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budgieinspector posted:like having an elderly woodlands lesbian perched on your shoulder, waiting to throttle you if you stray from her path. What an image. Almost a poem in itself.
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Feb 9, 2013 19:22
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quote:Here's a question: Do you think that the meter/rhyme oddness could work if I broke the stanzas around the different schemes? For example (without rewriting): I like this better than what you had before. Here the rhymes are able to carve out their own time and meter against (or amidst?) the prevailing metric cadence... a kind of inner life against the inevitable tick-tocking of the world.
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Feb 9, 2013 20:37
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budgieinspector posted:YES! Thanks for taking the time! The poem tells the story of an already disturbed mind being subjected to a string of failures that ultimately lead to suicide. Though Vatel might start out understandably nervous about the king's visit, that he stays at the same level of manic anxiety throughout the poem doesn't make a lot of sense; surely as his entertainments begin to fail, one after the other, he would become increasingly distressed. The breaking point isn't the king's visit but Vatel's discovery that his one plan to salvage his reputation is now impossible to accomplish on account of bad fish. So while he might not start out entirely stable--and with the king visiting this is entirely plausible--at the beginning he is merely afraid of failing; as the poem progresses this fear of failure turns into a series of ever-more-humiliating realities, culminating in suicide, and this is a descent into madness if it's anything at all, even if it's a descent from one kind of madness to another, darker kind. You don't have to represent this descent from acute anxiety to suicidal despair in the form, of course; as you said, rather than have the form track Vatel's unfolding psychology you'd rather that the poem vacillate between moments of order and disorder throughout without any progressive 'deterioration' in the form. I shouldn't have assumed you intended the former as the latter is a perfectly good alternative. In both cases, though, there still needs to be a clearly established order for there to be any palpable sense of disorder. And in your poem as it is the rhymes don't effectively establish enough of a pattern to allow for meaningful deviations. There's no suggestion that Vatel starts off in a manic state of mind, because in its current state the poem just appears to be written in prosodically smooth free verse with a few incidental rhymes. Giving your rhymes greater structural prominence by forming your stanzas around them isn't a bad idea. It would simultaneously draw attention to the rhymes and also contribute a more palpable sense of disorder, with the hectic changes of the length of the stanzas as well as the constant enjambments between them. The only thing this would perhaps negatively effect would be narrative clarity, given that at the moment your stanzas are most closely structured around key events. I don't think this is too terrible a thing, though; having the events only imperfectly correspond to the arrangement of the stanzas is certainly an effective way of reflecting the confusion occasioned by doing a great number of things under a great deal of stress; and in any case the change wouldn't make the already quite simple story imperceptible or unintelligible. Structuring your stanzas around the rhymes is definitely not an obnoxious choice because you'd be doing it for a real mimetic effect (and a rhythmic effect, as well, given that the new enjambments between stanzas speed up the reading of the poem, allowing the reader to experience something of the dizzy rushing panic Vatel himself is feeling). You're not just mindlessly chopping up lines in a vacuous attempt to be interesting. Orkin Mang fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Feb 10, 2013 |
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Feb 10, 2013 03:45
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Awesome. Taking your notes (and Jeza's) onboard. Gracias, gents--I haven't been able to get any further with this piece since I wrote it, four months ago, and now I'm seeing some possibilities. If y'all have something in need of critiquing, I'll gladly do my best to return the favor.
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Feb 10, 2013 05:15
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Alright so I promised I'd look at this, then I did the wrong poem. This is the right one, right? I'll start by saying that I don't speak French, so there's probably a lot lost on me here. budgieinspector posted:Pour Vatel, le maître des maîtres d’hôtel Beatitude is a weird one because if you don't know what it means, it looks like terrible 90s slang. I'd consider changing it, though I can't think of anything that works better. quote:C'est vrai, and I, the miracle worker. quote:But what divine conspiracy  quote:yet only twenty-four of these have any roasts at all! Oh wait that's not an emoticon but anyway this line doesn't scan well and that makes me sad because the setup is great. Yet seems to be the offender here- it shifts the stress onto the wrong syllables and the line comes out lumpy. quote:For the evening’s entertainment, quote:I shall rally! quote:Behold the ice armada, quote:The fishmonger is prompt; he stands  quote:tightly clutching cap in hand. quote:I could strangle him. Overall it's wonderful and you are wonderful. If there's a single big issue dragging it down, it's coherency of form: I know it's free verse but there's some very definite underlying structures and they shift around too much.
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Feb 10, 2013 05:36
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And many thanks to you, as well, Senor Muffin!SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Nice little touches like jonquil instead of narcissus help to build a more complete picture of our speaker: he's a narcissist who won't admit he's a narcissist and likes to dress his ugly sentiment in fine words. That's one word. Pay attention, students. Would that I could take credit for being that clever. The fact is that I used jonquils in the piece because, according to this letter, Vatel arranged a "meal in a place carpeted with jonquils" for the king and his entourage. I just decided to split the flowers and the meal into two separate scenes. Still, that's quite the happy accident. I do indeed picture the man to be the sort who would relentlessly pursue his own glory, riding roughshod over the rest of the staff to get all the quibbling details just so, and rationalize it as being all in the service of his prince. quote:Do poêle and Vatel rhyme? Yep!
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Feb 10, 2013 08:24
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I actually missed the earlier discussion so I missed this:budgieinspector posted:I promised silver scarabs, crimson poppies,
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Feb 10, 2013 08:40
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Previous poetry-thread starter, here. Muffin, I appreciate what you're doing but some of your critique falls a little flat and from my perspective is too proscriptive. One thing that deeply troubled me was your insistence that people avoid similes in poetry. You must know in your heart that this is oversimplistic advice, just like that old chestnut about adverbs (though I've never written prose creatively so who knows). I get that you're trying to help people new to the art, but locking down a whole subset of expressive language probably isn't the best way to do that. A better way to put this is that similes and metaphors are different. Spatially speaking, if the metaphoric expression overlays and to some extent obscures the literal image in the text, then a simile links or yokes two distinct images. Like here's a fragment (sorry, only a selection because it's out for consideration) of something dumb I wrote, where the simile doesn't diminish or reduce the imagistic force, but links together different senses or descriptors: quote:Narcissistic bodily cathexis: There was another thing too but I forgot it, and then I saw you mentioned how stars are overused in poetry and I felt self-conscious because I'm obsessed with the motions of the firmament and my #1 editor/reader is always getting on my case for it. PS, if everything after 1950 is about dicks, then everything before 1950 is about dicks too.
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Feb 12, 2013 20:55
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Oh yeah, I hammer people pretty hard for stuff but it's more of a Creative Writing Tutor ADVERBS ARE DEATH thing: it's not that similes are impossible to use well, it's that they're overused by bad poets and a good way to help people improve is to force them to use something else. I think your own example is a bad one, though:quote:the planets orbit like seasons, eccentrics, quote:the planets in orbit are seasons, eccentrics, read both of those aloud in the poem and tell me which you feel is a tighter fit.
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Feb 13, 2013 00:59
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quote:the planets orbit like seasons, eccentrics, The original is a much tighter fit than what you suggested Muffin, especially when you consider the likely cadence of the line and poem as a whole. The line with 'like' follows a much slower and downbeat tempo, whereas inserting both 'in' and 'are' forces unwanted rhythm and takes away the full force of 'eccentrics'. So it seems with the way I'm reading it at least. Nevertheless, definitives tend to scan much better than similes, I agree.
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Feb 13, 2013 01:21
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areyoucontagious posted:Surreptitious, I touched on this in the Thunderdome thread, but I'm having real problems understanding contemporary poetry. I want to become a better poet, because I enjoy it as an outlet, but I feel that I won't be able to grow and improve until I can consume other people's poetry. Going back to this first-page post because I've found an enjoyable solution to my dreadful ignorance: The Best American Poetry Series! It seriously doesn't get better for us dubious-about-highfalutin'-"culture"-stuff types than knowing that several people combed through an entire year's American GDP of published poetry and chose ~75 pieces that stood out. Will every poem in every book be a gem? gently caress, no. But if you don't like the writer's style or message, you can just flip the page. I liked this one: "Race", by Bao Phi.
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Feb 13, 2013 03:52
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Not a lot of poems lately? Here's one I've been working on this week: The Widow of the House Shingles gray from decades of sun, Geriatric shutters cling to their rusty hinges, Parkinson addled fence-posts shake at passing trucks, Uncombed hedges grow as they please, Wrinkled paint flakes from disheveled wood siding, Forgotten relics gather dust in the attic. Smoke wanders aimlessly from the chimney, Drifts down the road, Mutters allusions to yesterday. Any critique much appreciated.
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Feb 13, 2013 14:05
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Here is a sonnet I posted in Entertainment, Weakly. The Descent of Orpheus His lyre charmed many a ferocious beast; His songs so pure did cause the gods to weep. Now with his eyes transfixed towards the east, Orpheus set out for the yawning deep. Moved by the plaintive chants and cries of dread Lord Hades himself, eyes blurred with his tears, Allowed Orpheus to take from the dead Eurydice, his love, of many years. Reunited beyond the gates of life, He did well to control his anxious gaze. Alas! His fear betrayed him and his wife! She was called back, banished from the sun's rays. Listen close to the winds and you shall know The dirge of the man in the world below. I would like to hear your thoughts on this.
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Feb 14, 2013 00:21
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ddinkins112 posted:Here is a sonnet I posted in Entertainment, Weakly. I think that there are two major things here. The first is, why does this need to be a sonnet? I'm not saying that to be a dickhead, but in what way does this particular idea benefit from being put into sonnet form? As it is right now, it feels like you just wanted to write a sonnet. The other thing about sonnets is they are generally in iambic pentameter, I think you do that successfully in some lines here, but a few, like, "Allowed Orpheus to take from the dead" just seem to have a breakdown in the rhythm, and I can't wrap my head around how to say them in the traditional, da-dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum beat of a sonnet. Remember that the number of syllables in the line is not the same as rhythm. To put it in perspective, setting out to write a sonnet for the sake of writing a sonnet is like tailoring someone a suit without measuring them first. But that being said, I mean, I love Greek myth. I think the content is really interesting. I think, especially based on the subject, you should totally try experimenting with different beats and rhyme schemes, and make something really sing-songy. You could totally have a lot of fun with it if you did something a little less stringent with the subject matter. You could write something someone could strum along to on an actual lyre. You know what I'm saying? Don't force it into this dusty old form unless it's of some benefit to the poem. Have fun with it, man. Zack_Gochuck fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Feb 14, 2013 |
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Feb 14, 2013 03:23
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You're right, I did want to make a sonnet out of Orpheus' myth. There wasn't any other reason why I chose sonnet form; I just wanted to see if I could do it. I'll see how I can edit this one and write better poetry in the future. I love Greek mythology too, so I'll give it some more thought. Thanks!
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Feb 14, 2013 03:54
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To be more on the nose, "banished from the sun's rays" is / - - - / / when you don't force the Shakespearian "BAN-ish-ED" pronunciation they put the accent over sometimes. There are a few lines that are in the correct form, but are hard to scan: "Eurydice, his love (no comma) of many years", "Reunited beyond the gates of life" and the previously stated "She was called back, banished from the sun's rays". You have to go back and re-read them to catch the scheme or read through it with a heavy, forced beat. The last stanza, in unaffected speech, isn't iambic pentameter or iambic all the way through. "Listen close to the winds and you shall know" is / - / - - / - / - /. "The dirge of the man in the world below" is - / - - / - - / - /.
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Feb 14, 2013 05:02
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Man, my scansion's terribly off. I never was quite good with that; I'd always just count the syllables of the stanzas and call it a day. I guess that's what separates good poetry from bad. Thanks for the tips.
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Feb 14, 2013 05:40
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So, I sent all my poo poo off to MFA schools and then poetry lived somewhere that wasn't my head for a good month, because I was just so drat burnt out. I come back and discover, holy poo poo, the Daily Poetry thread is alive and kicking, far more so than it was through much of when I followed it in 2012. There have already been a few posts on this: ddinkins112 posted:Here is a sonnet I posted in Entertainment, Weakly. And I don't really have too much to say about it, other than to yell at you for your response: ddinkins112 posted:I guess that's what separates good poetry from bad. If your goal was a Shakespearean sonnet, then, yeah, you missed the mark a bit, but that doesn't make it bad poetry. Wendy Bishop, in Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem contends that the sonnet is nowhere near as rigid as people would have you believe, and I agree with her. One of the big things that I feel you nailed is the volta, turning in your last couplet to relate this epic of love and loss with something people experience nearly every day. Listen to MadRhetoric if you want to have a more traditional sonnet, which seems to be the case, but don't say that this is a bad poem. Of course, if you're going to break from the traditional sonnet, I'd make some different word choices and have its deviation be intentional  Here's a thing I've been working on that I'm mostly happy with, but there's at least one or two parts where it'd be nice to get some more thoughts on it: Midwestern Debutante Daughters with olive sweater sleeves hanging past the tips of their fingers, one-size- too-small tennis shoes bulging from overgrown feet with scrunched toes, sit in rear end-numbing Shaker chairs across from their fathers. They sit together at the widest tables in the most deserted coffee shops, softly sipping hot cocoa until their emptiness ratchets up, until my mind teeters, needing to fill the void with something while I pretend not to stare. I fill it with anything: the melody of the latest autotuned earworm or the death rattle of a forest teeming with cicadas or the tremble in her voice when she asks why I didn't try harder; anything to smother the sound of silence, that sixty-hertz buzz of electrons, the electromotive hum flowing through the walls and the floor white noise permeating each wicked little Twilight Zone town where every silent neighbor feeds into the static until I think I hear him begin to stutter, to struggle, scouring his memories for the names of her friends or her hobbies or whether she is still too young for a boyfriend, but I can't be certain if the skittering is the shifting of his shoes, anxiously grinding against remnants of winter on the rock salt-scarred hard- wood floor or the knocking of his daughter's knees or if cockroaches have begun to flood the streets and alleyways, taking refuge in all the deserted homes, but I can tell from her crumpled Dixie cup posture that this daughter is fluent, that she understands the skittering, that she knows all he ever wanted was a son with whom he could be silent.
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Feb 15, 2013 06:13
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Zack_Gochuck posted:
Still haven't gotten any thoughts on disun.
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Feb 15, 2013 14:13
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Zack_Gochuck posted:Not a lot of poems lately? If this poem was a suit of armour, it wouldn't have many chinks in it. But it would be quite a dull and plain suit of armour. Sure, it would protect you from arrows - but you won't be wowing any of the other knights on the field with their spangly gold pauldrons and glimmering codpieces. The first stanza is just descriptive line comma descriptive line comma, following the exact same pattern throughout. Very simple, and though effective at first, it really begins to trail off in impact after the third line. The final stanza feels a little disconnected from the first. Whether consciously or not, you have the first stanza drawing us inside the house and then bam, suddenly we're back out the chimney without any resolution. It makes me feel a bit cheated as to the story of the house, like you were dangling a red herring of a backstory and then whisking it away. The title alludes to a widow living there and the smoke is the sign that she lives in this neglected house, but we never get to see her or anything else in the house outside the attic. This is OK if you want the mild melancholy of a detached observer, if that is what you want, but it isn't right if you want us to actually care about the occupant of the house. bairfanx posted:
The writing in this is already very nice, the only thing I had trouble with was recognising the transition between observation and reminiscence (if I am actually getting the 'correct' interpretation). I'm not convinced by the relatively self-pitying "didn't try harder' line, and the foreshadowing just doesn't come off quite right in my eyes. Jeza fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Feb 15, 2013 |
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Feb 15, 2013 17:53
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bairfanx posted:
Thank you for your kind words! Yeah, I was being a bit melodramatic with my response, looking back on it. I beat myself up over little things sometimes, and just because my sonnet (which I tried to model after an English sonnet) isn't technically perfect doesn't mean it's bad. Breaking from the Shakespearean paradigm wasn't my intent; I wanted to retell Orpheus' myth in a sort of Bardly manner. I'll take this as a lesson to develop my own poetic style, rather than to mimic established forms.
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Feb 15, 2013 20:00
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ddinkins112 posted:Here is a sonnet I posted in Entertainment, Weakly. Whatever you do, don't try to 'develop your own poetic style' without at the same time becoming familiar with what other poets have done, past and present; experiment within and around established forms; don't be slavish, but at the same time don't strike out entirely on your own, because what inevitably happens when a poet tries to innovate in isolation is that they simply end up reproducing something that has been done many times before and often much better. It's no coincidence that a lot of people who try to write in free-verse just end up writing in iambic tetrameter or some sing-song demotic metre. Actually trying to mimic or at least creatively reproduce older forms, especially a metrical form like iambic pentameter, is an excellent idea. There are very good reasons why iambic pentameter was the single most common metrical form in English poetry from the sixteenth right up to the early twentieth century--one of which is its naturalism ('natural' lines of iambic pentameter occur in normal speech quite often). I entirely agree (I think with budgie) that new poets should at least occasionally make an effort to write in blank verse. People like Shakespeare were able to recognise and reproduce lines of iambic pentameter because they heard others performing pentameters regularly, and were therefore aware, on a more or less subconscious level, that there were rules and principles that determined whether a line did or did not count as an example of the form, even if they couldn't articulate precisely what those rules and principles were. Since we don't much listen to or read poetry anymore, and many of the poems we do read have no metre, we haven't developed the intuitive ability to hear and creatively manipulate lines of iambic pentameter (or complex metre in general) in the same way the literate in Shakespeare's day had. Still, readers of poetry are still aware that there is something called iambic pentameter, that an iamb goes da-DUM, that pentameter means five beats, that having ten syllables is important, and that basic lines of iambic pentameter can sound quite pleasant. None of this is wrong but it is a bit misleading. First of all, you can't write a line of pentameter by just tallying up ten syllables. The best reason why syllable-counting alone is a bad idea is because the precise number of syllables in a line is something that is pretty much imperceptible to a reader or listener unless they explicitly stop to count them. While we are all very well equipped to naturally perceive beats--children are able at a very young age to get pleasure from nursery rhymes, for example--our ability to perceive syllable number is pretty well non-existent. Another reason is that there are a hell of a lot of perfectly legitimate lines of iambic pentameter that have more or less than ten syllables; if the standard were any different, then huge swathes of Shakespeare, for example, would be rendered unmetrical. What is absolutely crucial, though, is that any line that one wants to read as a pentameter must be able to carry five beats. If the natural stress-contours of the line prevent it from carrying five beats, then it cannot be a pentameter. (It's important to note here, too, that beats are not an intrinsic property of syllables and words: beats and stress are not the same thing: stress is intrinsic to words, beat is sort of 'super-added' in performance; conflating the two is at the basis of a hell of a lot of misunderstanding). Beat placement in spoken language tends towards isochrony (that is, equal placement between beats), but only tends that way--we often lose our train of though or trip over our tongues or hesitate or whatever; we often deliberately vary our beat placement for creative effect, too. So a sentence can be given a greater or lesser amount of beats depending on how fast or slow one performs it. What metred poetry uniquely does is constrain the placement and timing of the beats, arranging them into recursive patterns, giving them greater prominence, and in so doing allowing them to be the subject of artistic uses that wouldn't otherwise be possible. So a line like this from Shakespeare: quote:Absent thee from felicity a while Can be read quite quickly, with the beats falling on 'absent', 'felicity', and 'while', while rushing over the intervening syllables, giving the line three beats. Beats most naturally fall on so-called 'lexical' words--nouns, verbs, adjectives, because these provide a sentence with most of its content. But this line of Shakespeare is supposed to be read with five beats, not three. And the structure of the line allows it. Furthermore, those five beats can be arranged in an iambic structure: alternating off-beats with beats. quote:Absent thee from felicity a while Now the words (or, more precisely, syllables) carrying the beats are abSENT, FROM, feLIC-i-TY, WHILE. (Sorry for the sudden caps but for some reason italicisation won't work for me here.) So the line can be read as an example of iambic pentameter. You might also notice that in this line of Shakespeare's, not only are the beats arranged in a perfect iambic structure, but that the syllables those beats fall on are alternately strong and weak. And this subtle alternation of emphasis is supposed to be present in the performance, with the reader or speaker slowing down their pace enough to place perceptible beats on the weaker syllables 'from' and 'ty', without over-emphasizing them in that sort of monotonous, town-crier declamatory trumpeting that way too many people think iambic pentameter demands. This coming together of generic iambic structure with alternating phonological emphasis (basically 'stress') is an example of a so-called 'golden line'. Rhythmically speaking, such lines are about as elegant as pentameters get. Such an excess of lyrical order is entirely appropriate to the line, too, given that it perfectly reflects the heavenly order it describes. What is really brilliant about this line from Hamlet, though, is the way it contrasts with the next line: quote:And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain The natural stress contours of this line much harder to perform as a pentameter. The reasons for this are relatively complicated. Put most simply, while it can still be given a generic iambic structure (off-beat beat) the awkward beat placement on 'in', as well as the slow alternation of lexical words (when lexical words fall on off-beats it makes the metre harder to perceive as well as slows down the line markedly), make this line far rougher than the one preceding it. (Just reading them aloud makes that obvious to most people.) As it should be, given that the contrast Hamlet is drawing is between the divine order ('Absent thee from felicity a while') and the imperfect world of change and decay ('and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain'). What's interesting about your poem is that, even though you admit to only counting syllables, about half of your lines are in perfectly fine iambic pentameter. So even though you were only explicitly counting syllables, you were probably unconsciously or only half-consciously preferring lines that were conducive to being read in iambic pentameter. This line, for example, is only one 'weak' syllable away from being a golden line: quote:Eurydice, his love of many years. Like Shakespeare, you employ a (nearly) golden line to reflect a state of blissful constancy. (I removed your eighteenth-century comma placement.) Read this line out loud (with the beats as follows: Eurydice, love, many, years) and then do the same with the nearly equivalent line in Shakespeare. You should notice that they both have almost identical rhythms even though their content is different. Shakespeare's is the more 'perfect' because there are no intonational breaks in his line, and yours, and not his, has two consecutive beats falling on strong syllables ('many and years). But yours is a very good line: your form matches your content. Lines 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 11 and 12 (just) are all pentameters that nobody from the sixteenth century to the twentieth would have considered unmetrical. Not all lines in iambic pentameter (or any complex metre) are of the basic beat structure, o-B o-B o-B o-B o-B (off-beat and beat). This basic or generic structure is called the 'matrix'. Beats can be swapped around, coming either earlier or later than expected, to create what are called 'templates', which are variations on the basic 'matrix'. The large number of possible templates gives the pentameter a great deal of metrical variety; and since every change is perceived as a variation on the norm, the effect is similar to counter-point in music. A very common variation is to reverse the initial o-B to a B-o, making a line with a beat structure B-o o-B o-B o-B o-B. One of your lines most naturally follows this common form: quote:Moved by the plaintive cries and chants of dread Now a basic principle governing these template transformations is that every deviation from the o-B norm must be followed by a re-establishment of that norm. You do that here: 'Moved by' (B-o) is immediately followed by 'the plain' (o-B), with your line finishing off as a simple pentameter (notice, too, that while the second line of Hamlet starts off rough, the last two feet--'thy breath in pain'--are perfectly smooth, as if to remind us that the line is indeed a pentameter). The reason why every variation must be followed by the norm is for the understandable reason that if you deviate for too long from the basic metre then the metre quickly becomes imperceptible. Furthermore, the final foot of a line cannot be a transformation (so no o-B o-B o-B o-B B-o). Now these aren't, of course, rules of nature, but these basic rules--no successive transformations and no end-line transformations--account for all but the most experimental lines of pentameter in English (including practically all of Shakespeare, even at his most daring). And since ddinkins is looking to write a Shakespearean sonnet with the same sort of language and metre as the original examples, then it is only appropriate that his lines be metrical by the standards of that era. Which explains why this line of yours is unmetrical: quote:Listen close to the winds and you shall know-- 'Listen close to' has a fixed phonological structure of strong-weak strong-weak ('listen' with the stress on the second syllable is not an English word, and there is no reason to place special emphasis--say contrastive--on the 'to' in 'close to'), and so cannot align with any traditional template. What's interesting, though, is that after these two initial reversals you immediately order the final three beats as if the line were in iambic pentameter. Like I said, you sort of know how iambic pentameter is supposed to sound, just imperfectly. As for whether the sonnet form is appropriate for the material--I think it is. Putting an old, established story in an old, established poetical form makes artistic sense; and the popularity of classical themes in English poetry coincided quite nicely with the ascendancy of iambic pentameter. The sonnet being the traditional English vehicle for love poetry makes it well-suited to the story of a lover trying to save his love from Hades. And, more specifically, the volta of the sonnet matches up perfectly with the action of the poem: ddinkins has Orpheus turns to see Eurydice right at the customary point at which the volta occurs. I think the poem would be badly served if you changed it from its current form. What's impressive about your poem isn't its content--it's pretty standard, and you're aware of that--it's that you managed to get the rhyme scheme correct as well as have the dramatic turn of your poem coincide with the standard placement of the volta. Unfortunately much of your poem fails at what is arguably one of the most important aspects of this kind of sonnet: its metre (i.e., iambic pentameter). It'd take some serious rewriting to correct it, but since half of it's already there, I think it'd be worth the effort. You should be given a lot of credit for putting in the serious effort and time it takes to artistically write in continuity with an established form. But, even though I'm in favour of developing technique and rhythmic sensitivity, etc., by practising with various verse forms, the language of the poem is probably a bit too archaic. Stuff like 'Alas!', the periphrastic 'do' of the second line ('do cause'), and the general by-gone tone, are not the kinds of things I'd get into a habit of doing. Orkin Mang fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Feb 17, 2013 |
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Feb 16, 2013 07:28
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boogs posted:I entirely agree (I think with budgie) that new poets should at least occasionally make an effort to write in blank verse. Credit where credit's due, that's Muffin's advice--and, I believe, he had us do just that for an early round of Thunderdome. But I wholeheartedly agree with it. I dig formal structures. A beginning writer could learn a lot by bouncing between blank verse and haiku, for example. Set aside rhyme for a bit, and just concentrate on rhythm and economy of language. From there, sonnets, villanelles, abecedarians... I'm trying to get the hang of ghazals at the moment. There are lots of forms to try once you develop your ear. I bitch a lot about Mary Oliver's Poetry Handbook for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is her casual dismissal of traditional form: Mary Oliver posted:Poems written with rhyme and in a fairly strict metrical pattern, which feel strange and even "unnatural" to us, were not so strange to our grandparents. Mary Oliver is 78. Assuming that her forebears were no younger than 20 when they reproduced, her implication is that rhyme and meter haven't been relevant since 1895. Robert Frost was still using both into the early 1960s. As boogs pointed out, kids still like nursery rhymes. And what about Dr. Seuss? Point being, rhyme and meter are still quite present in our earliest encounters with language. Don't let anyone tell you that they're irrelevant.
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Feb 16, 2013 08:27
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budgieinspector posted:I bitch a lot about Mary Oliver's Poetry Handbook for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is her casual dismissal of traditional form: Don't be ridiculous. I haven't read the book, but it seems obvious that her usage of "we" includes the reader, or at least some of the various schools of contemporary poets. She's not writing an autobiography or trying to define The Year That Meter Died. Your math presumes that she claims meter became unnatural the year her grandparents were born, and that's not even close to what she said. Nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss are half the reason why metrical forms seem strange and unnatural to most readers today, because those are the most obvious and ubiquitously encountered places that the forms still thrive. There's a delight in meter, but poets have embraced a much wider idea of meter that can be naturalistic or more structured in the past century (and even earlier, of course). The delight of a Dr. Seuss poem is simple because the meter is simple, so children enjoy it. A bad metered poem by a novice has the same Seussian feel to it, which is one reason it will feel strange to a reader today.
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Feb 16, 2013 21:39
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Josh Lark posted:Don't be ridiculous. That's like telling the rain not to be wet. quote:it seems obvious that her usage of "we" includes the reader Yes. She continually takes for granted the reader's agreement with her positions throughout the book. "We" understand that tetrameter is "claustrophobic"; "we" agree that poets are born, not made in school (as though these were the only two options)--that kind of thing. quote:Your math presumes that she claims meter became unnatural the year her grandparents were born, and that's not even close to what she said. Completely missed what I getting at by focusing on my facetious math. My point was that, contrary to her position, meter and rhyme are not relics of a bygone era--unless you classify all language in that category. They're mnemonic devices which have been with us since before literacy, and aren't likely to go away unless/until written communication moves much further away from speech. quote:Nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss are half the reason why metrical forms seem strange and unnatural to most readers today, because those are the most obvious and ubiquitously encountered places that the forms still thrive. "The reason why meter seems strange to readers is that they are exposed to it at an early age." I would add "and are then only exposed to it in the context of schoolwork, frequently being forced to read passages aloud in class while their friends make farting noises from the back row". The only modern context in which it's acceptable for a schoolkid to delve into meter and rhyme is if they're in a band or can rap, and are writing lyrics. quote:A bad metered poem by a novice has the same Seussian feel to it, which is one reason it will feel strange to a reader today. I think you might be putting the cart before the horse, here. I'd argue that readers feel that meter (and, for the vast majority of the public, poetry in general) is strange because they haven't encountered much poetry since their nursery days, and so, if a novice tries their hand at it, they're likely to produce something discouraging and trite in a Seussian meter. On to more pleasant matters: Zack_Gochuck posted:The Widow of the House It's not bad. I think the best bits are the allusions to human symptoms of age and infirmity. Jeza's suggestions sound dandy. Not sure what to suggest aside from kicking some of the phrasing in the rear end. For example, the first line: quote:Shingles gray from decades of sun, It's just kind of... there. Not all that auspicious of a beginning. You start all of the other lines with an adjective, so that might be a way to go. Maybe something like: Sun-blanched shingles, gray and flimsy as singed newsprint (Although Muffin will probably kill me for suggesting a simile.) bairfanx posted:Midwestern Debutante Good stuff. Again, Jeza's points are solid (except the cocoa, which is tres Midwest). I, too, don't really see a need for the narrator's reminiscence; it takes us away from the focus of the scene. But yeah, not much else I would change. This week's assignment in class was to write a response to Rainer Maria Rilke's "First Duino Elegy". Not a big Rilke fan. Nor have I ever tried writing in elegaic couplets, so I'm sure I buggered up the scansion (not used to the concept of "long" and "short" syllables, in place of "stressed" and "unstressed"), but here it is: Chiding a Dead Bohemian Please, let's (just for now) strip out the supernatural--sundry seraphim, cherubim, saints; whatever clamor they cause. Let’s get down to the brass tacks pinning this chanson to your page: Lovers who cleave to their ardor with a desperate need, scorning the world beyond their embrace; the quick scream of the lone heart leaping at human-shaped gaps; small consolation in voids; sour grapes pressed into sweet w(h)ines; how we are better off unmoored-- drifting, our anchor kept well-stowed lest it free itself, plunge aft, sink down into silt, and, embosomed in sediment, find joy. Let us speak of the new dead--not as persons adrift; conscious, enduring past corporeal scope--but as sad husks moldering witlessly, limp, trundled on biers, spent, lost, gone. How you cling to romance, in an age when boys suffocate slowly, rake their throats in the trench, rot on their feet, is beyond my ken. Savagery silenced a whole generation, still you scribble along at your desk: love into air into death. Baubles and homilies. Death's purpose isn't joyous-- well, to the loam and the root, sure, but the corpses don't care. They only donate their nitrogen, blacken and leave what the soil craves. Yes, an enlightened love sweeps out the shadows, but bliss boils for as long as the thermodynamics allow, then it slows, cools finally down to a sweet hand on your brow as you heave, weak and half-naked, your fever assuaged by the kindness of her touch. Fire just consumes; love pays off the arsonist's boss. This whole notion of striving for solitude--personal exile; castles of self, from which strange warblings flit; hermitries' grand foyers; furnaces bright with returned love letters--a mug's game. Show me this chaste heart's dream: sweaty and clenched like a fist, spasming nightly for some distant hand to reach under the sheets; needful, wanton, penned up in peine dure--is this penury pure? Suffering merely for martyrdom's wild-eyed, hungering halo? Rilke, bubbeleh--stop teaching the children to yearn.
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Feb 17, 2013 06:38
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budgieinspector posted:Completely missed what I getting at by focusing on my facetious math. My point was that, contrary to her position, meter and rhyme are not relics of a bygone era--unless you classify all language in that category. They're mnemonic devices which have been with us since before literacy, and aren't likely to go away unless/until written communication moves much further away from speech. The fact that devices have existed doesn't mean they are in fashion. Black and white movies will always be around, but we don't need to make them now that we've discovered how to record in color. It's always an option for any filmmaker, but it will likely seem strange and unnatural to the modern audience. It wouldn't to our grandparents. One of the reasons poetry was so highly structured before literacy was so it was easier to remember. Now we can read. We have discovered new ways and the old ways sometimes appear strange and unnatural to most of us. No one is saying rhyme and meter are gone forever or "irrelevant", at least not in what you've shared from the Oliver book.
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Feb 17, 2013 07:53
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Josh Lark posted:The fact that devices have existed doesn't mean they are in fashion. She isn't talking about fashion. But, honestly, I find the topic of poetic fashion to be about as exciting as the topic of self-adhesive stamps--something for a niche market to bicker over, but of nearly-zero importance to society at large. Hell, I wonder if there's any data on the number of non-enthusiasts who think that real poems employ meter and rhyme versus the number who prefer free verse. Read her screed, if you want; I had to do it for class, and found it to be obnoxious and smug. And now, a poem: Don't blame Seuss or Mother Goose that poems are out of fashion Blame all them of academe who leeched the form of passion Blame the rite-- "Stand up. Recite."-- performed in toneless voices Blame the dry publisher's eye that squeezed out all the choices Blame your peers for shouting, "QUEERS!" at those who scratched a sonnet But don't blame Seuss don't fit the noose o'er Mother Goose's bonnet
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Feb 17, 2013 09:08
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Thanks for the comments; the reminiscence was not actually meant to have the depth that it seemed like it was trying for. I was shooting for generally awkward feelings that would feel better than being a voyeur on this father/daughter interaction, and that was one of the first things that came to mind, having someone ask you directly why you didn't try harder. That said, I clearly see how it would take the reader out of it and shouldn't be there. Thanks!
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Feb 17, 2013 18:09
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Josh Lark posted:The fact that devices have existed doesn't mean they are in fashion. Black and white movies will always be around, but we don't need to make them now that we've discovered how to record in color. It's always an option for any filmmaker, but it will likely seem strange and unnatural to the modern audience. It wouldn't to our grandparents. One of the reasons poetry was so highly structured before literacy was so it was easier to remember. Now we can read. We have discovered new ways and the old ways sometimes appear strange and unnatural to most of us. No one is saying rhyme and meter are gone forever or "irrelevant", at least not in what you've shared from the Oliver book. Are you seriously implying poetry up until the early 20th century was structured simply because people couldn't read? I think you should do some reading of your own on the intellectual context of poetry, and writing in general, from the last millennium or so. It is patronising to compare metrical work from history to black-and-white film, as if somehow they were constrained by their times to their own detriment, and that somehow only we today hold all the answers and understand their feeble limitations. Rhyming poetry does not appear strange and unnatural to "most of us", only to English Lit majors and the incredibly rare poetry buff from outside the field. Believe me. It is the same phenomenon that has most people dismiss entire swathes of modern art as crap, the kind of person that has Art History students shed salty tears into their soymilk lattes. 'Modern' art and 'Modern' poetry simply resulted (in my opinion) from reaching the saturation point of poetry and art within traditional forms. Freeing ourselves from them gave modern poets and artists far more breadth to innovate and experiment, therefore keeping things fresh and interesting. I don't want to rag on at you, especially when you didn't even particularly knock rhyming/structured poetry, but outright dismissal of that kind of poetry is something I come across disturbingly often and it irritates. If anything, I genuinely believe that constraining structures in historic poetry involve far more art than the free verse that is embraced by most poets today, just as painting a bowl of pears is more technical than making GBS threads on a pile of bricks and calling it sculpture. I wouldn't hesitate in telling you which was more 'in fashion' however.
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Feb 17, 2013 20:23
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Jeza posted:Are you seriously implying poetry up until the early 20th century was structured simply because people couldn't read? I think you should do some reading of your own on the intellectual context of poetry, and writing in general, from the last millennium or so. Well I was directly responding to the idea that meter and rhyme have been around longer than literacy, but go ahead and put whatever words in my mouth that you please.
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Feb 18, 2013 07:05
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Jeza posted:Are you seriously implying poetry up until the early 20th century was structured simply because people couldn't read? I think you should do some reading of your own on the intellectual context of poetry, and writing in general, from the last millennium or so. But today we do understand their feeble limitations, they were boring. I mean, I understand what you're saying about constraining structures. But that modern art and modern poetry are just due to saturation and not because their boreishnes and inaccessibility, that's silly. It's as much due to certain democratizations, and when you hear a lot of people speaking out against structured poetry, you might as well consider that a vote. The fact that rhyming poetry does not appear strange and unnatural probably has more to do with people being used to it, because, really, no one speaks in rhyme -- it is strange, and it is unnatural, and it is much more forced, and the only "more art" in it is in trying to make something so forced seem natural.
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Feb 18, 2013 07:55
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Sheepysaysmoo posted:But today we do understand their feeble limitations, they were boring. Stop talking out your rear end.
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Feb 18, 2013 08:30
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boogs posted:Stop talking out your rear end. Sonnets are boring.
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Feb 18, 2013 08:46
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You're illiterate and have worthless, high-handed opinions on things you don't understand.
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Feb 18, 2013 08:48
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boogs posted:You're illiterate and have worthless, high-handed opinions on things you don't understand. You're hoity-toity. Your underwear are probably too tight. You have authoritarian leanings. No, I'm sure you're well read and have stuff and arguments to back up your opinions. I just disagree. I don't think there are rules that insist on people being overfamiliar with literary history and I can't stand T. S. Elliott and his opinions, which are like that. Shel Silverstein, for instance, didn't know the history of poetry and wrote well. If it's high-handed to think that sonnets are boring, I'll be high-handed and right.
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Feb 18, 2013 09:03
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Sheepysaysmoo posted:But today we do understand their feeble limitations, they were boring. Ah. Well, then. Close the books. Forums user Sheepsaysmoo has solved the case. quote:It's as much due to certain democratizations, and when you hear a lot of people speaking out against structured poetry, Jesus. (A) What has happened to poetry over the last century is the exact opposite of democratization. Poetry used to be a popular--even, in some cases, profitable--literary genre. But a variety of factors drove it almost entirely from the mainstream marketplace, and now it resides almost entirely in the hands of academia, through the various university-affiliated presses which still publish verse. (B) I think the idea that "a lot of people [are] speaking out against structured poetry", at least as a percentage of the poetry-reading public, is debatable. As I said earlier, though, I'd be very interested to see information on what people in general consider to be the characteristics of a "proper poem". I wouldn't bet money that free verse would come out on top. quote:no one speaks in rhyme -- it is strange, and it is unnatural, and it is much more forced, and the only "more art" in it is in trying to make something so forced seem natural. I disagree--not about the "no one speaks in rhyme" bit (R.I.P., Nipsy Russell), but about the seeming thrust of your argument and the use of the word "forced". "Forced" anything blows. Making precise decisions seem natural, though, is an art--whether in the application of paint to canvas, chisel to stone, acting, stage and set design, framing and composition in still and motion photography... most folks don't want to see the rough edges of the process; they want the finished product. And, believe it or not, there are still those of us who value the skill involved in ordering a thought around a pre-existing framework in such a way that it appears effortless.
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Feb 18, 2013 09:08
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Sheepysaysmoo posted:You're hoity-toity. Your underwear are probably too tight. You have authoritarian leanings. Hoity-toity? I'm not the one strutting around like a pompous iconoclast, declaring entire forms 'boring' while at the same time admitting an almost perfect lack of familiarity with them. You're suffering from some strange delusion if you think that in this exchange I've been the one behaving like an aristocrat. And don't try to adopt the mantle of democracy for yourself and your opinions. There are not 'a lot of people speaking out against structured poetry'; most people don't give a poo poo about poetry. When most people--and by that I mean people who are neither poets nor otherwise especially interested in literature, i.e., the vast majority of people in the world--hear free verse or 'unstructured' poetry, they think it sucks. Sometimes they're wrong and it doesn't suck. I like quite a bit of free verse poetry, and the last thing I want to happen is for everyone to ape Shakespeare or write in pentameters or rhyming couplets. What's important, though, is that what the majority of people--the democratic public--find so objectionable about free verse is often the lack of the very things you so contemptuously dismiss as aristocratic: metre and rhyme. There's a reason there aren't any free verse sporting or protest chants, why 'Mary had a little lamb' is only interesting to children in a sing-song metre, and why, on the off chance that anyone actually recites a poem outside of a themed pub or lecture room, it'll almost always be a rhyming limerick in a jaunty metre--and it has nothing to do with them being under the dark influence of authoritarian powers, or anti-democratic. It's because they simply don't find it pleasurable. The more 'refined' and 'naturalistic' modern forms of free verse are what people find inaccessible, academic and weirdly pointless. Again, I'm not saying they're right (in fact I think they're wrong, and they're wrong for much the same reasons you are: laziness and lack of imagination, though in their case I wouldn't be nearly so harsh on account of their not having any pretensions to being serious poets.) All I'm arguing against is this self-aggrandizing notion of yours that all poets who came before were involved in some artistically deadening conspiracy of power, and that only now have we all broken free of the fetters of poetic 'structure' to breathe in the cool, cleansing air of the Democracy of Art. An idea which, incidentally, is about as dusty a piece of literary history as you can find. There's no such poet and critic as 'T.S. Elliott'. I wear briefs. Orkin Mang fucked around with this message at 10:30 on Feb 18, 2013 |
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Feb 18, 2013 10:17
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boogs posted:Hoity-toity? I'm not the one strutting around like a pompous iconoclast, declaring entire forms 'boring' while at the same time admitting an almost perfect lack of familiarity with them. You're suffering from some strange delusion if you think that in this exchange I've been the one behaving like an aristocrat. And don't try to adopt the mantle of democracy for yourself and your opinions. There are not 'a lot of people speaking out against structured poetry'; most people don't give a poo poo about poetry. When most people--and by that I mean people who are neither poets nor otherwise especially interested in literature, i.e., the vast majority of people in the world--hear free verse or 'unstructured' poetry, they think it sucks. Sometimes they're wrong and it doesn't suck. I like quite a bit of free verse poetry, and the last thing I want to happen is for everyone to ape Shakespeare or write in pentameters or rhyming couplets. What's wrong with iconoclasm? I did not admit an almost perfect lack of familiarity with them, else how would I know they were boring? I was joking, and see you have stuff and arguments to back up your opinions, and I still just disagree. I didn't say I heard a lot of people (though I definitely do, definitely) speaking out against structure in poetry, Jeza did. I just said that they're being a democratic part of poetry and disliking sonnets appropriately. All of them. How do you know that most of these people in the world think it 'sucks'? I'm not arguing, but, you're just saying. I have as much inexperience with people spouting limericks as you seem to have experience. I was joking about authoritarianism. We were going tit for tat it was cool; you wear briefs, me too, in the summer at least. I don't want people to write in rhyming couplets either, we have a lot of common ground here, we should exploit that. I mean, most of all I don't want people to write in rhyming couplets and to ape Shakespeare. I mean, I just, I was joking about the authoritarian part. I am happy about the "broken free of the fetters of poetic 'structure'". I like quite a bit of free verse poetry (more common ground) and those fetters, if they had their way, I would not get to enjoy it. The democracy of art is the old that is always new again, is what I think.
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Feb 18, 2013 10:59
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Sakae, A poem Sakae means stupid, foolish, ugly, and a nerd. Sakae also means stupid ugy litte frog. Frogs are ugly just like him, Because he talks just like a monkey. But i thiought monakeys are cute. Monkeys are cute, That's why he is not a money. He's an ugy, ugy, super insolent frog.
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Feb 21, 2013 16:12
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Haoma posted:Sakae, A poem  If I have one issue it's that sakae doesn't mean stupid:; it's a type of rice wine.
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Feb 21, 2013 16:23
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