Daily Poetry Thread 2K16: so i've been working on my freeform sonnets

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Daily Poetry Thread 2K16: so i've been working on my freeform sonnets

bawk: Mar 31, 2013

What fresh hell is this?

Hey yeah, so I've been looking for a place to dump out poetry that isn't a tumblr of five people who just absentmindedly like my posts, when I discovered the hot new take on writing threads that was the Daily Poetry 2013 thread. Which is locked for archiving. And no replacements have been made. So here's a fresh one for 2016, for us to gradually critique each other's skills at stacking words in stanzas!

Are there any special rules?

No, gently caress that. You're all adults, just post your poo poo as you write it and critique others as you want. I want to make one thing very apparent though: THIS IS NOT A THREAD FOR YOUR FINISHED POEMS, SPECIFICALLY. THIS IS A THREAD FOR YOU TO DUMP YOUR HEAD OUT SO WE CAN COLLECTIVELY PARTICIPATE IN AN EDITING PROCESS THAT BENEFITS US ALL. It's a daily thread, this isn't supposed to be a place of pristine poems that glisten with perfect meter and rhyme schemes, it's just a place for you to participate to keep your writing juices flowing.

Are you going to critique every poem that is posted, like others said they would?

AaaaaahahahahahahahahaahahHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
_{_{To be honest, if this thread stays slow, I just might.}}

I have a poem that I wrote a little while ago that I want critiques on, that I did not literally write today. What should I do?

I'm literally about to post one exactly like that lmbo. Just do it, friend.

This is not a thread for high brow wankery about who is a good or bad poet. Take posts as they come, critique them as they are.

If you are posting a poem which requires context or explanation, please do so in italics, like a fancy person before the poem. This way we know what your specific comments are, separated from the poem, and also I can pretend that a fancy french person is explaining the finer subtext of your works.

Otherwise, if you are about to ask whether or not you should post something, I have some primo advice for you, right off the bat:

:justpost:

# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 07:32

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 16:38

bawk: Mar 31, 2013

Immigrants

"I don�t want no loving Somalians living in my state,� he says,
white knuckles wrapped around a black coffee.
The irony is lost on him.

�Bunch of lazy no-good idiots if you ask me,� another grunts.
It is 10:30 on a Tuesday morning.

�They lie, and cheat. You can�t trust any of them.�
He is renting a motel room tonight by the hour.

�I hear they�re a bunch of rapists.
I�m worried about my daughter living so close to them.�
His wife owns a different shade of foundation depending on her bruises.

"At least I can provide for my family.
They just want to suck on the government's teat."
This will be the seventh consecutive year
that his government insurance
will cover his farm's drastically low yield.

�They just want to move in and take over.
In a few years, they�ll be everywhere.
If we don�t say no now, then this country is going to go to poo poo.�

The men sip their coffee,
and nod in quiet certainty,
on a land called Dakota

# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 07:38

bawk: Mar 31, 2013

Broenheim posted:

Congratulations, you have written a STDH poem! This has absolutely no nuance to the subject matter whatsoever. So it feels like you are just writing stereotypes in order to like say stereotypes are bad? There's no uniqueness to this story. What's the point? "Racism is bad and racists are bad people." But like, that's it. And you're presenting it in such a boring and generic manner. There's nothing in this poem that feels original. It's all just parroting ideas of the generic hick racist and you dont even show that well.

Now, I'm not a big traditional poet. I write free verse when I do write poetry, but I'm not like a big expert on meter or beats and stuff. I just kind of read the poem to see if it flows well for me, or if it doesn't flow well, there's an intentional reason why. These just feel like sentences strung together without any regard as to how a reader will actually read them. It's choppy and doesn't flow like, at all. Like that fourth paragraph, each line just exists on its own. I feel like you didn't have any consideration of how your reader would read the poem and as such, it lacks that flow that helps make a poem more effective.

Lastly, I think images are very important in poems, especially if you're going to do free verse. Your poem needs something, and racist stereotype conversations aren't enough. I need to see, or feel, or touch, or hear, or taste something in poems. You have a few that gives me images, like "white knuckles wrapped around a black coffee" and "His wife owns..." Personally, I think those images are kind of weak. The whole white knuckles/black coffee doesn't really work because you don't wrap your knuckles around the coffee, but like, the actual mug it's in, so then I'm left to make up some kind of mug. The "His wife owns..." could work stronger if you made it more specific like "His wife pulls out her pile (i dont know makeup terminology im sry) of foundation and tries to find the right one for the bruise." That doesn't flow well and I'd edit it to make have a better flow, but now I got the wife actually doing thing and a more vivid image in my head.

Anyways, yeah, thanks for making the thread, I might post some poems later.

I'm very dumb and should have done my own italicized background for the poem, or find a way to include it in the poem itself!

I work at a poo poo gas station in a hick town, and a group of old farmers sit in from around 8 AM to 11 AM bullshitting about politics, and this was a series of things they've talked about over a few weeks when Somalian refugees became a hot topic in the newspapers. The attribution of things they said don't line up exactly to people in the conversation, obviously, but it's just (barely) paraphrased sentiments they all shared in their conversation. The other lines are also true facts, they're just mostly about other people from around and just outside of town who share these same opinions, tied together into the same setting.

You're right, though, I'm less and less satisfied with this the more I read it. I'm going to chop through this and restructure a lot of it, because I can tell what I'm trying to do with it, but it's divorced of pretty much all context if I have to type a huge paragraph just to explain it.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 22:27

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