personally enjoy the process of wrestling words into formal structures and have a strong preference for reading poems with simple lyrical metre but that doesn't at all mean I look down on other forms. I was just absolutely convinced that what you'd written was free verse and I guess you've persuaded me otherwise. I will say this- beyond the ten syllables per line, I don’t see any obvious structure to the poem. Am I missing something obvious otherwise? Some intrinsic syllable stress pattern, etc?
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 22:47 |
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sephiRoth IRA posted:I will say this- beyond the ten syllables per line, I don’t see any obvious structure to the poem. Am I missing something obvious otherwise? Some intrinsic syllable stress pattern, etc? Nope. At least, not to my knowledge. I lean very heavily on ear because, again, I am lazy and impatient. (Also chances are if it sounds bad to me, it's gonna sound bad to someone else.) But again, any constraint is as arbitrary and intentional as any other. An abecedarian doesn't have any obvious structure beyond each line starting with the next letter, etc.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 22:55 |
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Ammon's Tape for the Turn of the Year was written on a roll of adding-machine tape, which determined the length of each line as well as the length of the poem itself.
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# ? Feb 11, 2020 03:28 |
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hey actual real serious logistics post can we please have a consistent submission deadline? at least on the same day (timezones rnt too important unless someone's doing like AUS/EU time), ideally same # of weeks between prompt and submission (aka, it's always the sunday the week the prompt is posted or the sunday afterwards). its been annoying that it's been scattered so much and creating a pattern helps people realize "oh hey wednesday is poemdome day, time to write" vs. "oh god what day of the week was it and how many weeks after was it? i already looked at the prompt like 3 times to check but i cant remember because it always changes" <-- thats me btw im dumb as poo poo. ideally, id prefer not on sunday as that conflicts w/ thunderdome, but as long as its consistent, i really dont care, but having a standard "this day every time" would help me (and hopefully others) immensely. id also personally prefer if we kept it either every week or every other week consistently rather than sometimes longer, sometimes not
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# ? Feb 11, 2020 03:36 |
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Yes, I agree. Would a Wednesday Deadline/Thursday Winner Declared/Friday New Prompt schedule be objectionable to anyone?
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# ? Feb 11, 2020 03:50 |
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i dont think setting a strict "judgement this day" is good, just try to do ur best to get it in by 1-2 days after u close submissions (3 at the latest imo), and then winner can prompt up relatively quickly after that im basically suggesting emulating td but i mean td has been going strong for god knows how long so if it works dont fix it ig
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# ? Feb 11, 2020 04:07 |
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How bout Mondays for deadlines then? That makes it the 17th.
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# ? Feb 11, 2020 06:08 |
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Surrealism crits also, general hint, this week a lot of people capitalized the start of every line for some reason. this made some of them read more awkwardly than necessary. you dont have to do that. you probably shouldnt Saucy_Rodent i think this is a decent attempt at surrealism, and i like the sinister tone this takes as a response to tate’s, but the larger issue with this poem is that the line breaks are just very, very bad. im all for short, abrupt lines and im all for experimentation with different formatting, but it doesnt work in this piece because it causes the poem to read very poorly. esp when u try to read it out loud, it feels very staggered and awkward. it’s almost there to actually work -- some of the interruptions help build up the darker vibe, but too many times it just feels annoying to read, especially out loud. Thranguy this is decently fine, but i found myself just thinking, eh. like, it hits surrealism fine, but i wanted more out of this poem. it has some neat lines and ideas, but it doesnt do much with those lines or ideas. it kinda just drops cool ideas but doesnt try to interrogate them in a way to come up with some unique or interesting perspective. it’s nice, but feels a little vacant. crimea i think i understood this better than when i first read it, which is fine, poems can be somewhat dense, but i still find myself confused on certain things. i get this is about war and it being bad (which feels somewhat trite, especially given that wading through the obfuscation only leads us towards war = bad which is meh), but i find myself confused on who the speaker is and what exactly he’s talking about. giving us a more clear of the speaker can help us get into their headspace more and make the poem feel more personal. sephiRoth IRA i liked “One hundred percent of my life has been filled with violence.” as a conceit to the poem, but i hate it as a line. it completely destroys the ability for the reader to craft their own meaning of the poem, and lays everything out too openly. i have two main issues: one is that i dont think you were able to make your images as sinister as they needed to be to really highlight that life is filled with violence, even if that violence is sanitized. its little too cutesy and silly to really hit right to make us think hey this is kinda bad. the other problem is that, while the images are cool, there’s not a lot of response to the idea. it kinda just plops the idea of a life being dominated by violence, but there isnt much examination of what that kind of life has a person. it just kinda says, yep, that sure is a thing also cool prose poem rickiep00h this works the strongest as a poem, and i liked a lot of the individual images and ideas here, but it loses the trail near the middle. the skull is cool, but then it talks about three-point lines and something about investing and its like, everything here, independently, is pretty cool and well written, but taken as a whole, i cant quite fit everything together. yeah sure surrealism, but even then, nothing quite fits together, and i cant quite make out a complete understanding of what ur trying to say here. the pieces all here work on their own, but they dont quite fit together into something altogether. thanks for the prose poem tho Antivehicular there’s a lot of ideas in here i like. the never-cats are cool, and the idea of being haunted by cats that arent exactly sinister is great. a lot of the images are really nice too. i think the only thing is i wanted a little bit more pushing of the ideas, since it kinda felt like, while this is a piece full of good images, it doesnt quite do much else. it kinda just drops these cool images in these laps, and there’s some decent lines that pull at deeper meaning, i.e. “Cotton, you’re the first thing i ever mourned”, but i think u could push this concept a lil bit harder to pull at something larger than just “ghost cats” good prose poem arbitaryfairy i actually like the conceit of this poem, and even the title kinda made me go errr what? i actually think its not as tasteless as i thought it would be. i like it as a sort of metaphor of teaching something socially inept how to deal with social situations. the main problem is that it fails as a poem. there arent many images and the flow is kinda all over the place, and a poem, to me, is not just about the ideas, but also how the words fit together, and the words are kinda haphazardly thrown together in a way that it makes it difficult to read. i will say my biases lean towards very image-based poems, but even outside of those biases, i think the overall flow of the piece kills it for me, and there isnt much redeeming factors besides having a nice conceit. cda every time i tried to do crits i would hit a wall with this poem because i find myself at mostly a loss for what to say so let’s just start. i just dont rly get it -- i think there’s some linking between consumerism/products to childbirth, but i cant quite catch the line of logic here, and it sort of shifts settings very rapidly because there’s descriptions of malls, but then delivery rooms, so i find myself mostly confused with this. idk, i feel like im not quite sure what exactly is going on her, and there’s not enough cool images to keep me engrossed without understanding what’s going on that i feel like im mostly at a loss for what u were trying to go for, sorry Anomalous Amalgam i was quite a fan of your first stanza, but it fell apart in the second because u just stopped giving me things to latch onto. “Dress up the porcelain caricature of your best self. / Tell simple lies that snowball into permanent falsehoods. / Let those lies permeate the everchanging tides of our fragility.” are much too vague lines that feel like theyre trying to say a lot but end up not being effective since theyre so vague. the flow between lines is pretty awkward through the first and second stanzas -- theyre all one sentence, which makes each line feel very abrupt, while the two lines that are on sentence “Grime encrusted rayon tunics knit by well-wishing relatives / Can be found for a steal at your local thrift store.” still feels abrupt for some reason, my brain always wants to make a hard stop on after “relatives” which fucks with the flow. overall, i think there’s a good effort here, but some poetic flaws keep it from really working.
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# ? Feb 11, 2020 07:20 |
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Thank you for the crit flerp!
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# ? Feb 11, 2020 08:10 |
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flerp posted:cda Pretty sure this means I win Surrealism
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# ? Feb 12, 2020 23:27 |
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Brawl poem (anapests are loving hard, have this weird thing) Branch Promise Creak and thrum, the forest groans. Glacier flows in frosty pond, yet we grow in mossy thrones. Melting frost, pale sun has dawned; shining oak and yew in groves. Write in roots and stems a song within the humming of the droves; live an oath and sway along.
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# ? Feb 13, 2020 09:40 |
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Brawl poem As Spring Comes. Exchange of seasons over rolling moors. Harsh winter’s final winds drink our skin’s heat. This warmth spring’s early beaming sun restores, along bright fields of golden waving wheat. This path whose earth does fill the tread of shoes, bears marks of those who fell before my walk. Wet earth that slips like grease, and thus I choose to tread the grass’ green emerging stalks. To crest hills tall and face blue open sky, where roaring winds like waves do crash and flow. Embrace this tide with open arms that I might dance like purple creeping phlox below. I hold the winter’s winds at season’s end. All seasons, harsh or fair, are welcome friends.
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# ? Feb 13, 2020 14:20 |
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Maugrim posted:a pleasant meter such as iambs or anapaests Funny how that worked out
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# ? Feb 13, 2020 14:30 |
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Thank you for your submissions, both of which I have enjoyed. Judgement will be forthcoming this evening.
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# ? Feb 13, 2020 15:28 |
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Azza BambiRoth IRA brawl judgement: This is close! As I start writing this, I don't yet know who I'm going to award the win to, although I have an initial slight favourite. I enjoyed both poems and both more-or-less hit the prompt. sephiRoth IRA - Branch Promise Interesting title, odd enough that it made me look for some kind of wordplay, although if it's there I'm not clever enough to find it. From the mention of glacier at the start I assumed this was a coniferous forest in a cold country, but then later you mention oak and elm which typically inhabit temperate biomes. After many readings, I still didn't feel like I'd fully grasped the story you're telling - at least not from the words themselves. Fortunately, there's more to this than just the words. This poem is largely written in trochees - a foot consisting of a stressed, then an unstressed syllable, the reverse of an iamb. Where iambs are free-flowing, bouncing you easily onto the stressed syllables, trochees are ponderous, weighty, grandiose. Which isn't what I asked for in the prompt - but I forgive you, because it's a perfect choice for the poem you've written. It evokes the unstoppable march of the seasons, the slow heartbeat of the forest. Combine that with the sonorous vowel sounds you've incorporated, and this poem echoed in my head in the booming voice of an ent. It's a reflection on the long slow existence of trees, with a hint of the promise of spring. quote:Creak and thrum, the forest groans. Azza Bamboo - As Spring Comes A much more straightforward offering in terms of the story it tells, and appealing to me as a lover of hill walking. You've got one big stumble in the rhythm, and several cases of awkward wording and word order to try and retain the rhythm. But you've also got some pleasing imagery and I liked your final couplet a lot. quote:Exchange of seasons over rolling moors. Adjectives! You've got lots of them. In places where you've got several on the same noun, the ordering often seems to go a bit skew-whiff, even when it's not necessary to fit the metre. I don't know if this is a deliberate attempt to sound more poetic, but it's probably best avoided. Here's Mark Forsyth in The Elements of Eloquence, a lovely little book I happen to have on my desk here, in the chapter on hyperbaton (the rhetorical trick of messing with word order): Mark Forsyth posted:John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a 'green great dragon'. He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely couldn't have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years. (The whole book is written like this, it's such an easy read and I thoroughly recommend it.) gently caress, I've really gone on here haven't I? Okay, here's your judgement. sephiRoth IRA takes the win because, for me, their poem evoked a consistent mood and used the metre to support the content really well. But Azza's poem has plenty of good in it too. Thanks guys. Maugrim fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Feb 14, 2020 |
# ? Feb 14, 2020 01:03 |
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Firstly, Thank you for the crit! Your edits are spot on. In my head I was considering the promise of regrowth, to live out the oath of progressing through the seasons. That said, I know gently caress all about plants and did no research whatsoever, so thanks too for giving me a biology pass
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# ? Feb 14, 2020 01:17 |
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Thanks for the crit. I don't get this word order stuff and I'm rearranging the words around the French knife not really seeing that it sounds insane at all. Nonetheless I'll try to abide this rule because the language is full of this arbitrary crap I don't really get. Is there an explanation for why or how it's wrong? I ask because the author of your passage relies on the assumption that anything else sounds insane, and I'm not getting that. I'd rather understand what's going on than have to sit with the list, checking my adjectives every time. Azza Bamboo fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Feb 14, 2020 |
# ? Feb 14, 2020 08:38 |
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The example he created with the whittling knife is over-egged for the sake of humour, frankly. When you have that many adjectives you sound insane regardless of the order! It's easier if you just look at two adjectives - the "green great dragon" example (which is why I expanded the standard meme quote to include it). If phrases like "green great dragon", "old little lady", or "whittling French knife" don't sound odd to you, there may be something unusual about the way you process language. I'm not gonna tell you to sit down with a list every time you use multiple adjectives, don't worry. At any rate the three examples in your poem - "golden waving wheat", "green emerging stalks", "blue open sky" - are less egregious than any of those, they sound subtly wrong to my ear but not insanely wrong. Maugrim fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Feb 14, 2020 |
# ? Feb 14, 2020 09:10 |
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There actually is a list of adjective order but I don't remember it off the top of my head. Stealth edit: quantity, opinion, size, age, color, shape, origin, material, and purpose As with literally every rule of linguistics/grammar, this is a descriptive definition, ie, the way that people tend to naturally order things without knowing "the rules." So using things out of order isn't *wrong* but it will sound *odd* to most speakers of the language and may be hard to parse for meaning.
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# ? Feb 14, 2020 09:37 |
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To be fair I've had a working class upbringing in an old dying industrial town and now I work in factories with mainly people who don't speak English as their first language. I wouldn't be surprised if I process language differently to the kind of degree-having city dweller that normally writes the books we read. I might just have to use a list.
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# ? Feb 14, 2020 10:19 |
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I didn't say anyone had to follow it, just that it exists.
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# ? Feb 14, 2020 16:42 |
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imo most of the examples you've got in that poem don't sound "wrong" so much as they sound like a deliberate choice for effect. The underlying idea behind these adjective-order rules is that you're grouping things that are important. That's why, in the case of the little old French knife, French comes last. It's what has the most influence on the noun being described. It's also why "little" and "old" go together, because they're both about the 'state' of the noun. When you say "golden waving wheat", my brain's reading that as "the waving wheat is golden" as opposed to "the golden wheat is waving". And when you say "the blue open sky" you're saying the openness is more fundamental than the blueness. It's perfectly valid to say that, as long as you're aware that's the effect you're producing. Also, when you're using participles (adjectives made from verbs ending in -ing) word order becomes important for distinguishing where the verb applies. A good example would be "pungent burning stench" versus "burning pungent stench". Neither is incorrect, it's just a matter of what they're emphasizing. A tire fire is a pungent burning stench. Fresh vomit is a burning pungent stench. In the first, the burning stench is pungent. In the second, the pungent stench burns.
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# ? Feb 14, 2020 17:44 |
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I Was Received Into The Church My Dear Lord Cardinal - Last night I was very much tempted with a hard, absent heart. Carried a taper to the altar. Went forward as if I might fall dead. I feel a human sadness. What do I fear? In how many ways is this life what I most desire? My Dear Lord Cardinal - You must be tired with this unfortunate affair. I am very sorry that you should be troubled with ecclesiastical gnats I find to infest chiefly high places. Sad tidings travel so fast I fear you will have heard all I have to tell you. My Dear Lord Cardinal - Received all sacraments. A great plague of tongues gives me much disquiet. Tell me in what way I may hereafter offend. Much as I am enjoying Rome, I am counting the weeks to be at home again. Excerpts taken from the personal diary and correspondence of Cardinal Henry Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, c. 1851-1857
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# ? Feb 17, 2020 01:16 |
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The Treasures of Peterborough Abbey pronunciation guide for non-British readers: Ely – “Ee lee” Peterborough – “Peter bruh” William of Normandy strides into England: he swears he is rightful king - takes the land promised him - All know these measures. Four years later he orders a travesty: from all the monasteries in that fair land to seize all of their treasures. Hereward – outlaw he – camped on the isle of Ely, hears of the monarch’s plan – summons his outlaw band, sails to the abbey. “As I love God,” quoth he, “No cur of Normandy shall have the smallest pin sacred to God within Peterborough Abbey.” Monks they refuse his plea, suffer him no entry: so from the walls they dash, burn all the town to ash, burn the monks’ houses. Through burning gates they break, drive out the monks, and take crown of the Lord divine, crucifix, coin and shrine, golden and silver. Drag they this hoard from there – haul it to Ely, where Danish ships bear it forth back to their homeland north, safe in church stow it. Afterwards through their own carelessness, and through their drunkenness, in [but] one night the church and all that was therein was consumed by fire. - From the Peterborough Chronicle, A.D. 1070 – as translated here
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# ? Feb 17, 2020 01:16 |
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I just realised the sub deadline was changed to tonight so I didn't have to rush that O wel
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# ? Feb 17, 2020 10:34 |
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Maugrim posted:I just realised the sub deadline was changed to tonight so I didn't have to rush that
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 00:24 |
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pre:DMT I should start off by saying that I did not emotionally or mentally prepare for this trip in anyway this experience happened nearly a year ago and while some of the smaller details may have slipped from memory I believe what I experienced that night was powerful enough that I can still describe what happened to me with the detail and accuracy that I feel this trip report deserves about two months ago I obtained two grams of DMT I was elated after several years of searching for it I took the DMT by sandwiching it between two layers of dried mint leaves in the bowl of a glass bong I put some dry tobacco in the body of the pipe along with some spice in the kitchen I heated the pipe over the gas hob smoking is painful and stupid and I don’t enjoy any of it the disadvantage of my method seemed to be that it led to quite some wastage I spend all day mowing for my job and suddenly these two still frames of my boss and the mower I use at work flash through my brain like moving snapshots I knew a rising of consciousness awareness of colour very effective now a vast purple coloured dome-like structure covered in fractal patterns extremely beautiful a valve of colour then this feeling came over me a feeling I was seeing an ancient place I had broken through excited happy and euphoric this did not last I feel as if I can’t breathe whatever is left of my body isn’t functioning there was no longer a grid as if someone shattered it I had strong spotlights on the ceiling pointed to my head I began to surmise that my technique was probably flawed and wasteful I notice for the first time two horses grazing in their pastures I felt my body again there were walls a door I was on a couch the main thing I have taken from this is a very strong sense of my own mortality all I could think about for the next few days was what in the hell happened to me the rest of the evening is spent with grilling eating and laughing with Anatoli different than before -- the light is gone out no ill effects afterward.
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 02:24 |
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formatting that was a bitch. everything taken from erowid trip reports.
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 02:24 |
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Subs closed! Winner is cda! Crits tomorrow!
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 07:30 |
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Failed this one... sorry!
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 08:41 |
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Crits! Azza Bamboo I enjoyed this quite a bit on a gut level; I laughed pretty well. Unfortunately, I found it hard to make a human connection in this one. It definitely qualifies as found poetry, and well done in my opinion, but it isn't terribly interesting in a documentary way. Whose story is being told? What do connect with on a human level (beyond irony, I mean.) So: enjoyable but not quite what we're looking for. sephiRoth IRA If I could declare co-winners, I would have. I really enjoyed the breaks in this one particularly, as it still felt epistolary, but with the heightened sense of timing and tension poetry gives. Craft-wise, great. My only real quibble is with, as above, the documentary portion. While the humanizing quality is definitely there, I think an Archbishop is pretty high up in the list of people whose stories have been told and told well already. That said plenty of docupoetry deals with exactly that sort of level of public official, so like I said, minor quibble. Maugrim I was feeling this one pretty well until I landed on "hereward" immediately followed with a poetic inversion and got pulled out of a relatively natural syntax. I appreciate the meter and rhyme scheme here as homage to the source material, and there are some really tasty bits of enjambment, but overall the diction and elevation of register due to the form pulled me out of any particular human relation. This one is so close, but it still screams "You're reading a poem! Look at it being all poetic!" and the points where the craft is a little looser become more apparent. In the spots where the meter makes things awkward, let natural diction and syntax take over. cda I would have never expected an Erowid trip report. So first off, props for that. That's honestly the biggest factor here: the elevation of what most people wouldn't consider poetic into something altogether different. Also, given the... questionable... quality of a number of those trip reports, it's refreshing to have some sort of intentionality applied to them, even if that intention is to be fragmented. To that end, I appreciate the form as reflective of the content, and how it heightens the sense of fragmentation. One of the things a tabbed/column form gives is that the poem can be read as both a single poem and as two separate poems, and the single poem is just confused enough to make the two separate columns seem relatively coherent independently. A huge benefit of this is, I think, the use of first-person to combine all the individual accounts into a single "I" speaker, unifying a number of individually disjointed pieces into a single disjointed piece. If that makes sense. In the end, everyone did pretty drat good and it was honestly hard to choose, and cda's work was the one that felt like it got both the craft and the intent down best. But everyone had those in varying degrees. I think from a conceptual standpoint everyone got the gist, and that's what matters to me. And there could certainly be the genesis of a larger project in each of these submissions. Well done! rickiep00h fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Feb 18, 2020 |
# ? Feb 18, 2020 20:53 |
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Congrats cda (also autocorrect hates your username) and thank you rickie for the crit. Interprompt: Docupoetry from your favorite something awful thread
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 21:27 |
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Car Trouble I got an email back from Budget saying they were sorry you pay what they theoretically lost absent a law specifically preventing this exact thing. There is a contract doctrine - the actual calculation of a loss of use of a rental - but as a lay person reading that, lol you are getting taken for a loving ride. I'm not a lawyer and yeah, you should actually talk to one. Excerpts taken from posts in the Legal Advice A/T thread
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 21:38 |
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Thank you for the crit! I didn't like the prompt much at first (couldn't think of anything I wanted to document) but I actually enjoyed learning about this kind of poetry, and I learned some history in the process of writing it. Which I'm sure was your intention. Good stuff. Prooooompt
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 22:22 |
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sephiRoth IRA posted:Congrats cda (also autocorrect hates your username) *scrabbles to edit crit post*
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 22:29 |
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sephiRoth IRA posted:Congrats cda (also autocorrect hates your username) and thank you rickie for the crit. lol. great idea
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 22:47 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 14:19 |
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I really liked "I Was Received Into the Church." Was each stanza from a single letter or did you rearrange the text more than that? For the trip reports I initially pulled things almost in straight chronological order (a lot of trip reports include either actual timestamps or words that describe the passage of time) but then as I started to work it into a poem, things started floating out of place, so I'm interested in what your compositional process was like for your poem; the imagery is excellent (this was the hardest part for me because god drat so many of those stupid trip reports are the same thing...I saw a bunch of colorssss mannnnnnn -- the saving grace was that they usually get very descriptive about how they took the drug lol)
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 22:52 |