Poetry Not By You (Unless you're published + good)

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Poetry Not By You (Unless you're published + good)

chernobyl kinsman: Mar 18, 2007; a friend of the friendly atom; Soiled Meat

let's have some good proper british poems that every red-blooded man and boy ought to appreciate

Invictus, William Ernest Henley posted:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Puck's Song, Rudyard Kipling posted:

See you the ferny ride that steals
Into the oak-woods far?
O that was whence they hewed the keels
That rolled to Trafalgar.

And mark you where the ivy clings
To Bayham's mouldering walls?
O there we cast the stout railings
That stand around St. Paul's.

See you the dimpled track that runs
All hollow through the wheat?
O that was where they hauled the guns
That smote King Philip's fleet!

Out of the Weald, the secret Weald,
Men sent in ancient years
The horse-shoes red at Flodden Field,
The arrows at Poitiers.

See you our little mill that clacks,
So busy by the brook?
She has ground her corn and paid her tax
Ever since Domesday Book.

See you our stilly woods of oak,
And the dread ditch beside?
O that was where the Saxons broke,
On the day that Harold died!

See you the windy levels spread
About the gates of Rye?
O that was where the Northmen fled,
When Alfred's ships came by!

See you our pastures wide and lone,
Where the red oxen browse?
O there was a City thronged and known,
Ere London boasted a house!

And see you, after rain, the trace
Of mound and ditch and wall?
O that was a Legion's camping-place,
When Caesar sailed from Gaul!

And see you marks that show and fade,
Like shadows on the Downs?
O they are the lines the Flint Men made,
To guard their wondrous towns!

Trackway and Camp and City lost,
Salt Marsh where now is corn;
Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,
And so was England born!

She is not any common Earth,
Water or Wood or Air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2018 20:09

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 16, 2024 19:29

chernobyl kinsman: Mar 18, 2007; a friend of the friendly atom; Soiled Meat

love me a good pem

# ¿ Apr 14, 2018 05:33

chernobyl kinsman: Mar 18, 2007; a friend of the friendly atom; Soiled Meat

Tree Goat posted:

you might like brown's the virginia state colony for epileptics and feebleminded, that was from last year iirc and gives off sexton-y vibes

its really good yeah

# ¿ Apr 23, 2018 22:19

chernobyl kinsman: Mar 18, 2007; a friend of the friendly atom; Soiled Meat

chernobyl kinsman posted:

prose poetry is almost universally maturbatory trash tho. the only exception I can think to make rn is poe's eureka, and then only because it's 1) insane and 2) weirdly spot on about the Big Bang somehow

# ¿ Apr 25, 2018 05:15

chernobyl kinsman: Mar 18, 2007; a friend of the friendly atom; Soiled Meat

Franchescanado posted:

personally i prefer dril's earlier work

# ¿ Apr 26, 2018 19:16

chernobyl kinsman: Mar 18, 2007; a friend of the friendly atom; Soiled Meat

you're thinking of meter in general, not pentameter specifically. 'meter' means any pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables; the 'penta' prefix just means 5 (see also pentagram). you're right that shakespeare usually writes in iambic pentameter; his verse lines have 5 "iambs". an iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

Stress is what word or what syllable in a word you emphasize. Here's an illustration.

Try it: say the words 'emphasis' and 'syllable' out loud. I'm betting you say something like EM-pha-sis and SYL-a-ble; that is, "em" and "syl" are stressed syllables. The humor in that clip comes from Mike Myers instead saying em-PHA-sis and syl-A-ble; he's stressing the wrong syllables.

here i've marked the stressed syllables from a line of shakespeare in bold, so you can see what i mean:

but soft! what light through yonder window breaks

try saying it out loud, and you'll get a feel for how the stresses fall ("but SOFT" instead of "BUT soft"). it comes out as something like "da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM". each of those unstressed-stressed combinations is one iamb.

you can also have Dactylic pentameter but there's no real need to go down that rabbit hole.

different poets will use different meters in different poems; robert frost's The Road Not Taken, for examble, still uses iambs, but uses them in tetrameter, so four iambs per line instead of five.

anyway, defining what is and isn't poetry is one of those questions, like defining what is and isn't art, that has the potential to piss a lot of people off and is simultaneously very boring. there also isn't always a clear line. Billy Collins, the former US Poet Laureate, writes in what's called free verse - verse without any meter or rhyme. you can see an example here. Bukowski also writes in free verse. sometimes you'll find people saying that the only thing that makes a poem a poem is the use of line breaks, but there's something called 'prose poetry' which doesn't even have that. Poe wrote this batshit thing that he titled "Eureka: A Prose Poem", for example, and it doesn't rhyme, stick to a meter, or use line breaks.

OscarDiggs posted:

So; the poems I have looked don't exactly advertise what pentameter they are using so if I opened a poetry book to a random page and started reading one, how would I know how it's supposed to be read?

just read it, and read it slowly. you'll find yourself falling into the rhythm of the poem naturally.

you could definitely pick up a book, like Perinne's sound and sense, that will teach you all about different kinds of meters and whatnot, but i really don't think that's necessary to understand a poem or derive enjoyment from it. you can find a lot of pleasure and meaning in Ozymandias without knowing that it's a sonnet in iambic pentameter.

chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Sep 7, 2018

# ¿ Sep 7, 2018 19:52

chernobyl kinsman: Mar 18, 2007; a friend of the friendly atom; Soiled Meat

professional shitposters you mean

# ¿ Sep 7, 2018 20:24

chernobyl kinsman: Mar 18, 2007; a friend of the friendly atom; Soiled Meat

im actually just going to trick him into reciting the Shahada and receiving the blessed light of Islam

# ¿ Sep 7, 2018 23:54

chernobyl kinsman: Mar 18, 2007; a friend of the friendly atom; Soiled Meat

CestMoi posted:

Songs of innocence and experience are a pretty nice intro if youre stupid but if you want the primo poo poo just read Jerusalem (the book not the shite song)

ya this but also read it on http://blakearchive.org/ so you can read them as they were meant to be read: as part of a bugfuck crazy series of prints engraved and inked by a lunatic

here are the songs of innocence, for example

# ¿ Sep 8, 2018 02:37

chernobyl kinsman: Mar 18, 2007; a friend of the friendly atom; Soiled Meat

no one gives a. e. housman's very goth poem 'her strong enchantments failing' enough credit for how kickin rad it is

quote:

Her strong enchantments failing,
Her towers of fear in wreck,
Her limbecks dried of poisons
And the knife at her neck,

The Queen of air and darkness
Begins to shrill and cry,
'O young man, O my slayer,
To-morrow you shall die.'

O Queen of air and darkness,
I think 'tis truth you say,
And I shall die tomorrow;
But you will die to-day.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2019 07:03

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 16, 2024 19:29

chernobyl kinsman: Mar 18, 2007; a friend of the friendly atom; Soiled Meat

Tree Goat posted:

Maggie Nelson, "A Misunderstanding"

this sucks

# ¿ May 20, 2019 05:34

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Poetry Not By You (Unless you're published + good)