Poetry Hit Rate

poetix

we murder to dissect
That Bukowski
poem
is not actually
a poem,

which
is probably
its
point.

It's
a sentence broken
up into
lots of lines.

Or 2 sentences.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Well, if you're not writing verse in established verse structure, it should at least be something other than broken up prose. (For example, The Wasteland.)

For example, prose poetry is a description rather than a defintion.

People who read William Carlos Williams and think that they can do that, generally can't. Even WCW can't a lot of the time.

Writing poetry is not at all easy. I can't do it, so I don't.

Or: Joyce wasn't a very good poet, so he wrote Ulysses. Eliot couldn't write prose as naturally and beautifully as Joyce. Even his lit crit essays are constipated.
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
if i didn't do stuff that i couldn't do there'd be no point in getting out of bed.

poetry is like the subway system but instead of taking you to the station stops it sends you to, say, the interiors of music boxes, the other side of the mirror, and other unexpected places. i read somewhere that poetry makes subterranean connections---that sounds right. maybe it is a space in which meaning can play.

poets that i know, like professional-type, they live off their poems types, seem to deride fiction. i can understand that because the mission of a fiction writer seems, in a way, antithetical to that of a poet. i have trouble articulating the difference. that would be the job of a poet, maybe?
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Well, I'm not saying you shouldn't write poetry, and I don't think "professional" poets add up to much anyway (that just means you get published, right?) but to be a good poet, or write a good poem, you have to know what you're doing, surely?

Why would that
word
start a new line,
for example?

If you can't technically write poetry, you have to have some other supernatural talent for it to write good poems. Like, say, Luka.

Luka's great poems are great not just because of the beautiful subject, location, imagery, but because

1. when he gets going his rhythmic instinct is magic and impeccable, rough and rolling, which I partly put down to imbibing Kool FM in his pre-teen years, and

2. alternatively, an intense, aryrthmic logophilia which reminds me of no one less than Mina Loy.

Luke and I have fallen out recently, so I am writing quite dispassionately here.
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
i haven't seen (or read) luka's pomes but i like mina loy
i suspect it helps not knowing what you are doing when it comes to poetry
technical proficiency brings to mind formalism
tumescence at the use of commas isn't an aesthetic experience but something rather more (pause) perverse
 

Sick Boy

All about pride and egos
Or: Joyce wasn't a very good poet, so he wrote Ulysses. Eliot couldn't write prose as naturally and beautifully as Joyce. Even his lit crit essays are constipated.

Well, as soon as you get away from actual poetic forms, rhyme, meter, etc., there is no line between prose and poetry. From my way of thinking, many poets are simply lazy prose writers. I can take a page of descriptive prose and break it into lines, as I've done in Exterminator!, and then you've got a poem. Call it a poem.

- William Burroughs
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
well, and then there are prose poems by the likes of gertrude stein and charles simic----poetry written in the shape of prose
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Well, as soon as you get away from actual poetic forms, rhyme, meter, etc., there is no line between prose and poetry. From my way of thinking, many poets are simply lazy prose writers. I can take a page of descriptive prose and break it into lines, as I've done in Exterminator!, and then you've got a poem. Call it a poem.

- William Burroughs

I'd have to agree, I think people who make too fine a distinction between poetry and prose are just being fussy formalists. Which is fine. It's just bordering on the deathly dull.

It'd be like taking a Britney song and breaking it down into keys and measures and modulations and harmonics and telling you exactly when she goes off pitch or doesn't quite hit a note. Does anyone really care?
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
It'd be like taking a Britney song and breaking it down into keys and measures and modulations and harmonics and telling you exactly when she goes off pitch or doesn't quite hit a note. Does anyone really care?

that Ian MacDonald bloke did it for the Beatles. tho no, no one really cares but a certain kind of obssessive fan that pores over liner notes & delights in minutaie, the kind of which Britney Spears doesn't exactly inspire (though I'm sure she's inspired fans who are obssessive in, ah, other ways). though I think it could also be interesting professionals in the field - in that case musicians/singers/producers - like engineers discussing what does & doesn't work in the design of a suspension bridge. that's the tedious side of creating art though, I dunno it does produce a lot of great stuff tho - jungle was an engineers' music after all.

like for poetry & prose it's probably helpful, though not necessary, to know all the formal bizness cos then you can use, discard or mash it up at will.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
well, and then there are prose poems by the likes of gertrude stein and charles simic----poetry written in the shape of prose

Do you like Charles Simic? I don't know what I think of him. I remember really liking "Congress of the Insomniacs" when I first read it, but it seems a little self-help, Paolo Coehlo-ish to me now.
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
sorta not really.
i try to read widely to see what sticks, i guess.
poets i really like would be a short list.
 

nochexxx

harco pronting
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?!

that was just the way he wrote, from the gut, out as quick as a warm beer shit.

the context during the time of when this poem was written is needed.

his shows were like rock performances. drinking solidly all day, live reading at night, after-party's with wannabe poets/writers/artists/thinkers and general hanger-on's (whom he despised), home for more drink (if he couldn't get laid, then thoughts spewed out as natural as a 'warm beer shit'.

from his point of view the necessity of his writing is explained here.
 

vimothy

yurp
Teenage Kicks

J'ai de mes ancêtres gaulois l'oeil bleu blanc, la cervelle étroite, et la maladresse dans la lutte. Je trouve mon habillement aussi barbare que le leur. Mais je ne beurre pas ma chevelure.

Les Gaulois étaient les écorcheurs de bêtes, les brûleurs d'herbes les plus ineptes de leur temps.

D'eux, j'ai : l'idolâtrie et l'amour du sacrilège ; - Oh ! tous les vices, colère, luxure, - magnifique, la luxure ; - surtout mensonge et paresse.

J'ai horreur de tous les métiers. Maîtres et ouvriers, tous paysans, ignobles. La main à plume vaut la main à charrue. - Quel siècle à mains ! - Je n'aurai jamais ma main. Après, la domesticité mène trop loin. L'honnêteté de la mendicité me navre. Les criminels dégoûtent comme des châtrés : moi, je suis intact, et ça m'est égal.

Mais ! qui a fait ma langue perfide tellement qu'elle ait guidé et sauvegardé jusqu'ici ma paresse ? Sans me servir pour vivre même de mon corps, et plus oisif que le crapaud, j'ai vécu partout. Pas une famille d'Europe que je ne connaisse. - J'entends des familles comme la mienne, qui tiennent tout de la déclaration des Droits de l'Homme. - J'ai connu chaque fils de famille!
 

vimothy

yurp
2 fuckin rite R kid

Il m'est bien évident que j'ai toujours été race inférieure. Je ne puis comprendre la révolte. Ma race ne se souleva jamais que pour piller : tels les loups à la bête qu'ils n'ont pas tuée.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
RIMBAUD

Once upon a time,
Life was a banquet.
And I was such bad poet,
I could never finish what I started.
 
Just finished Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, possibly the most ambitious 'poem' ever? it basically tries to perform the entire infinite operation of the material universe, including human thought, as materially coessential and symphonically harmonious. sort of like a one-up on Milton, i.e. so you've described the beginning and ending of the universe and all history, well, in my universe time is infinite, and so is space..

but weirder still, lets take it back to 1759 & free verse 150 years avant la lettre

http://www.pseudopodium.org/repress/jubilate/
 
Top