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I get it Harry, I have only been dabbling in poetry for around the last year, but have been a bit more serious in the last 2 months. I find myself having poetic epiphanies at the strangest times. I sleep maybe 4 hours a night, so I don't dream much.
Angeline
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Funny how you just start to see the poetry in life everywhere once you begin thinking about it, eh?
I dream in music all the time. My dreams almost always have a soundtrack, sometimes stuff I recognize, sometimes not. Poems not so much, but when I am in periods of intense writing I think in poetry. It's as if I can't turn it off. It usually doesn't last for more than a week or two at a time, but I love when it happens.
It has been a strange phenomenon for me, I work a lot of hours, and my back ground is not what would normally lend itself to or interlock with poetry, but I am enjoying myself immensely, despite the fact that my poetry is middling in mediocrity at best!
Just throwing this out to anyone, what triggered your urge to be poetic, by that I mean all facets of poetry, the reading, writing and attempting to understand it?
Just throwing this out to anyone, what triggered your urge to be poetic, by that I mean all facets of poetry, the reading, writing and attempting to understand it?
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bogusagain
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School poetry I suppose. In English lessons at school I was captured by such poems as Coleridge's Xanadu and Tales Of The Ancient Mariner, Lord Byron's Don Juan. The idea that a poet could be mad, bad and dangerous to know for some reason delighted me. Not forgeting Blake. I hated his poem Jerusalem which is a sort of alternative English anthem (you'll know this if you are a Brit). Then I found out Jerusalem was a sort of protest poem or even a revolutionary poem and Blake was a Bonopartist, which in those days was like being a Marxist in the 60s fighting colonial rule, only Bonopartists saw Bonoparte as someone who would free them from oppressive aristocratic rule. As we know now, Bonoparte would change nothing, he was just your typical political general on the make or even just typical politician. Then there was the war poets, not all were anti-war of course but the ones I liked were. So really it was as much who the poets were and what they believed in as to how they wrote.
I left school at 15 and went to work at the local coal mine. The choice was coal mine or steel works and little else unless you travelled and that didn't improve any job potential anyway and probably got you less money. I was surprised to find how many miners read or wrote poetry. I shouldn't have been surprised, the generation I'm talking about had few life chances and didn't have a chance to be educated so there was a big thing in educating yourself. Incidently I was wild at school and left as soon as I could which made my parents mad but they accepted I would be wasting my time staying on at school. Anyway, I got to reading a lot of poetry at work and then someone gave me a novel, Kerouac's On The Road and decided the mine wasn't for me, packed in my job, realised there was no way of travelling across American and decided Europe would do instead and ended up travelling round Europe and the middle east for three years. I more or less forgot about poetry but I would keep a note book I would draw and write phrases in, I had the bug but I was just a carrier.
It was twenty-twenty five years later when I happned upon Lit I started writing. However, I can't overcome my laziness. I often write a poem and never get round to editing it, no matter how good the potential. Though I am trying to discipline myself and work through my better poems. Though over the years I've deleted hundreds of poems, many I thought were good, much to my regret. Though I've done the same with my art work, destroyed everything and started again in a new vein, something completely different. I suppose it all is about taking up time, distracting one from life as much as concentrating oneself to life.
Eer.....I never meant to write that much!
Oh there was one important influence I left out, The Mersey poets. At the end of the 60s they turned poetry into pop and made it widespread in Britain. The Poetry Society disowned them, saying they weren't writing 'real' poetry but I think they were just jealous. Where the academic poets were just selling a handful of books, to each other, family, friends and to a few academies and libraries, the pop poets were selling books in thousands, something never heard of before, well not for a long long time. So poetry did become very popular for awhile and it was impossible to miss.
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I started in poetry as a lover of fiction looking down upon Keats, Shelley and any of the poets I came across currently writing. After reading what I thought were the core novels of English speaking world I still felt inadequate. So I read the collected works of a bunch of poets and thought I could do as well as most of them. I'm still working on that, for about ten years now.
In reading a few hundred poems of each author I only found maybe half-a-dozen from each that I would deem great. I wasn't interested in the good poems, I wanted to find the undeniable gems. Rimbaud put the least amount of effort into writing great poems. Frost and Auden were two that I thought put the most effort and had the worst return on investment. Since, I've changed my opinion on what greatness means and have grown to love and respect the work of many poets living and dead. I still hate prose poetry though. I'm most passionate about hating prose poetry. edit: and the Boston Red Sox.
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HarryHill
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What an interesting thread this has become. Reading, I find myself stopping and thinking 'really?' as personal experience and growth are revealed in frank and honest language. I feel as if I have been short changed in my own journey here.
Poetry learned by rote in high school, a battered red hardback copy of Kippling, salvaged from a donation to a local library, even more battered before it disappeared into stacks of sci-fi paperbacks, my total experience for forty years.
Then the bad thing came and I descended into madness and depression for two years, perhaps not a clinical description of my trials, but close enough for me. I emerged singed but sentient and began writing a book that I considered calling 'Therapy'; another four years passed. No one wanted to read it.
That led me to Lit. I was being read now, and while waiting for the views and comments, I found NP's, read, posted some of my own, then found this forum and the kind poets that fed my questions with answers and links to a world of literary connections that fills my grey days with the desire to improve, evolve, and write.
A formal thanks to all here; you may have saved my life.
Poetry learned by rote in high school, a battered red hardback copy of Kippling, salvaged from a donation to a local library, even more battered before it disappeared into stacks of sci-fi paperbacks, my total experience for forty years.
Then the bad thing came and I descended into madness and depression for two years, perhaps not a clinical description of my trials, but close enough for me. I emerged singed but sentient and began writing a book that I considered calling 'Therapy'; another four years passed. No one wanted to read it.
That led me to Lit. I was being read now, and while waiting for the views and comments, I found NP's, read, posted some of my own, then found this forum and the kind poets that fed my questions with answers and links to a world of literary connections that fills my grey days with the desire to improve, evolve, and write.
A formal thanks to all here; you may have saved my life.
Angeline
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I think many people who write poetry (or just artists in general) struggle with depression. I did for many years, partly because I suffered a lot of traumatic loss early in my life, but also because I think that I have that personality. I get sensitive and tend to over think things. Poetry is, in part, a way for me to cope with that. I still can easily spiral into it but don't much anymore (mainly imo because of exercise and meditating, both of which help me more than any drug ever did).
When I came to lit my life was not in a good place. My marriage was in a shambles and I needed something different in my life. Badly, at the time. I had always loved writing and was an English major in college (though as I've said, I was more into fiction then), but before I found this place I had no one with whom to discuss my love of writing. In spite of that I began writing poetry more seriously in the mid-1990s, mainly because I was away from home a lot on business trips and so had time to pursue it. Then, when I did find lit (first by searching for stories and then joining the chat room and meeting Lauren Hynde, who brought me to the forum), it was so exciting to have people to write with and talk to about it.
I met some of the most amazing people here in those first years: Wicked Eve, Judo, smithpeter, darkmaas, tristesse, Senna Jawa, Champagne, Annaswirls, Rybka, Neonurotic, Boo Merengue--too many to mention them all here. And I was exposed to so many different ways of writing. I had never even written a sonnet before I came here, but people helped me learn. And of course best of all I met eagleyez, who is currently in the next room, reading. And we talk about writing every day! So this place has been very good to me and a lot of what I try to do now is an attempt to give back some of what I've received.
So I do understand.
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Wow we are a deeply emotoional bunch lol
It is good to see such candid honesty and so in that vein I'll answer my own question,
I had a horrific child hood full of violence, drugs, abuse all the fun little goodies in life that give you a kick start to your day. Watching your mother get beaten, your brothers battered. 17 different primary schools.
I started reading as a form of escapism in my early teens 13 to be exact, I was so fucked up emotionally and mentally crippled I couldn't relate to anyone unless it was through violence. then I hit drugs pretty hard, woo way to get your life on track....
I had a pscyhotic episode at 16 and nearly slit my best friends throat coz I thought he was laughing at me, needless to say we aren't friends any more. I was such a charismatic individual. after that I took stock of my life and realized I was perpetuating five generations of my families crap and I couldn't let myself be that person. I started to actually go to school not high on pot, or having taken some other illicit substance and found I actually enjoyed english. failed highschool though left my run a little too late lol.
Took up bouncing as an occupation as an outlet to my darker urges, at 18 fighting grown men is a massive reality check! during my stint as a bouncer I started writing dirty text messages to women that I had gotten the numbers of, to the average girl they were pretty good, I got a few praises for my lurid descriptions as well as.....you all have good imaginations.
I found lit about a year ago took a look around and thought these are my kind of people, got more into the poetry than the stories. wrote my own posted it got shot down, HarryHill himself actually commented on it which helped me not torch my computer and stop writing, so thanks back Harry. I came back in the last two months to actually try and learn this beautiful craft.
It is good to see such candid honesty and so in that vein I'll answer my own question,
I had a horrific child hood full of violence, drugs, abuse all the fun little goodies in life that give you a kick start to your day. Watching your mother get beaten, your brothers battered. 17 different primary schools.
I started reading as a form of escapism in my early teens 13 to be exact, I was so fucked up emotionally and mentally crippled I couldn't relate to anyone unless it was through violence. then I hit drugs pretty hard, woo way to get your life on track....
I had a pscyhotic episode at 16 and nearly slit my best friends throat coz I thought he was laughing at me, needless to say we aren't friends any more. I was such a charismatic individual. after that I took stock of my life and realized I was perpetuating five generations of my families crap and I couldn't let myself be that person. I started to actually go to school not high on pot, or having taken some other illicit substance and found I actually enjoyed english. failed highschool though left my run a little too late lol.
Took up bouncing as an occupation as an outlet to my darker urges, at 18 fighting grown men is a massive reality check! during my stint as a bouncer I started writing dirty text messages to women that I had gotten the numbers of, to the average girl they were pretty good, I got a few praises for my lurid descriptions as well as.....you all have good imaginations.
I found lit about a year ago took a look around and thought these are my kind of people, got more into the poetry than the stories. wrote my own posted it got shot down, HarryHill himself actually commented on it which helped me not torch my computer and stop writing, so thanks back Harry. I came back in the last two months to actually try and learn this beautiful craft.
Palba_Noruda
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okay, i'll go first then
this is a general question directed at you poets with college/uni education that relates particularly to creative writing:
were there particular poems/poets you can pinpoint that, when you read them for the first time in the course of your studies, gave you a real moment of 'wow, so that's how it's done!'? did you feel a change come about in the way you wrote due to this landmark event, or was any effect more subtle and slow to make itself felt?
There are two poems that stand out for me that I read in college. First, in an English course with a unit on war poetry, was Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori. In the second half he describes the skin sagging off the face of one of his fellow soldiers due to a gas attack. Whew. I can remember the classroom I was in when I read it, and this was close to fifteen years ago.
Another poem I recall enjoying was Whitman's When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer. It's relatively short for Whitman, not particularly in his "charismatic" style, and definitely more pointed than his usual, but I remember connecting to the conflict between the mystical experience of life versus the academic experience. The conflict between head and heart. Apropos for a poetically inclined young college student, I reckon.
This is a great post, bogusagain. Thank you. I recall having tried to make this point--in a rather clumsy fashion--years ago here in Buddy's post about what makes a poem good.
You suggest considering poetry as sculpture or painting or music. I consider viewing poetry as a home. My relationship to my home is quite unlike any other person's relationship to same. And while the person who drew up the plans and the people who built it certainly had in mind how I would use it--and they certainly put some of themselves into their efforts--I don't think they specifically acted (wrote) in such a way that they meant to create the specific subjective feeling I am having now sitting in my home.
If an old man has the chance to return to his childhood home, and he somehow finds an old toy of his there, a toy he had forgotten about for decades, imagine the flood of memory and nostalgia and meanings that the old toy would evoke. The people who originally created the toy all those years ago did not imbue said toy with those meanings, but yet there they are.
The two poems I mention above, the Whitman and the Owens, are not like my home example or the toy example. They are much more pointed and specific in the ideas and feelings they are trying to get across to the reader. This is a popular style of poetry, and a style many people employ on this forum.
I prefer a different style. I have been a commercial writer for a good nine years, and I believe this spills into the writing I have done here in the past. The specific purpose of my writing here is to hold the reader's attention. In order to hold the readers attention, it is necessary that I put some part of myself into the poem--just as the architect and builders of the home must, at the very least, put some portion of their concentration, their mind, and their energy into their work if they want it to stay standing for ninety years (the age of the house I am sitting in now). The attempt to hold the readers attention (in a sense, hypnotize or put a spell on the reader) and putting myself into the poem results in poems that have some bit of story or some bit of meaning that the reader can grasp onto, but the main goal is to imbue it with the minimal amount of specific meaning necessary to still hold the attention. That way, the reader is responsible for filling in the maximal amount of detail or meaning from her own experience.
I believe Kafka worked this way at times. And the film maker David Lynch. Commercial writers work this way. To commercial writers, the obsession with trying to communicate some specific experience of the self comes off as self indulgent in the extreme. In commercial writing, the focus is on an object or phenomena that resides outside of the writer. The only bit of the writer that is communicated is the minimal amount necessary to hold the reader's attention and to give the reader an understanding of the product. If a commercial writer tries to insert more of herself into a piece of commercial writing, it is very easy to spot as self-indulgent, inappropriate, and inefficient.
Hypno-therapists work this way, too, I believe. Hypnotherapy is all about the hypnotic subject's experience. The hypnotist provides only as much of himself as is necessary to induce the experience in the subject. It's why a stage hypnotist calls volunteers to the stage. If he was going to only communicate things about himself, he'd be a stand-up comedian.
It's about reverence and trust in the soul of the reader.
Amen.
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twelveoone
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interesting, I don't disagree, but Rimbaud had the least depth and the psychology was the madness of me-ism, Frost on the other hand was very complex in his portrayals. I also think he had a better end.
...but as far as ROI (return on investment) goes, and discarding the great, that would have to be Maya Angelou and Rod McKuen.
butters
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don't know how i missed this but wow! it is beautiful. and i absolutely get the connection. i wonder if men feel it as much? not saying they wouldn't, just wondering.When I was in college I was studying English literature and my interests were really in the 19-century novel. I had written poems since childhood but in college I was more into writing literary criticism (well the way I wanted to do it). I figured I'd end up teaching and doing the traditional lit crit publishing route. Anyway I found this book in the college library of poems by women from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. I was taking a Women's lit class that semester and was probably thinking I might be able to use it for some project.
In the book I read this poem and I was, as my buddy darkmaas would say, "gobsmacked." I made a copy of that poem and kept it in my wallet for 18 years until it fell apart. There's something about it that is so essentially feminine and honest (not contrived) to me. I felt like I made a real connection with the poet just by reading it. I think the way she, Forugh Farrokhzad, writes has influenced me all these years, not only because it made me want to write more poetry but also because I think it gave me a sense of what my writer's voice could be.
Other poems and poets moved me but I've always felt she shook something loose in me and got me writing more seriously. Emmis! (That's Yiddish for "true story"!).
How about you?
guess the main wow moment for me, as an adult, was reading whitman's Song of Myself. while his other stuff moves and interests me, that one knocked me off my feet and lifted my up all at the same time.
Palba_Noruda
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Is there a room for light entertainment in the house that poetry built?
Angeline
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Hey you.
This may be a question for Mr. darkmaas, but I recall turning him on to Forugh Farrokhzad long ago here and he reacted similarly to you. But I also feel he understands women in his poems, so mebbe that's part of the mix, too.
The only real problem with her poems is that there are few really good (imo) translations. And if you read a handful of translations of the same poem, it's hard to know which one is closer to what she wrote: things change from translation to translation. Even so that elemental femininity comes across in her poems (to me) like perfume and smoke and feminine longing. She's so passionate.
I had to read Ginsberg to go back and appreciate Whitman. I remember having to memorize bits of When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloomed, his elegy for Lincoln, in school and, as school often does, they reduced it to banality to me. And I did not, unfortunately, really delve into American lit in college. But once I had a sense of who Whitman was and went back and read Song of Myself I liked him much more.
butters
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poetry as a sculpture . . .
how many of you feel we start with a big block of words, words we put down, words that spill
but then, when we have that big block, or stump, or polystyrene cube, then we have to become the sculptor, walk around it and look. we know the poem's buried inside. we have to feel the best way to reveal it, where to start chipping away, eroding.
how many of you feel we start with a big block of words, words we put down, words that spill
but then, when we have that big block, or stump, or polystyrene cube, then we have to become the sculptor, walk around it and look. we know the poem's buried inside. we have to feel the best way to reveal it, where to start chipping away, eroding.
twelveoone
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that was a response to a specific post
for your amusement
true it loses something in the translation
perhaps your question should have been directed at bflaggest, as I like Bukowski, which sticks me in the prose poetry camp
Palba_Noruda
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Fair enough. I'm certainly on a silly crusade.
champagne1982
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The Sculpture
He searches for each subtle clue
of what his art will be.
A flaw in fabric, a knot in wood
a crack inside the stone
He sees all this and then he looks
deeper for a hint
Of golden fleck, inside the granite,
or a swirl of grain, in wood.
Expose the golden heart cast,
there, within the bronze.
Pound strength into this molten steel
forged from iron's rust.
The artisan makes me his craft
and creates Pygmalion's form,
My lover clothed in workingman's skin
shapes this golem's heart.
To have his touch on my formless soul,
moulded in his hands
And feel as his breath on my marble lips
warms them for his kiss,
Only my craftsman loves me enough
to humanize this mud.
This exquisite life can only be lived
as a product of his mind.
____________________
I remember you had wonderful things to say about this poem in that e-place we first met ms B.
Yes, we chip and whittle and smooth away the excess until the poem has morphed into something acceptable; or not; but unlike a sculpture, the process is never finished with a poem, we either continue until there is nothing but a shapeless mass again or until we have changed it into something new, thus the process continues on. ad infinitum or ad nauseum you decide.
Help
I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of confusion, is there an easier way to grasp all this talk of rhythm and metre, or is it meter? I am struggling my tiny little brain out to get this stuff, but unlike the little engine that could, this little engine can't! I have looked at Angeline's link in this thread, but it is still so over my head I feel like a cat trying to be tutored in advanced astro physics, now why the hell a cat would want that I have no idea but apparently it does.
I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of confusion, is there an easier way to grasp all this talk of rhythm and metre, or is it meter? I am struggling my tiny little brain out to get this stuff, but unlike the little engine that could, this little engine can't! I have looked at Angeline's link in this thread, but it is still so over my head I feel like a cat trying to be tutored in advanced astro physics, now why the hell a cat would want that I have no idea but apparently it does.
bogusagain
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Depends which side of the pond you are on. The British use the French spelling, metre. Also calibre, centre, fibre, litre, lustre, manoeuvre, meagre, ochre etc etc.
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twelveoone
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there is a link in rant, rant. etc, but your best bet is to read those that use it, or go beat up youtube and find actual readings, other (the official) poetry sites also have some readings
read Lord almighty Bryon the patron saint of the neo-forms (minimum substitutions)
Poe was highly metrical
most everything from England from the 1800's, Hardy had a variety of rhythms
However you being an Auslander, you're best bet may be to avoid it and focus on easier tricks, alliteration and assonance
links
http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/361
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do
you might try, but be careful not all would have been composed according to a metrical system
as for the cat it was probably Schrödinger, he's always escaping and getting into weird shit, so maybe he moved on to higher (ouch) things.
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Angeline
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I don't really understand meter and how to scan a line of poetry beyond some basics, although I've been learning more in the past few years. How much of it anyone needs to know probably depends on what they want to write. If you want to write traditional verse forms, and there are a great many from many cultures, it helps to know some of it. I actually find the easiest way to do that is to find a poem I like, for example a sonnet, and get the rhythm of it in my head like a song (by reading it aloud over and over) and then drop my own words into the "music," if that makes sense. It works for me.
I have come to believe it is much more important to focus on sound (which is what meter is supposedly expressing in poetry anyway: how the lines sound when spoken aloud). That's why 1201's suggestion to listen to poetry being read on youtube is a good one. You don't have to know the technical stuff to know what you like when you hear it. To me, that is key: if you read or hear something you think is good, try to identify exactly what in the poem is making it good. And if you like something and don't know if there's some name or concept for it, just ask here. Someone will know.
Here's a few links to youtube you may find helpful. Maybe others will post some more.
First is WB Yeats reading some of his poems. If you want to skip his (interesting but kinda prissy) intro, he reads his The Lake Isle of Innisfree starting around minute 2:03. I find him very musical whether reading or listening to him.
Contrast that with TS Eliot reading his Four Quartets. You don't have to listen long to hear the rhythm is more modern than Yeats, more like prose.
Then if you listen to someone like Langston Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, you hear a modern rhythm--the American blues. He has a musical accompaniment, but notice he is reading in a voice that could easily be sung as a blues.
Finally one of my favorites, Ted Berrigan reading one of his sonnets which is like no sonnet you've ever heard.
My point being these poets all had very different approaches with different sounds when read aloud and all are good. It's really just about what you like and what you choose to emulate in your writing.
PS I just asked my sweetheart eagleyez what he thought about the whole meter thing and he said "tell him to just write and let it flow." He's a lot more succinct than me.
champagne1982
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Oh come on... Not one mention of Dr. Suess for Todski?I don't really understand meter and how to scan a line of poetry beyond some basics, although I've been learning more in the past few years. How much of it anyone needs to know probably depends on what they want to write. If you want to write traditional verse forms, and there are a great many from many cultures, it helps to know some of it. I actually find the easiest way to do that is to find a poem I like, for example a sonnet, and get the rhythm of it in my head like a song (by reading it aloud over and over) and then drop my own words into the "music," if that makes sense. It works for me.
I have come to believe it is much more important to focus on sound (which is what meter is supposedly expressing in poetry anyway: how the lines sound when spoken aloud). That's why 1201's suggestion to listen to poetry being read on youtube is a good one. You don't have to know the technical stuff to know what you like when you hear it. To me, that is key: if you read or hear something you think is good, try to identify exactly what in the poem is making it good. And if you like something and don't know if there's some name or concept for it, just ask here. Someone will know.
Here's a few links to youtube you may find helpful. Maybe others will post some more.
First is WB Yeats reading some of his poems. If you want to skip his (interesting but kinda prissy) intro, he reads his The Lake Isle of Innisfree starting around minute 2:03. I find him very musical whether reading or listening to him.
Contrast that with TS Eliot reading his Four Quartets. You don't have to listen long to hear the rhythm is more modern than Yeats, more like prose.
Then if you listen to someone like Langston Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, you hear a modern rhythm--the American blues. He has a musical accompaniment, but notice he is reading in a voice that could easily be sung as a blues.
Finally one of my favorites, Ted Berrigan reading one of his sonnets which is like no sonnet you've ever heard.
My point being these poets all had very different approaches with different sounds when read aloud and all are good. It's really just about what you like and what you choose to emulate in your writing.
PS I just asked my sweetheart eagleyez what he thought about the whole meter thing and he said "tell him to just write and let it flow." He's a lot more succinct than me.
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