|
gently caress it I'm not doing anything with this MFA and I know just enough Lorca to be dangerous. I'm in. Give me a line.
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2020 06:53
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 00:26 |
|
|
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2020 00:55
|
|
|
flerp posted:week 8 judgement Aw poo poo.  As for losing the trail, yeah, it's sort of a thing I do sometimes. It's something I try to avoid, and yet. sephiRoth IRA posted:Interprompt: all your coworkers drank all my jagermeister you're alcoholics
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2020 05:11
|
|
|
Week 9: Haibun A quick description stolen straight-up from Wikipedia: "A haibun may record a scene, or a special moment, in a highly descriptive and objective manner or may occupy a wholly fictional or dream-like space. The accompanying haiku may have a direct or subtle relationship with the prose and encompass or hint at the gist of what is recorded in the prose sections. ... Generally, a haibun consists of one or more paragraphs of prose written in a concise, imagistic style, and one or more haiku." (Emphasis mine.) Bashō the biggest proponent of the haibun form. So! First, you write a prose poem bit. Then, you write a haiku bit that is related, in a way, to the prose poem bit. It's deceptively difficult to do well. I'm not going to give any parameters or prompting beyond the previous. (I will, however, suggest a single paragraph-ish-sized piece of prose and a single haiku stanza just to make it easier.) Signups thru Jan 29 and submissions through Jan 31.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2020 05:39
|
|
|
Aw yiss, it begins. Reminder that the signup deadline is tomorrow (11:59pm).
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2020 23:17
|
|
|
Four entries this go-round: sephiRoth IRA Saucy_Rodent Anomalous Amalgam cda We're now closed, and have til 11:59pm of the 31st. Good luck have fun.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2020 08:12
|
|
|
Okay, first off, winner is: Saucy_Rodent! Yay! Crits, in chronological order: cda I'm mostly a fan of this poem; my only quibble with it is that it veers a little too far into telling than showing. I think I would have nibbled each sentence in half or so. There's some really great imagery, and the really lively bits get pulled down or lost in the less lively stuff. For example, I would have trimmed the second stanza to quote:The forest opens in front of us, the sugar maple and yellow birch spaced quite wide between more boulders sephiRoth IRA I don't think you needed to worry about being trite with this one, not quite. There's just a smidge of over-explanation, just enough to make me wonder how much is needed. I really enjoyed the use of paradox--Mount Hood vs. the sky, the sun vs the stone, heat vs. cold--and how those parallel the paradox of absence and presence. I like the interplay between the prose and the haiku, but I'm not sure I'm down with "Songbird choir heralds," because I feel like it's right on the edge of tipping into cliché. I like the audio image of songbirds and "my ascent," maybe something else for the verb. An emotional poem that reminds me a bit of Kenneth Rexroth's "Delia Rexroth" though obviously not as wide-ranging out of necessity and formal considerations. Saucy_Rodent Simple and evocative at the same time, I think this is exemplary of the form. It's not too concerned with telling us monologues or making its own meaning known, it's a moment of travel told well. The prose section has some pleasant moments of alliteration, which come and go without making themselves particularly obvious. Here, too, I enjoy the paradox of the marble vs. the concrete, of life vs death. Most of all, the image of a small group of friends eating lunch on the dome of a ruined mosque seems so basic and pleasant and human. Honestly, my only real complaint is with the choice of the verb "mocking," but the rest of the poem more than makes up for it, and I'm willing to go along with it for commitment to conceit. Anomalous Amalgam The biggest thing holding me back on this poem is that it goes abstract so often. Sticking with the concrete images is really necessary in the imagist style, and you end up explaining the metaphorical content of your images, which sucks the life out of them. I'm also not quite sure about how I'm supposed to feel about the speaker's overall emotional state, considering "missing home" contrasted with the haiku. The haiku, incidentally, is what feels the most authentic here, and with some pruning of the prose section, I think it would feel more earned, especially since the concrete images are so good. Overall, great job by everyone. All of the imagery from everyone is so strong, and there's a definite feeling of aware in each, in good haiku/haibun tradition. Congrats, again, to Saucy_Rodent! rickiep00h fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Feb 2, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2020 02:24
|
|
|
sure, in
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2020 05:49
|
|
|
I'm planning on rolling with the Richard Hugo-approved "ten syllables who cares about stresses/accents" form, m'self.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2020 21:17
|
|
|
I Wonder All the Time if I Would Stop Walking at the Lakeshore or Collect Riprap in My Pockets I think I would like to die in an art museum, milling in Toulouse-Lautrecs and Monets, then sitting on a bench to admire a bulbous Rodin and simply falling asleep. Just resting my eyes for a moment. Is this what self-exile is supposed to do? I’d like to at least see some things on the way. The thought of drowning is frightening, I admit. Just walking ‘til I need a long expository nap seems much more pleasant. We always talk about inertia, never moving but expecting.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2020 08:40
|
|
|
Aw I had one, I just didn't get to my computer til now. I have dishonored my family and dishonored my cow.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2020 04:01
|
|
|
In the interest of not being a snooty elitist I'm going going to respond except to say that I don't think we understand poetic formalism (or line breaks!) in remotely the same terms. For my prompt, I'd like to consider genre this time: documentary poetry. Pulling from Joseph Harrington's essay "Docupoetry and Archive Desire": quote:Usually “docupoetry” designates poetry that (1) contains quotations from or reproductions of documents or statements not produced by the poet and (2) relates historical narratives, whether macro or micro, human or natural. Clearly, such writing is part of a long tradition; without even going back to Virgil or Lucretius, one can see that the poems of Pope and Dryden had everything to do with documenting (with a very definite point of view). To put it another way, documentary poetics takes original documents that are traditionally not considered of literary interest--histories, newspaper stories, government records, receipts, all that personal ephemera--and crafts a poem out of it. For a personal example, my thesis advisor, Tony Trigilio, wrote a book of poetry called Historical Diary (referenced in Harrington's essay mentioned above), which quotes and reinterprets Lee Harvey Oswald's diary from his time in Russia. Another example would be Nicole Cooley's The Afflicted Girls, which use as a starting point the judicial records of the Salem Witch Trials. Like, the actual records and testimonies. A more ambitious version of the idea might be Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder, which creates an investigation into her aunt's murder through newspaper stories, police reports, letters, and interviews. It is, I think, a kind of ekphrasis--art directly inspired by other art. What I'm interested in, then, is what is interesting to you. Find a subject you think is worth exposing to poetic consideration. While you don't have to say what it is, or what your sources are, I think it would be interesting to see where you're pulling from, whether in the poem or not. For an example, here's Maggie Nelson from Jane: A Murder: Of Her Blood By her second year of college, her parents told Jane she was no longer welcome in their home. That same year Jane wrote in her journal: Mother, the Christian hypocrite and I, of her blood. Under her influence--how much am I-- and I love her-- at least if I can love at all I do. I'll give a deadline of 11:59 Feb 16 for this, no deadline on signups, just say if you're in or not so I know how many to expect. Form does not matter, write whatever you want in whatever way you want in a way that works as a poem for you.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2020 00:46
|
|
|
Azza Bamboo posted:Firstly, in. You're welcome to add or subtract whatever you want. In the Nelson example, she gives some temporal context. In the Cooley book, she takes on the personas of those she quotes and gives them new internal monologues. In Harrington's poetry, he often attempts to bridge his own impressions into the work. (His book Things Come On is a juxtaposition of the Watergate scandal and his mother's coinciding battle with cancer.) My own experience in it was trying to arrange various bits of things from the early Trump administration--tweets, news commentary, photographs, etc--into something more considered. (Ultimately I think I failed because 1. the reality of the whole thing is absurd to the point I have problems imparting form to it, and 2. I feel like being this close to it right now gives it a legitmacy it doesn't deserve... both of which are issues that were discussed while writing them.) In any case, I approach it a bit like an essay, but, like all poetic n poo poo.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2020 01:55
|
|
|
Maugrim posted:Please do school me, I'm here to learn! PM me if you like. Or don't. Central. sephiRoth IRA posted:No don't PM! This thread would be an appropriate place for discussion. Okay so! Everything in the writing of poetry is arbitrary! Several forms have nothing to do with metrical feet. The easy, obvious one is haiku. But pantoum, villanelle, sestina, and several others have nothing to do with meter, and are still formal. Form is a matter of intent, an arbitrary constraint, a means to an end. An abecedarian is just as much a way to make an expression as counting syllables and stresses, and as far as meters are concerned, there are enough "allowed" substitutions in metrical feet to make adherence... arbitrary. Syllabics, therefore, are as important as any other formal consideration. As for line breaks: incredibly lovely English teachers love to tell students that line breaks are unimportant, just read through them! This is hilariously wrong. White space is an organizational/emphatic consideration. My "nice" "prose" wouldn't be near as nice (and indeed wasn't) before being broken into lines and then re-written to conform to the ten syllable count. So what of emphatic consideration? When making a line jump, your brain is automatically going to create a space AND an emphasis on the first syllable/word of the next line. Robert Bly (who I'm not a huge fan of, personally, but a fan of a good many of his friends) called this jump a sort of leaping spark of energy. Metrics and rhyme might pull you through a line, but the breaks are what pull you down the page. A lovely break--and I'll admit to a couple in my submission--is far more noticeable than a good one. My primary undergrad professor was adamant about not ending lines with crap-rear end words like "and" and "of" and poo poo like that, but sometimes that's wrong, too... personally I like the bad breaks in my submission, because the shift in emphasis is in service of the content. I'd probably lose that argument in a workshop, but I don't care. All this is, of course, why I don't particularly enjoy metric forms (and indeed a number of forms in general), because I'm loving bad at them (for starters) and because I'm entirely too impatient to hammer the expression into a pattern without it sounding like absolute unnatural poo poo. There's a quote near the beginning of Richard Hugo's book on writing The Triggering Town--which I highly suggest to literally everyone to read about four times (because that's how long it took me, a particular sort of idiot, to get it)--that goes like this: quote:When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music. If you believe the first, you are making your job very difficult and you are . . . limiting the writing of poems to something done only by the very witty and clever, such as Auden. Anywho. That's, like, the extremely short version of a creative writing minor and MFA in poetry with some very, very specific people as mentors and peers. As with all things on the internet, ymmv.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2020 07:49
|
|
|
sephiRoth IRA posted:I am envious of your MFA. Don't be. I was one of those idiots that knowingly and intentionally took out a shitpile of (federal, thank god) loans to get it, and my plan to pay them back is to wait until the collapse of the US financial system or my own death, whichever comes first. I loved every moment of my program and my professors, advisor, and cohort were all great, but I have basically destroyed my future in order to have access to them. You might want to check your local library or nearest post-secondary institution to see if there are any workshops or classes you could hop in on or audit, or check low-residency or otherwise flexible programs. You don't need a degree, just patience, practice, and the ability to get rejected dozens of times a year while receiving little to no money for the things you write that do get accepted because there's a billion poets, a million journals, and no money for or in either of them. As for my poetics in general, four books have been absolute rocks for me: Hugo's The Triggering Town, Jack Spicer's The House that Jack Built, Stephen King's On Writing, and Jeff Vandermeer's Wonderbook. Honorable mention to William Stafford's Writing the Australian Crawl. All of them are pretty straightforward excepting the Spicer, by nature of Jack Spicer having been a drunk, entirely too smart, and insane, but the lectures that comprise the book have some extremely good metaphors to the process in them. Anyway, I don't really want to derail this thread too badly from the writing and critiquing, so if anyone has specific questions I can take them in PMs, but most of my responses will probably be some kind of variation of "Truth be told most of my influences are comic books, 'The Waste Land,' and remix culture."
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2020 09:43
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2020 22:55
|
|
|
How bout Mondays for deadlines then? That makes it the 17th.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2020 06:08
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2020 09:37
|
|
|
I didn't say anyone had to follow it, just that it exists. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2020 16:42
|
|
|
Subs closed! Winner is cda! Crits tomorrow!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2020 07:30
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
sephiRoth IRA posted:Congrats cda (also autocorrect hates your username) *scrabbles to edit crit post*
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2020 22:29
|
|
|
Azza Bamboo posted:Ach that's my fault. I didn't realise documentary meant documenting a person's experience. I thought it was just documenting a subject, like nature documentaries or there's even a documentary on the history of Yamaha in the front of my motorcycle's service manual. I was trying to co-opt the style of that kind of "for your information" documentary to share something I think people need to know. It probably borders on mockumentary at that point. Here's the thing: in a larger project, like a book based on transportation workers, or looking into the specifics of a particular car accident, or some such, it would totally fit in. One of the members of my grad cohort did a docupoetry project for her thesis which investigated campus sexual harassment, and while it interpolated several specific cases, it also just straight up quoted from Title IX and some very famous open letters supporting faculty. As an individual poem without context, though, it just didn't quite do it for me. I did quite like it.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2020 06:18
|
|
|
in
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2020 21:17
|
|
|
William Frederick Durst Everyone says that Fred is awful, kind of a tool, but Fred thinks Fred is pretty awesome. Fred skateboards, Fred is into the tattoo scene. Fred gets to date hot chicks who say Fred never dated them, so Fred gets away with it. Fred made red ballcaps cool again. Fred is friends with a bunch of cool people: Fred has been the guest of Snoop and Run DMC. Fred is a filmmaker, even worked with John Travolta, who says people miss Fred’s purity and intent. Fred has three multiplatinum albums. Fred’s working on a new one, things are looking up for Fred. Fred’s been divorced three times, but it ain’t for lack of trying. Fred thinks Putin is a pretty swell guy, but Fred can’t go into Ukraine for a while. That’s okay, Fred has better things to do.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2020 19:10
|
|
|
Thanks! I was honestly having a hard time coming up with anyone because I try to be be as genuine as I can and I just don't like giving space to things or people I don't agree with (unless it's in an effort to defeat or insult them.) I also don't agree with a lot of those ideas of an artist's impartiality, as it tends to lead to a lot of moral ambiguity and, intentional or not, the occasional genuine support of people who think you're being serious. It's not a debate I care to enter into, and it's a really easy cop out for a lot of lovely people to spout their lovely beliefs. Which is roundabout way of saying I should have sat this one out. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2020 18:56
|
|
|
Y'know what, sure. I'm in.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 1, 2020 22:08
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 00:26 |
|
|
‘petative nonsense words winter cold, summer heat twenty-three tilt degrees seasonal cause cyclical changes that seem like they never end all this depends upon natural laws
|
|
#
¿
Jun 15, 2020 16:11
|
|