"[The poet] must divest himself of the prejudices of his age and country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same. He must, therefore, content himself with the slow progress of his name, contemn the praise of his own time, and commit his claims to the justice of posterity. He must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.
"His labour is not yet at an end. He must know many languages and many sciences, and, that his style may be worthy of his thoughts, must by incessant practice familiarise to himself every delicacy of speech and grace of harmony."
-from Rasselas ch. 10
Our Younger Poet, weaned early from his bottle,
Begins to cast about for a role-model
And lacking knowledge of the great tradition,
Pulls from the bookstore shelf a slim edition
Of Poems of Now, and takes the offered bait,
And thus becomes the next initiate.
If male he takes his starting point from Lowell
And fearlessly parades his suffering soul
Through therapy, shock-treatments, and divorce
Until he whips the skin from a dead horse.
His female counterpart descends from Plath
And wanders down a self-destructive path
Laying the blame on Daddy while she guides
Her readers to their template suicides --
Forgetting in her addled state, alas,
Her all-electric oven has no gas
Start by reading some treatise on meter, Aristotle's Poetics, Horace's Ars Poetica, Pope's Essay on Criticism (Boileau if you're French), Pound's ABC of Reading, T.S. Eliot's Selected Essays, Borges's This Craft of Verse, alongside an authoritative anthology of poems in your language (Norton in English, Gide's in French, etc. Look for the best ones, give preference to those made after 1945 but before 1980)
you are off your rocker my dude, there could be no better way to mangle a naive and sincere interest in poetry than to browbeat it with trochees and terza rima.
OP just keep reading poems until you find some pleasure and meaning, then start honing in on what causes you to feel meaning.
The ONLY thing you need to have a sense of in poetry is metaphor The rest is technical minutia.
>you are off your rocker my dude, there could be no better way to mangle a naive and sincere interest in poetry than to browbeat it with trochees and terza rima.
He needs to get used to writing meter. The point is that he should practice.
>t. a poet
I am a better poet than you.
And poetry is NOT a collection of metaphors, ultraismo has been dead for 100 years.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>The point is that he should practice
That you feel this needs saying is surprising. >I am a better poet than you
Cool
8 months ago
Anonymous
The vast majority of poets nowadays can't write meter.
8 months ago
Anonymous
he asked where to begin in poetry, not how he can remake himself into something nearer to your ideal. you are approaching like a stupid school teacher with your stick, your Teacher's Edition and your homework assignments. You are the magister with the mighty knowledge and student heads are empty and must be filled with your ideas.
recall your own best experiences in poetry, which are discovery and surprise. "The motive for metaphor" is "desiring the exhiliration of changes."
students who encounter poetry often come away dissapointed and annoyed, I certainly did when Mrs. moron asked me to circle 5 alliterstions and 5 symbols in a poem about cherry trees. I think Mrs. moron secretly took pleasure in depriving these texts of excitement and vicacity, as she is mostly concerned with avenging her tbhltory marriage on hopeful teenage boys, or something.
metaphor is where the magic is, as I have known it
"Heavenly hurt it leaves, we can find no scar
But internal difference
where the meanings are"
8 months ago
Anonymous
You are projecting your own frustration into my post.
At no point whatsoever did I say he should stick to my list. He should read all the books I mentioned, and others, many, many others. I merely gave him some useful recommendations.
Poetry is a very rich art which DOES NOT depend SOLELY on metaphors for its effects. You are an idiot who tries to define poetry as a whole by what's in fact only one of its parts.
Defining poetry as metaphor is as silly as defining it as metrified speech.
Meter and metaphor are merely tools of poetry, which often are present in the best poems, but are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for it. There are many great poets who do not use meter and write very free verse or prose poetry, just like there are many poets who do not employ metaphors, or employ them rarely.
OP should be familiar with all such kinds of poetry, and explore further those which he likes best, which is why, in my reading list, I included poetry anthologies where he will be able to find extremely diverse tendencies in poetry, which he wouldn't if he were to follow your stupid, reductionist neoultraist advice.
>metaphor is where the magic is, as I have known it
For you.
For your own taste according to which Shakespeare and Dickinson are the two best poets ever.
Guess what? The majority of people disagree.
Let OP's readings be wide and diverse, which is why I recommended him books of different epochs, different tendencies (Aristotle is very diff. from Pope who is very, very diff. from Pound who's very diff. from Borges), as well as the reading of anthologies where he may find the poets he enjoys most and of technical manuals where he may acquire tools which will be extraordinarily helpful to him, and in fact a magnificent liberation rather than a restriction once he has effectively mastered them.
8 months ago
Anonymous
You may as well argue with a tree, it would be more likely to result in art than whatever it is you are doing in this post. I'm not engaging you.
8 months ago
Anonymous
You may as well argue with a tree, it would be more likely to result in art than whatever it is you are doing in this post. I'm not engaging you.
There's a middle ground, boys. Anyone who's serious -- truly serious -- about becoming a poet should both familiarize himself with the stodgier rule-oriented iterations of English and international poetry, as well as the contemporary rule-breaking forms. I've worked with far too many poets who've either been fully entrenched in classical ideals and who, as a result, couldn't write a single thing that didn't sound like pastiche nonsense, or who've done nothing but write trite, gimmicky garbage about menarche or get fisted in a back alley. You're both right, and you're both wrong. The only way to reach greatness is to appreciate both sides and to not arbitrarily gatekeep the other side.
8 months ago
Anonymous
One anon said the same thing as you but the other disagreed with him. He already expressed the middle ground, but the other wants to keep his pride and did not relent to a clearly reasonable position of poetry.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I am not wrong.
I recommended Pound's ABC, which contains a large amount of idiosyncratic and rule-breaking advice, including heavy criticism of metrical treatises (which one should nevertheless read and master). I also moderated that recommendation with Borges, who's more tradition-oriented but still a modernist.
The anthologies I recommended will also reveal many modern poets to the OP, such as Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Whitman, Eliot, Stevens, etc. I told him to chose post-war and pre-80's ones precisely because these are recent enough to contain some modern poetry, yet old enough that they won't be plagued by 'cultural studies' requirements, slam poetry, Taylor Swift lyrics, etc.
As you can see, the books I picked were very carefully chosen, and I stand by my list. Many others can and should be added.
You may as well argue with a tree, it would be more likely to result in art than whatever it is you are doing in this post. I'm not engaging you.
The problem is you are a dogmatist who has convinced himself poetry/good poetry = metaphor, because you are either too insensitive or dumb to notice the other aspects which make up a poem.
According to your thesis, Homer is barely a poet, or at any rate not a very good one, because he favors the method of metrified direct descriptions and elaborate similes, which are in themselves small descriptive vignettes, rather than that of embellishing every single thing he sees or thinks with some unjustified metaphor that would merely interrupt the directness of the narrated object/action.
Homer does use metaphors, as he should, but with great care and moderation, as he should. Metaphor-making is far, extremely far from being his main interest.
In my opinion Shakespeare is overrated (I do not say "bad") and Dickinson is an American obsession whose poetry is popular mostly (I do not say "only") because saying you like Dickinson/Hopkins gets you points with college professors. Yet they happen to be your two favorite poets, so you have come to believe that their limited particular strengths are necessarily the strengths of all poetry, and all else is mere weaknesses or at best technicalities.
The majority of intelligent and well-read poets and critics around the world and throughout time disagree that poetry is in the metaphor. Poetry is in the poem, as a whole. In one poem you may want to say Miranda's father's eyes are pearls and his bones are corals; in another you may want to give a gruesome description of his body's decomposition. It all depends on the poem, on the particular place of the poem where the passage is supposed to go in, it depends, in short, on the whole. Metaphors in themselves are easy, I can come up with dozens in the time it took me to write this post, what's difficult is creating a full poem which employs even one or two of them effectively within the context of the whole.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>The problem is you are a dogmatist who has convinced himself poetry/good poetry = metaphor
I see now, thank you. I have changed my ways accordingly. Since this first sentence was so well argued I relieve myself of reading further.
The modern poet is probably best served by learning poetry technically first. The modern mind thinks technically first. And since there is a technical aspect to poetry, there’s nothing wrong with doing it this way. You only want to avoid getting stuck in technique.
8 months ago
Anonymous
classic poets also studied technique to some extent, Coleridge talks about the importance of his writing teacher in biography literaria.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Right, but what I’m saying is that while all poets will have paid attention to technique, modern people tend to think along the lines of technique to a greater degree. So while for them technique wasn’t the focus or square one, for us in can be and whatever their focus or square one can be for us what technique was for them. And quite frankly, I think this is more or less a mandate for modern poets. We can’t help who we are or the times we’re born in and to some degree, a poet’s job is to grapple with that. If the oldest poets were poets possessed with Odinic madness then the newest poets are probably possessed with technical obsession. What you really want is to grapple with what is most natural to you and incorporate what’s not such that your poetry doesn’t become sterile. Too much madness and you don’t have poetry. Too much technique and you don’t have poetry. So if he’s inclined to approach poetry as a matter of technique at first, I think that’s basically fine.
Step 1. Read poetry
Step 2. Study poetry
Step 3. Write poetry
Step 4. Send poetry to publications for publishing
If you successfully complete steps 1 through 4, congratulations.
"[The poet] must divest himself of the prejudices of his age and country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same. He must, therefore, content himself with the slow progress of his name, contemn the praise of his own time, and commit his claims to the justice of posterity. He must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.
"His labour is not yet at an end. He must know many languages and many sciences, and, that his style may be worthy of his thoughts, must by incessant practice familiarise to himself every delicacy of speech and grace of harmony."
-from Rasselas ch. 10
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Our Younger Poet, weaned early from his bottle,
Begins to cast about for a role-model
And lacking knowledge of the great tradition,
Pulls from the bookstore shelf a slim edition
Of Poems of Now, and takes the offered bait,
And thus becomes the next initiate.
If male he takes his starting point from Lowell
And fearlessly parades his suffering soul
Through therapy, shock-treatments, and divorce
Until he whips the skin from a dead horse.
His female counterpart descends from Plath
And wanders down a self-destructive path
Laying the blame on Daddy while she guides
Her readers to their template suicides --
Forgetting in her addled state, alas,
Her all-electric oven has no gas
why go into a dead art form?
Start by reading some treatise on meter, Aristotle's Poetics, Horace's Ars Poetica, Pope's Essay on Criticism (Boileau if you're French), Pound's ABC of Reading, T.S. Eliot's Selected Essays, Borges's This Craft of Verse, alongside an authoritative anthology of poems in your language (Norton in English, Gide's in French, etc. Look for the best ones, give preference to those made after 1945 but before 1980)
There is no such thing as a dead art form.
>start by reading treatises on meter
you are off your rocker my dude, there could be no better way to mangle a naive and sincere interest in poetry than to browbeat it with trochees and terza rima.
OP just keep reading poems until you find some pleasure and meaning, then start honing in on what causes you to feel meaning.
The ONLY thing you need to have a sense of in poetry is metaphor The rest is technical minutia.
t. a poet
>you are off your rocker my dude, there could be no better way to mangle a naive and sincere interest in poetry than to browbeat it with trochees and terza rima.
He needs to get used to writing meter. The point is that he should practice.
>t. a poet
I am a better poet than you.
And poetry is NOT a collection of metaphors, ultraismo has been dead for 100 years.
>The point is that he should practice
That you feel this needs saying is surprising.
>I am a better poet than you
Cool
The vast majority of poets nowadays can't write meter.
he asked where to begin in poetry, not how he can remake himself into something nearer to your ideal. you are approaching like a stupid school teacher with your stick, your Teacher's Edition and your homework assignments. You are the magister with the mighty knowledge and student heads are empty and must be filled with your ideas.
recall your own best experiences in poetry, which are discovery and surprise. "The motive for metaphor" is "desiring the exhiliration of changes."
students who encounter poetry often come away dissapointed and annoyed, I certainly did when Mrs. moron asked me to circle 5 alliterstions and 5 symbols in a poem about cherry trees. I think Mrs. moron secretly took pleasure in depriving these texts of excitement and vicacity, as she is mostly concerned with avenging her tbhltory marriage on hopeful teenage boys, or something.
metaphor is where the magic is, as I have known it
"Heavenly hurt it leaves, we can find no scar
But internal difference
where the meanings are"
You are projecting your own frustration into my post.
At no point whatsoever did I say he should stick to my list. He should read all the books I mentioned, and others, many, many others. I merely gave him some useful recommendations.
Poetry is a very rich art which DOES NOT depend SOLELY on metaphors for its effects. You are an idiot who tries to define poetry as a whole by what's in fact only one of its parts.
Defining poetry as metaphor is as silly as defining it as metrified speech.
Meter and metaphor are merely tools of poetry, which often are present in the best poems, but are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for it. There are many great poets who do not use meter and write very free verse or prose poetry, just like there are many poets who do not employ metaphors, or employ them rarely.
OP should be familiar with all such kinds of poetry, and explore further those which he likes best, which is why, in my reading list, I included poetry anthologies where he will be able to find extremely diverse tendencies in poetry, which he wouldn't if he were to follow your stupid, reductionist neoultraist advice.
>metaphor is where the magic is, as I have known it
For you.
For your own taste according to which Shakespeare and Dickinson are the two best poets ever.
Guess what? The majority of people disagree.
Let OP's readings be wide and diverse, which is why I recommended him books of different epochs, different tendencies (Aristotle is very diff. from Pope who is very, very diff. from Pound who's very diff. from Borges), as well as the reading of anthologies where he may find the poets he enjoys most and of technical manuals where he may acquire tools which will be extraordinarily helpful to him, and in fact a magnificent liberation rather than a restriction once he has effectively mastered them.
You may as well argue with a tree, it would be more likely to result in art than whatever it is you are doing in this post. I'm not engaging you.
There's a middle ground, boys. Anyone who's serious -- truly serious -- about becoming a poet should both familiarize himself with the stodgier rule-oriented iterations of English and international poetry, as well as the contemporary rule-breaking forms. I've worked with far too many poets who've either been fully entrenched in classical ideals and who, as a result, couldn't write a single thing that didn't sound like pastiche nonsense, or who've done nothing but write trite, gimmicky garbage about menarche or get fisted in a back alley. You're both right, and you're both wrong. The only way to reach greatness is to appreciate both sides and to not arbitrarily gatekeep the other side.
One anon said the same thing as you but the other disagreed with him. He already expressed the middle ground, but the other wants to keep his pride and did not relent to a clearly reasonable position of poetry.
I am not wrong.
I recommended Pound's ABC, which contains a large amount of idiosyncratic and rule-breaking advice, including heavy criticism of metrical treatises (which one should nevertheless read and master). I also moderated that recommendation with Borges, who's more tradition-oriented but still a modernist.
The anthologies I recommended will also reveal many modern poets to the OP, such as Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Whitman, Eliot, Stevens, etc. I told him to chose post-war and pre-80's ones precisely because these are recent enough to contain some modern poetry, yet old enough that they won't be plagued by 'cultural studies' requirements, slam poetry, Taylor Swift lyrics, etc.
As you can see, the books I picked were very carefully chosen, and I stand by my list. Many others can and should be added.
The problem is you are a dogmatist who has convinced himself poetry/good poetry = metaphor, because you are either too insensitive or dumb to notice the other aspects which make up a poem.
According to your thesis, Homer is barely a poet, or at any rate not a very good one, because he favors the method of metrified direct descriptions and elaborate similes, which are in themselves small descriptive vignettes, rather than that of embellishing every single thing he sees or thinks with some unjustified metaphor that would merely interrupt the directness of the narrated object/action.
Homer does use metaphors, as he should, but with great care and moderation, as he should. Metaphor-making is far, extremely far from being his main interest.
In my opinion Shakespeare is overrated (I do not say "bad") and Dickinson is an American obsession whose poetry is popular mostly (I do not say "only") because saying you like Dickinson/Hopkins gets you points with college professors. Yet they happen to be your two favorite poets, so you have come to believe that their limited particular strengths are necessarily the strengths of all poetry, and all else is mere weaknesses or at best technicalities.
The majority of intelligent and well-read poets and critics around the world and throughout time disagree that poetry is in the metaphor. Poetry is in the poem, as a whole. In one poem you may want to say Miranda's father's eyes are pearls and his bones are corals; in another you may want to give a gruesome description of his body's decomposition. It all depends on the poem, on the particular place of the poem where the passage is supposed to go in, it depends, in short, on the whole. Metaphors in themselves are easy, I can come up with dozens in the time it took me to write this post, what's difficult is creating a full poem which employs even one or two of them effectively within the context of the whole.
>The problem is you are a dogmatist who has convinced himself poetry/good poetry = metaphor
I see now, thank you. I have changed my ways accordingly. Since this first sentence was so well argued I relieve myself of reading further.
The modern poet is probably best served by learning poetry technically first. The modern mind thinks technically first. And since there is a technical aspect to poetry, there’s nothing wrong with doing it this way. You only want to avoid getting stuck in technique.
classic poets also studied technique to some extent, Coleridge talks about the importance of his writing teacher in biography literaria.
Right, but what I’m saying is that while all poets will have paid attention to technique, modern people tend to think along the lines of technique to a greater degree. So while for them technique wasn’t the focus or square one, for us in can be and whatever their focus or square one can be for us what technique was for them. And quite frankly, I think this is more or less a mandate for modern poets. We can’t help who we are or the times we’re born in and to some degree, a poet’s job is to grapple with that. If the oldest poets were poets possessed with Odinic madness then the newest poets are probably possessed with technical obsession. What you really want is to grapple with what is most natural to you and incorporate what’s not such that your poetry doesn’t become sterile. Too much madness and you don’t have poetry. Too much technique and you don’t have poetry. So if he’s inclined to approach poetry as a matter of technique at first, I think that’s basically fine.
Could be interesting to see what of the human experience can still be expressed with language in an abstract and industrial world.
poetry is gatekept more now than ever despite mass literacy
Step 1. Read poetry
Step 2. Study poetry
Step 3. Write poetry
Step 4. Send poetry to publications for publishing
If you successfully complete steps 1 through 4, congratulations.