first time making this general, didn't see another one in the catalog, hopefully I didn't goof it up! anyway I was watching a TV show and a character quoted part of this poem which got me to look it up and want to share it, at which point I noticed there was no active /pg/ poetry general. and here we are.

Fuck you for not following my theme of using different old Poetry Magazine covers as the OP pic.

File: CPS.png (44 KB, 373x722)

44 KB PNG

>>25536176
>>25536178
What caught your attention about it? What show were you watching?

Picrel is a complete rough draft of a WIP poem. It will not be any longer. The next stage is aggressive polishing. Any intervening comments, kind or unkind are welcome.

I'm getting pretty filtered by Paradise Lost
I liked and understood the first 200 lines or so, but when all the gods and angels and shit got introduced I'm completely lost and the vocabulary is getting dense

File: HSPDeOTW8AARKCe.jpg (147 KB, 1040x792)

147 KB JPG

I'm in the part of my serially released book where I'm putting out the sections at the end that are entirely in verse. As somebody who's had to do both, let me tell you, editing poetry is a stranger, more taxing beast than editing prose.

>>25536720
It's alright to not understand every bit of a line or section, especially excessive and mundane details like that. Same with the names and lineages and histories in Homer.

I'm getting hard filtered by blank verse, if poetry doesn't rhyme then I really just cannot comprehend it

When will LE ARTISTES finally get it through their skull that yes, if you do aggravating and annoying things, people will feel aggravated and annoyed?
It's like they're shocked
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjcOK2T0lPo

>>25536870
It's a good poem. The only annoying part is the dumb bitches laughing at his heartfelt poetry.

>>25536811
...by appreciating every other quality?

Listing: book.
I'm selling
because I can't read:
fuck you.
Sorry, autocorrect.

I wrote some lines in Polish Alexandrine Tuesday;
I'm going to the doctor in a couple hours.

>>25536811
Read it out loud in a sing-song voice until you realize that iambs are the most common way to add rhythm to the English language for a reason.

File: image0 (61).jpg (326 KB, 1210x908)

326 KB JPG

From John Ashbery's book of poems, Quick Question

“e^(pi*i)+1=0”

I have no idea what it means

Yet it is the most profound thing that I have ever seen in my life

More like the Snoozebury Tales

>>25537987
He gave me medication to help with my nausea,
And also said my blood pressure was a bit higher
Than normal. They took blood and urine samples after.

>>25536720
>>25536811
The blank verse may make more sense if you watch it doing something rather than begin with a definition. Poetry reaches you through time. With rhyme, the ear waits for an answering sound. Blank verse creates expectation through metre, syntax, pause, sound, and the line-ending.

Take Tennyson:

"The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs, the deep
Moans round with many voices."

Read it aloud. The long vowels in long day wanes and slow moon climbs make the mouth linger. Then the deep reaches the end of the line without its verb. For an instant, the metre has completed a line while the grammar remains unfinished. Moans arrives across the turn, and the sound itself seems to swell out of deep. The poetry lies partly in that controlled delay. You are hearing the line and the sentence moving together without always ending together.

Milton exploits the same principle much more violently. Take a passage from exactly where the poem starts becoming difficult, when the classical gods enter. He introduces Mulciber, the pagan smith-god, and recounts the old story that Jupiter threw him from Heaven:

"from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer’s day, and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star
On Lemnos th’ Aegean isle. Thus they relate,
Erring..."

The fall should be instantaneous, yet Milton stretches it across the long beats of morn, noon, dewy eve, and a summer’s day. Your imagination is made to inhabit the duration of the fall. Then, just as the classical story has become beautiful, Thus they relate, / Erring arrives and overturns it. The pagan myth you have just entered is suddenly subordinated to Milton’s Christian history. Mulciber, he tells you, fell with Satan long before the Greeks invented their story about Jupiter and Lemnos. The rhythm of blank verse enacts the moment at which that correction reaches you.

That is why the mythology matters. Milton is continually making you pass through Homer, Virgil, the Bible, ancient religion, geography, astronomy, and history, then forcing those inheritances into new relations. The allusion changes what you are seeing while you are seeing it.

You also do not need to research every name before proceeding. When one appears, give yourself the smallest useful gloss. Mulciber, Vulcan, smith-god. Moloch, Ammonite god, human sacrifice. Chemos, Moabite god. Then read the sentence again and ask what Milton is doing with that material. If the reference controls the passage, look further. If it merely establishes a larger historical field, keep moving.

Treat difficult vocabulary in the same way. If a word prevents you from construing the sentence, look it up at once. If you can still follow the grammar, mark it and continue. Above all, as the other anons have said, read aloud. Milton’s verse has texture in the mouth. Consonants can make you labour, vowels can open or retard the voice, and metre can hurry, stagger, or suspend you.

File: 1763217422015670.jpg (52 KB, 768x768)

52 KB JPG

>Basil Bunting's master-list of poets: Homer, Ferdosi, Dante, Manuchehri, Hafez, Aneirin, Heledd, Malherbe, Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Wordsworth

>>25538359
And of course the enjambment at Dropt also enacts the drop and you do not know where he has dropped until the next enjambment "On Lemnos". And it works so well because of how he interrupts and stretches the sense across variously line

File: 1757353861945755.jpg (135 KB, 1038x778)

135 KB JPG

>The poet's great difficulty, is not to find the right number of syllables, or to put rhymes where people expect them. That's very easy. But to provide that every long note, shall have a long syllable with a nice open vowel sound, for the singer to hold. And that no short note should be burdened with a great mouthful of jaw-breaking consonants, that nobody could pronounce in a hurry with any hope of being understood. So corresponding lines in successive stanzas follow the same pattern very closely indeed. Not only in the stress and the quantity, the time each syllable takes to say, but also in the way open vowels and closed vowels occur, and the way clusters of consonants are kept out of the way of some roomy note at the beginning or end of the phrase.

>>25536176
Poetry is much easier to write and to play with than story/novel writing, but I want to write stories. As I write this, I guess I see that I should write some poems about the plot I want to flesh out, and then develop those poems into novel form.

File: dante-il-mito-scaled.jpg (320 KB, 2560x1686)

320 KB JPG

>>25538437
You could always write narrative verse. It was good enough for Homer, it was good enough for Virgil, it was good enough for Dante and Milton and Spenser, why wouldn't it be good enough for you?

whhat is even
but no pls i need more
ohbreak up
why it had to be
swifties in the mall now
im one of them lord
i bite the ear it smels good
kantankerous cunt
hangs the no sign im yes
a bit of decorum here and there
just to fool u
luv

Thoughts on Wendell Berry?
He died 2 weeks ago.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

How many heartbeats are we given
Until we are no more?
I sometimes feel it slows it throbs
When days are but a bore.

And how many heartbeats I have left
It surely is too few
For when I see your loving eyes
It only beats for you

File: Brody-Macbeth-Frances-Coen[1].jpg (694 KB, 2560x1899)

694 KB JPG

MACBETH.
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

The hour was masked,
the ledger sealed,
breath curved
along the graph.

Columns rose
like ribs
from the smoke,
numbers chattered
like teeth.

Silence shivered
behind the glass,
the hands that shook
took our sands away.

Our pulse became
a point on paper,
the figures
ran away
with the fever.

Beneath our skin,
the signature still burns,
the ink dries out
before the wound.

Fright encloses
the vacant night,
the white coat
folds over the light.

4chanoetry is dead what the hell

Now that 4chan
Is outta Lifespan
No more Anons
We're damned
Like dead lambs
I am gone, gone, gone
Site is 404'd
Inspiration not found here

First kiss, first kiss
did you brush your teeth.
The breeze breezes
and the moon is round.
There is a lake, we need it.
The flowers are installed.

>>25536176
I’ve been writing sonnets because Milton anon challenged me to do so. It’s pretty frustrating. I spend 1% of my time forming the image in my mind and then 99% of the time wrestling with the form. And by the end of it I’ve had to twist and distort the original image so severely just to cram it into meter and rhyme that it loses whatever little power it may have had to begin with. It’s an interesting exercise anyway. Maybe I should find another model than Shakespeare.

Every time I make another attempt I wonder what exactly the form is meant to accomplish. In music the form and the thought are identical. In poetry you have these images and sensations to express but you also have pure sound underneath which operates a lot like music. I guess the thing is to weave the sound and meaning into one another so that they reach their highest tension and most satisfying resolution at the same time. But isn’t prose capable of doing the same?

>>25542085
I just had this idea.
Milton went blind right?
And Homer in some interpretations of who he was was blind too.
So maybe to be more miltonian we should, keep our eyes shut when composing poems?
Think about it, our immediate surroundings would be less present and in doing so it'd open up the world that we know of in memory and less so what's immediately present.
I may pretend to be blind more often. Go full Stevie Wonder. For arts sake.

Extravagance,
Oh, my silver filigree,
Whose name is etched in my guts
Whose voice is deadened in dreams
Yet painfully alive in daylight,
Whose face writhes in my mirror,
A mockery.
How I miss you.

How long have we been together?
I seemed to know you,
When I walked alone, a child,
Into tall grass, wet and fearful -
At those times when baleful stars
Seemed to drip their prophesies
Onto my upturned and paled face -
When I was still alive.

Did you know I drove to see you,
When I had no destination?
Did you wait for me where the sidewalk ended?
Was it you I saw at the bus stop,
Carved into the mountains,
On a flight home from nowhere?
Or did you invade even my history,
To unmake me from start to finish?
Do you wait for me still?

Sting in my eyes,
Your faerie laughter has smoldered me into a wicked shape,
A moon's crater,
Unknown and unintelligible to everyone.

I am a needle's prick of blood,
Running softly down your throat,
Forever.

Every step of the way, we walk the line
Your days are numbered, so are mine
Time is piling up, we struggle and we stray
We're all boxed in, nowhere to escape

City's just a jungle, more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, trying to get away
I was raised in the country, I been working in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down

Got nothing for you, I had nothing before
Don't even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, came pouring down
Nothing you can sell me, I'll see you around

All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime
Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

Well, the devil's in the alley, mule's in the stall
Say anything you wanna, I have heard it all
I was thinking about the things that Rosie said
I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie's bed

Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger nobody sees
So many things that we never will undo
I know you're sorry, I'm sorry too

Some people will offer you their hand and some won't
Last night I knew you, tonight I don't
I need something strong to distract my mind
I'm gonna look at you 'til my eyes go blind

File: I am made.png (67 KB, 1180x387)

67 KB PNG

>>25536176
my latest microfragment

On this day i've realised, I have looked back,
I have seen the corpse and realised that,
what surrounds me, is a vague mist: i've turned
to smoke.
So in a such a speech as this and such a saltfull times:
what shallI I do, but induce some dream—perhaps eye-stinking sweat
will sprout or redding tears could be so; but i with so savageness, so in comfort and thus dream in mid sleep.
But I still hold light, and still can see: that times from now i'll still have to be,
and be still, among some fruitfull days, some perfumed (must)
hold some warm day, some moment (must)
or some bright winter day—futile snap of hope in bleakness,
futile trumph, a red meteor grazing through sky—or the dull moments (must)
but, how many sighs shall pay due to some smile that we weren't able to hold dearer, or how long shall the eyes meet and stay, on some wall, when sometimes you wake from your slumber to face yourself,
as for when you were allowed to, like the deserted men, to see:
the end, nowhere, but there.
So shall I slumber, however much, and die like the dead have died.

>>25542726
i like it. Very simple in excecution but nevertheless has charm

>>25542726
Prwtty good, i like it very much.

I've been writing poetry for quite a while, but never shared any at all except for on rs_poetry, and on my ig. I recently made a thread about how to get better, and someone suggested i should share so i can hear how to improve.

Here is one - let me know what can be done better.

26

Eyes wide at a 26th year
to see what is, unclouded
by what ought.
The page, white, unstained
by tears
shed from pained or passionate thought.

And in the beginning was
the word:
and I'm now a long way
from the beginning.

Words come so easily,
before
the calm,
settling- means seeing finer
textures and subtler colours.

The light is more fickle
now, just about an
acquaintance,
with whom I've grown less
flirtatious.

Our conversations are now
short and
scheduled.
I miss and betray it less,
and seldom betray its trust.

>>25542860
neat

Upon the claw,
beneath the tongue,
the country sleeps
in encrypted silence.

A voice says:
You are safe.

A word escapes:
You will be erased.

The screen reflects
your stinging eye.

The screen is cracked
by your eye,
and shatters.

The white awakens
in electric blindness.

The mirror opens
its hideous mouth.

The tongue
drops its vote
down your throat
like a gumdrop.

All thought
lies on gurneys
beneath the flag
and the claw.

We gather the pieces
of the screen
back together,
and punish ourselves
to count
the names
without bodies.

Only in the number
will the word
turn against itself.

Invisible to the world,
it reigns
false as light.

Spying
behind the curtain,
the only witness
is the window.

And written
in the signal wind,
the word
is its decree.

>>25536501
This was so good, I didn't realise it was the work of an anon.
>Eurydice innumerable
For the plankton imagery has no business being this good. The Orphic descent is the one katabasis defined by its failure, and by the fact that its failure is a consequence of love. The look back is the look of someone who cannot bear not to see. Setting it against an extraction that succeeds because nothing in it loves anything is a pretty spectacular image. The hose does not sing, does not turn, does not grieve, and therefore brings up not one shade but all of them. "Innumerable" is doing the whole of that work and converts a myth of singular loss into a logistics of bulk recovery. Although, the incarnation passage is confusing and jarring. It seems to come from nowhere

>>25536501
Seems professional grade to me.

File: images-1.jpg (38 KB, 625x490)

38 KB JPG

>>25541262
a dead lamb never went silent
at the break of light,
each round tickling the throat
for a word to escape
through the thick veil of the fibrous dark
where the gauze catches its sounding breath and leaves shadows as dry bark on the ground
birthplace of spring as a spark

>>25538832
Beautiful

Shepherd: Bah Bah Black Sheep have you any wool
Black Sheep: Not now, I'm writing my manifesto
Shepherd: Black Sheep... Your life... At my hair I pull
Black Sheep: they will learn of the beasts struggle, life in humans undertow
Shepherd: Black Sheep, it's not like I'm sending you to be culled
Black Sheep: My body penned in, with rage I'm full
Shepherd: Black Sheep I don't have time for this, I have fields to sow
Black Sheep: Baaah, then I shall be the reaper, give humanity its toll
Shepherd: I may need to get a vet, what's the point of a sheep with no wool?
Black Sheep (mocking): Yes Sir, Yes Sir, I'm just a productive fool

It's a Marxist critique of the nursery rhyme. Think I can make money of it selling it to socialist libraries and schools for inflated prices?

>>25544654
shepherd: black sheep have you seen that fool in the library, writing canons of socialist party marxist critique a dire frame artsy?

black sheep: yes my lord, my saviour in rainy days, I've seen the child play at the gates with his hair on the ground, shearing it bald like a clown.

white sheep: what use is a child with mockery in its tow, aimed at the wrong lad at the wrong time -like black sheep in the snow; the wolves are ready to plow.

black sheep. hush my friends, let him write and we bestow: we weyward sisters wait and we know.

>>25538832
Thank you for sharing, I'm very interested in him now. Collections of essays as well.

There is nothing harder for me than a way in when it comes to poetry. Unless it's really obvious, I have no idea how to approach a poem.

It’s cattle, it’s alive, it’s here, ok
I am a city boy, leave me alone
Hey we don’t see a lot of city boys up here
Let me in, it’s alright
Who keeps honking from the other side
Ah, this stupid fence
Man—what is there to be done
Poor, poor things
They turn around and just look horrible

File: 1789120797327874.jpg (256 KB, 1179x1545)

256 KB JPG

I'm an oak, broad and wide. Turned from you
To my chested inside. I've got mem'ries
In like a chamber of ol' lies . . . And without
Why, I've a misty blue world of solitude-fortified.

What of it, world of doubt? What've ye to say?
I tripped down the thresh to greet you this day
I visited by your own ground. Where are that of
Rumours I'm so sure about? -- all what lingers . . .

The powder of thin fingers to stocking'd thighs
Precocity in cigarette eyes -- shrouded some
Urban-classic of America, her stopgap cotillion
Perfumed like her old mother no-doubt, quite like
Vintage music -- Known only to the younger crowd.

In a scrawling scape, désolé, where old-hands
Count their tatter of days, and the young whistle
Their first breath and then . . . away. Count them
In my lot among billets . . . In my dolesome hand:
You a trinket, and I, materialist.

All during my residence, so . . . Will I retreat this
Day? Like all my others -- when I've innovated so far
As to the half life; and a chest of dreams which
I've not willed away, why . . . Then what?
Or will I scrape with you and then what?

>>25542085
Milton anon here. Ready to read your sonnets

File: iroh-n-appa.jpg (368 KB, 966x720)

368 KB JPG

>>25542085
Different anon here. A little unclear on past discussion, but I'd suggest getting a feel for quatrain stanzas first if sonnet schemes are giving you too much trouble to begin with. "Shakespearean" sonnets are a bit more natural in English than the complex Italian rhymes, definitely. Renaissance learning didn't always account for language differences when admiring southern artistry. But with consecutive quatrains you can basically ignore the idea of a volta until you feel ready to experiment with such a contrast. If I remember rightly, the Scots took a fairly simple approach to the 14 liner.

If you proceed from a central emotion or sense of meaning, you should have an easier time in balancing the musical and pictorial aspects.
>But isn’t prose capable of doing the same?
You can certainly write good poetic prose or prose poems. If the focus is on expressing something personal lyrically or "overheard", then I'd also look at a few different poets to observe their technique. Robert Herrick excelled at writing a lot of short poems.

>>25545546
I'm too ashamed of them to share them. They're atrocious. But I plan to keep at it, and with the help of our models it shouldn't take too long before I write something I can show you without blushing.

>>25545804
Thank you for the advice. I was already decomposing the sonnets into three quatrains and a couplet, and Shakespeare's structures seem to roughly obey that division too. I've just been taking his procreation sonnets and replacing the general idea "please have kids" with a close-enough analogue. I think I just need more practice at balancing the meaning and the music without one corrupting the other.

>>25536176
Here's some shitty, amateur, chuddoid shit I've been trying to write for the anons over at pol since there isn't much original content there these days. Yes, I know it fucking sucks ass. Anon in the writing general used Gemini to review it. You'd think it would still be sycophantic even if it was kind of shit. It got a 22 out of 100. A few anons back at my home board said my stuff was a bit charming, even if rough around the edges and missing a few principles.
This faggotry is getting too long so I'll just post the damn thing. Context will be in a follow-up.

Poem 4: Meek (part 1 of 2) draft 1

House of Saud, shifted from grain to world's sweet dew;
Wealth accrued, wealth vast! Foreign armies you raised:
Goliath, tribals, shields, officials, a whole crew!
You didn't build your self, never thought it mattered.

Your warriors lay wounded, your own blood pours out;
David and eagle, turned their backs on you quick
Your own great shadow now quakes, left in doubt;
Wounded, starving, mocked, the end thy greed did pick!

This was not the one I meant to transfer here, but I forgot I had it saved. Fuck it, might as well start where I was most unsastisfied.

Shitty dumbass stupid retard failure.

File: Steve-Reeves-Incline-Curls-BW.jpg (95 KB, 261x310)

95 KB JPG

>the vain travail hath wearied me so sore

>>25545804
nta, where can I learn more about sonnets, the quatrain stanzas, the renaissance sonnets and overall task on balancing musical and pictorial aspects.
>>25542085
>In music the form and the thought are identical.
can you elaborate on that?

File: fujiwara no teika.jpg (112 KB, 500x510)

112 KB JPG

>>25546640
>nta, where can I learn more about sonnets, the quatrain stanzas, the renaissance sonnets and overall task on balancing musical and pictorial aspects.
Most slim introductory books should cover the traditional forms you mentioned, plus practice tips. "How to write", "getting started", or something in that vein. Just make sure that the author doesn't put too much emphasis on free verse (although experimenting with that is fine at some point). You could also find a lot of info on fundamentals by browsing online or on poetry sites, but it's sometimes convenient (or less distracting) to have a book or three.

A popular anthology should contain a wide variety of poems from different authors to study. And you might be interested in some other book that focuses on the history behind it all for added context.

For a later technical look at musical and pictorial elements, you could try Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism". A little dense if you're just getting your feet wet, but an electronic copy should be easier to search for relevant passages.

File: 815018559_113084432284485(...).jpg (72 KB, 526x813)

72 KB JPG

Crazy old man from my city posted something funny. I never wanted to hear this self-aggrandizing boomer rant or whatever he does but I thought this was good.

>>25547364
>Henry Miller quote
The man knows the way to my heart.