Poetry Hit Rate

Loki

Well-known member
a discussion at work eventually came round to this: is it possible to actually like poetry or do people only like individual poems? i've tried hard and i must have a hundred collections but even the 'big boys' - Hughes, Heaney, Larkin, Dylan Thomas, Baudelaire,Rimbaud, Shakespeare - seem to have an awful lot of filler in amongst all the hits. despite the fact that i've always considered myself as someone who likes poetry i can't really claim to like more than 50 poems...am i the only one or is quality control something that poetry thinks it transcends?
 
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sufi

lala
by chance i attended some poetry readings recently at a translation/linguistics do...

choman hardi
richard mckane
nii parkes
negar hasan-zadeh

i thoroghly appreciated the recitations, chatted intelligently to some of the poets & it made me remember how much i enjoy poetry, here's 1 i blogged by Nâzim Hikmet , translated by richard

In the 21st century soundbites are getting slimmer and slimmer, i reckon i haven't read a book for maybe 6 months, so for me poetry fits with our transitory enjoyment of floating memes - e.g the blog entry, the newspaper article, the C&P email or bbs post, just maybe slightly more profound, more abstract...

thass why i try to check rumi often...

course you all are into grime innit - what is that apart from 'shouted word' poetry over riddim, no? you're already on the cutting edge!
it's beautiful the way they talk about bars, makes me think of shakespeare & traditional poesy....
 

Loki

Well-known member
sufi said:
course you all are into grime innit - what is that apart from 'shouted word' poetry over riddim, no? you're already on the cutting edge!
it's beautiful the way they talk about bars, makes me think of shakespeare & traditional poesy....


mmm, i smell another dylan vs keats mash up...
 

Melmoth

Bruxist
sufi said:
In the 21st century soundbites are getting slimmer and slimmer, i reckon i haven't read a book for maybe 6 months, so for me poetry fits with our transitory enjoyment of floating memes - e.g the blog entry, the newspaper article, the C&P email or bbs post, just maybe slightly more profound, more abstract...

Yes its relative brevity could be a strength, but poetry by its nature is also the antithesis of the soundbite. Where spin and lazy journalism corrupt and debase language, evacuate it, shackle it to the instrumental, poetry, if its doing what its supposed to be doing, fortifies the space of language, preserving it from the machinations of the Man by supercharging it sonically, materially, semantically and philosophically. Poetry - of whatever kind - is where the word lives, particularly when language under threat, as in this society.
 

jenks

thread death
Thanks Melmoth i may well stick that on my classroom wall - if that's ok by you - as long as you don't feel it would seem like being hijacked by the 'Man'
 

Melmoth

Bruxist
jenks said:
Thanks Melmoth i may well stick that on my classroom wall - if that's ok by you - as long as you don't feel it would seem like being hijacked by the 'Man'


Thanks Jenks - I'd be well chuffed
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
gosh this thread should have gone places

i am an avid reader of poetry (and have been)
i have been reading poetry to my newborn, adult stuff, out loud and i am finding that reading them aloud (which i haven't done in ages) really enhances my enjoyment and is steering my taste from poetry of the page (cummings, for one) to poetry of the ear

lately, i've come around to WD Snodgrass, the OG confessional poet, who often writes rhyming poems. when i first started reading him (in my head), the rhymes seemed corny, but reading him aloud, i GET it:
picture1f.png



please indulge me by reading that one aloud

also, i have been returning to Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashberry after having been lost in the woods of the L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poets

and i have been reading Sylvia Plath's Daddy to my newborn (named after the poet)----kinda funny because it is a cruel poem about an apparently hated father
:p
 

jenks

thread death
Reading poems aloud is one of life's great pleasures.

and learning them by heart...

I had written a whole load more but my computer decided to delete it probably because it as a bit crap - I like all sorts and am finding i like well made simple stuff the older i get - Cavafy for example

I'd also say check out Luka's stuff which is about as different from my tiny domestic things as you can get
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
About 5% of the poems I write strike my as any good at the time of writing. Of those, about 5% still strike me as any good about a month later. And I don't write that many poems, so it's slim pickings really.

I haven't gone off this one yet:


that fond dream’s dashed
insolence makes good
copy in this morning’s
round-up to not quite

not yet but soon
remastered with aplomb
a hunched ongoing
catastrophe in slow

sleeting agon
slicked off again
in durable mettle
with sighs spanning

* * *

My absolute favourite thing of J. H. Prynne's is the title of "Her Weasels Wild Returning".
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
hmm... never posted my poems on the internet before. this one is almost three years old, back when i composed these things on the computer. now i use pen and ink, longhand:

One tree fell into another so that it rested in its bent elbow, cradled. Brief light on the rocks high on the ridge of the gorge. The ground still wet. The sticks brittle. Roots wondering about soil. Red berries on branches and something green and bright on weathered logs, limbless, crumbling and soft. A thorny arm reached up and waited leafless. The water gathered and roamed over dirt and rocks. Some bricks were stacked deep in the soil. A house for rainwater to seep through.


I think my poems are more whimsical now, tinged with nostalgia about basement heavy metal bands.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I am a poetry scholar, so any questions...I am here to help!

Ted Hughes bad, Frank O Hara good.
 

nochexxx

harco pronting
Poetry by Charles Bukowski

it
takes
a lot of
desperation
dissatisfaction
and
disillusion
to
write
a
few
good
poems.
it's not
for
everybody
either to
write
it
or even to
read
it.
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
bukowski has a handful of great poems discouraging people from writing poems
while i agree with him, it hardly seems necessary
who do you know who even reads? much less write. i mean really?!
 

craner

Beast of Burden
That Bukowski poem is not actually a poem, which is probably its point. It's a sentence broken up into lots of lines.
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
well that is the bulk of bukowski's oeuvre; rants with scansion
he is more a personality than a poet
i arrived at this after devouring a couple dozen of his books of poetry and prose

🤷

i like my buk encased in mickey rourke

funny thing was hearing buk read (on tape) for the first time
i was not prepared for his voice, adenoidal, smarmy, slimy, grimy

poetry readings are a tightrope walk
very insidious
i feel like aristotle here... entertainment value should not be a consideration when experiencing art
 
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