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- When Texas-based poet Thom Young joined Instagram around 2009, he noticed a number of poets were already using the platform to share their work. At first, he found this encouraging and began sharing his work there as well, amassing several thousand followers. But as he continued to look around, he also noticed something strange: While most serious, award-winning poets — those who did thoughtful work — got hardly any attention, people who wrote short, trite poetry got tons of likes and followers. Some of these “pop poets,” as he calls them, had become social media celebrities overnight.
weewooweewoo · 69 days ago · link ·
The devaluization of thought has been on my head lately. It occurred to me that on any given day, I'm probably consuming 2-5 thoughts that click with me, as if they could resonate throughout my life and I could base the entirety of my thoughts around them. One good Nautilus article. One good poem I feel the need to read out loud. A Youtube analysis video on a great movie. A song I want to become friends with. These ideas spend increasingly shorter amounts of time in my head as I encounter more of them. I yearn for that feeling I got the first week of college, when the many introductory professors had filled my mind with persuasive arguments for how their field encapsulated the entirety of human experience, and it clicked to me while sitting in a coffee shop- "Everything is connected!" I spent that week starstruck, in love with an idea and the way it danced, the way it gave space and voice to other ideas it interacted with- if an idea was a person, this "Everything is connected!" would be the kind of person who walked with gravitas, would ask questions and be genuinely inquisitive of the answers she received, would be the type of hiker who made sure to stay slightly behind the slowest person, who knew that in their head, always seeking to bring the best out of people. Over time, I've treated "Everything is connected!" terribly. I've danced with tens of thousands of other ideas and there's an embarrassment of being seen with her. She is pop poetry, and it seems as though the more I encounter, the less likely I'll ever enjoy her the same way, the longer it'll take for me to recall how it felt, the easier it'll be for me to confuse her for someone else. Just another stepping stone to bigger ideas, I guess. I never want to take that away from someone else.
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Were you to give a subject the attention and care you gave it the first week of college your experience would be the same. This is why I hate "I'm so smart" Youtube videos - they give you a superficial, dishonest, clickbait-driven view of something and any greater wisdom is buried by the bullshit. You can't get an "everything is connected" sentiment out of a six minute Flash video, nor can you get it out of a thousand word Nautilus article. You have to go long-form. The master of "bullshit Youtube videos" was definitely James Burke, who did the column "Connections" in Scientific American for 30-odd years, and then three 1-hour shows for PBS. However Burke was all about showing how one thing you know well has its roots in something completely different and he uses that as a slice of history to show you a very specific thing. And that took him 2000 words, or an hour. Longform. There is no substitute.
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weewooweewoo · 65 days ago · link ·
But I am a longform.org addict. Weird question. Half a decade ago someone on reddit recommended Milan Kundera's books in a comment somewhere, saying that Life is Elsewhere is the best of the bunch. Was this you? This thread reminded me of it and I binged it. The Poet Masturbates, haha. My name is Jaron, and the main character's name is Jaromil. If it is you, well, thanks for influencing my self obsession.
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Loved _Life is Elsewhere_, though it gave me something of a hyper-self-analysis problem as a young poet. I'll never forget the scene of Lermontov on the balcony. I think ultimately though, _Immortality_ became my favorite Kundera. Still haven't read _The Joke_, though, and to be honest, his oeuvre is so much cut from the same cloth that I often misremember which characters/scenes were from which novels.
Wintermute · 69 days ago · link ·
2-5 per day? That sounds amazingly high to me. I don't think I find 2-5 things per month that meet your description. As an example, in a week where I particularly care about the music I listen to (which isn't most weeks), I would consider myself lucky to find a couple songs I like. "Like" seems a much lower bar to me than "become friends with". What I'm getting at is, I can't tell if we are viewing similar experiences through different perceptual lenses or if we really have vastly different experiences of day to day life. The yearning resonates with me, but the loss expressed in your third paragraph resonates with me more. It was wonderfully fun to be a young person with no virtually no preconceived world views. Everything was up for debate, and that made it possible to spin elaborate all-connecting webs. But, as I get on in life, I find myself accumulating ideas about how the world works that I believe are rational and correct, but also close doors that, in their closing cut off pieces of that all-connecting web.
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weewooweewoo · 65 days ago · link ·
I've been thinking about this comment, I promise I haven't ignored it. Mostly in regards to how I can change my lifestyle, and how I've failed to cultivate habits conducive for a healthy mind, even though I've always seen my love of learning as the main driver in my life. I'm a freelance web designer who likes reading Longform.org articles. And non-conversational podcasts. General infotainment. I also have a lot of trouble with internet compulsion. I spend at least 10 hours a day on the computer, to do 3 hours of work. Most things interest me, they contribute to one giant idea of the world that I have in my head. I think without a stable backing, I'm free to learn to a detriment, to ask questions of all of the shades. All is interesting.
Does he really though? To what extent has he turned the mirror on Instagram users, and to what extent has he found a way to game a common affection for short bad poetry? Here is a minor rant: IMHO the act of "doing X to show us how we relate to Y" is stale artistic strategy, and often a lazy excuse. It is difficult to to be sincere and to have conviction. It is a obstacle that we see anonymity as a risk. It is an obstacle that the speed of distribution and consumption contaminates the process. It's an obstacle that we have push notifications. Instagram cannot glorify poetry that isn't pop poetry. EDIT: I just navigated away to my inbox where I saw an invitation from LinkedIn to congratulate a casual acquaintance on a work anniversary.
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This is my beef with poetry: If you enjoy it without any education, you will be pilloried by someone with too much education. If you like something because it's accessible, that means you're a peon with no appreciation for the obscure. If you enjoy something on the face of it, you are clearly a shallow creature with no depth. A Pushcart Prize-winning high school English teacher with an Instagram account? The man is living a parody.
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I will say I find the current atmosphere of modern poetry to be entirely too "serious", without humor, certainly incapable of looking at itself with any humor or without a certain smug pretension. Half of the rockstars I see coming up in the modern poetry community are writers I could never be or write like because I don't have the requisite experience with oppression or want to constantly write about it. There are fun poets and fun poems out there, and even fun lit mags that have a better attitude. But they're one offs, hard to find, and as a whole the community doesn't foster these groups or people with such attitudes at all - there isn't going to be a renaissance where everyone stops looking down their noses anytime in the foreseeable future in the poetry community, (I guess the American poetry community is the one I'm mostly referring to and have experience with) and it's a pity. Poetry's very busy isolating itself.
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Yes, I agree that the American poetry community in general is overly earnest and self-inflated. I think I've shared this before, but in Jennifer L. Knox' A Gringo Like Me we see one of those hard to find examples that you're talking about. Maybe it's just me, but poetry in the popular consciousness (in English at least) is supposed to be something transcendent, transformational. It's supposed to be achievable by an elevated class of humanity and enjoyed by similarly elevated people, which is fucking dumb. Anyway . . . 
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This is hilarious, thank you for posting it. Reminds me of a poem one of my classmates wrote for workshop, which is published now, apparently, in her collection. Unfortunately, the published version took out my favorite line, which, if I recall correctly, went "The dog is at the ass end of the yard." Anyhow, the poem's still quite good, and happens to be part of the google books sample, if you wanna check it out: https://tinyurl.com/y9sh5dda
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Thanks a ton, man! Things are going pretty well, and I'm aiming onward and upward. Heading down to the RV inspection place to pick up our airstream today, so that's big news. What's new in your world? It's so funny and true about workshops, in my experience: the writer always ends up taking out your favorite line. Oh well, it's worth it getting to be part of the creative process, I suppose. De gustibus non disputandum est! (Or some such).
ArtemusBlank · 69 days ago · link ·
As someone that has competed in poetry slams before, I can agree with this. I do a lot of humor and satire pieces but they just don't resonate with an audience at times because the poetry slam audience is a lot of times looking for that piece about race, despairing emotion or some other social issue. It is the same thing over and over again with some different words I feel. It's frustrating to compete at times because I kinda know what the audience is looking for but it's not exactly me. There are times when I hit well with an audience but It's become less and less often these days. I could conform to what the audience wants as I'm a minority myself but I really don't want to go down that road because it wouldn't fully be me. There are times when I look at the poetry slam community and I just walk away to other poetry scenes that don't focus on slam at all because I feel like I fit in better at places where no one really cares about slam.
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Do that. Write for a new audience, yourself.There are times when I look at the poetry slam community and I just walk away to other poetry scenes that don't focus on slam at all because I feel like I fit in better at places where no one really cares about slam.
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Art often is about/driven by self-expression and I agree that this should be among a young (or even old) artist's driving forces to create. However, it's foolish to think that art and self-expression can exist in a vacuum without an audience and that be totally fulfilling. If you only share your self-expression with yourself, it can feel kind of masturbatory. It's not satisfying to create art that just collects dust afterwards. Maybe Dada would put on a ballet show for an audience of no one but we should acknowledge that art, from writing to dance including everything in between, almost universally relies upon an audience as much as a creator. What can you really effectively express if you only express it to yourself? Art is a conversation and writing is and wants to be part of that conversation. I see a lot of the time that "you should write just for you!" and yes you should do that but that aphorism also puts this idea into heads that "you shouldn't want or need an audience to feel good about what you create," which I think falls a little far from the truth. I write great poems that I love but once I write them, I also want to share them with people. And it's natural and understandable to have that desire and feel irritated when the literary structure/canon/environment in which you write is never going to embrace you -- I still write, sure, and I find people to share things with -- it shouldn't ever stop someone from creating -- but tell you what it sure can do is knock the wind out of your sails a little.
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I agree. Mostly. I think in the case of ArtemusBlank though, who has complained quite a few times about the slam scene this past year, that maybe he oughta try something new for a bit. Maybe rediscover why he fell in love with poetry in the first place. Sometimes you just gotta let go of the world and be you, if even for only a little bit.
I feel like the best rationale for "writing for the audience that is yourself" is to write that which compels you, in order to make sure you're speaking valuably to all those people more or less identical to yourself (which, statistically speaking, in a world so well populated, is a whole lotta people), and to all of the other types of people engaged in meaningful conversation with those people (which is actually a staggeringly large group of people). None of those people (except yourself) may be in the room with you, or perhaps even in your county. But they are most assuredly out there, in serious numbers. And one is much more likely to have deep, richly nuanced layers of meaning and intensity in expression for that audience than they are for the one that happens to be three tables over at the coffee shop. Also, if you don't write (at least largely) for yourself, then you will likely have forsaken your inner compass, which probably has a great deal to do with why you started writing in the first place. I'm not going to pretend it's the only guide of value (I've heard Yanni doesn't listen to others' music, so as not to pollute the purity of vision), but ignoring it entirely is, in my opinion, a hollow and baffling experience.
am_Unition · 69 days ago · link ·
Jives well with the notion of "weaponized prestige" I've been railing against in my own personal life. Communities of repute foster stagnation all too often, unless they have some specific characteristics instilled into their cultures. Still sniffing out those characteristics, but most are intuitive; healthy skepticism of authority, utilitarian, inclusive, etc.
You're not wrong? But if you ask someone who knows anything about poetry, you run the risk. My entire interaction with academia and poetry was 100% about how everything I liked was doggerel and everything I didn't was genius. There are few things that make me want to put my fist through faces than hearing about goddamn red wheelbarrows.
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thenewgreen · 68 days ago · link ·
It's a good poem though... (ducks head).There are few things that make me want to put my fist through faces than hearing about goddamn red wheelbarrows.
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That's fine. You can say that and no one will criticize you. However: Keep out of the wet and don't go on the shout, For the sickness gets in as the liquor dies out, Crum-, crum-, crumples the soldier . . . I have had three "experts" tell me that the above is doggerel. We can agree to disagree. But absolutely no one is going to lambast you for assuming the majority position that Williams is a goddamn genius.When the cholera comes -- as it will past a doubt --
An' it crumples the young British soldier.
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thenewgreen · 67 days ago · link ·
I've a always liked Ogden Nash poems: There is something about a martini Ere the dining and dancing begin And to tell you the truth It's not the vermouth I think that perhaps it's the gin I used to recite that, when I was a bartender, to my customers that ordered a martini. Tips increase when you you recite poetry. Pretty sure poetry snobs would turn their nose up at that one.
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That's... a limerick. Limericks are held in such low regard that they'll teach you how to make them in 3rd grade but by fifth, when they ask for "poetry" they'll accept a fucking haiku (without paying any attention to the meter or kireji) but they'll refuse to accept a limerick. When I had to hand in poetry I'd do sonnets. Teachers were so impressed that I could handle ABBA ABBA CDE CDE that you could write straight fucking nonsense and they'd take it. Of course they'd take straight fucking nonsense as free verse too But not limericks
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thenewgreen · 67 days ago · link ·
Limericks are wonderful. Because they're so easy and ubiquitous, a good limerick is actually high art.
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We had some really wonderful sections on light verse in a few of my courses at the program. In particular, for our "80 works" course (a generative, fast-forward through the forms class) we were assigned several different forms of light verse, and the output was all regarded as seriously as for the other projects. Now, that's a grad workshop, not AP Lit in high school, which is where the stick first gets firmly planted, but I'm happy to report that quite a few academics, at least on the creative side, are taking light verse seriously enough to keep thinking about it after they stop laughing. I think the Clerihew was my favorite of the light verse forms, personally. Here's a fun one: There's no disputin' that Grigori Rasputin had more will to power than Schopenhauer. (by Dean W. Zimmerman)
I feel like everyone's about as precious about poetry as they are about their highschool sweetheart, and that's whether they lay claim to it as a high-brow occupation of the oh-so-refined, as a supercharged, ultracool assault on society's failings, or as the humble framing of the everyday, as satisfying and disposable as lunch from a street vendor. Everyone seems very invested in a version of what poetry is/should be, which is most hilarious because (almost) no one is doing anything with the actual stuff, except for in those pursuits wherein we are forced to brush up against it, either in class, in song-lyrics, or in those various media which have divided poetry's many powers among them -- lyrical prose, the vaunted rhetoric of speechwriters, advertisements, homilies, etc). This all means to me that "Poetry," as entity, shares a fate with all of the other subjects from the past that we argue about, not because they're happening now, but because they give us a sense of who we are, and why we mean something. We'll keep arguing over everything dead and gone that offers some force to be applied to the present discussion. The war over the present is waged in how we define the past. Meanwhile, I think the only useful definition of poetry is flat-out descriptive and broadly inclusive. No one likes everything that is technically, by definition, poetry. And that's fine, or whatever. It's a fact anyhow. Taste is fine, inevitable, glorious even, but we should at least try to keep it out of our taxonomy ... at least, that is, if we don't want to constantly be the cause of our own vexation.
WanderingEng · 69 days ago · link ·
That's true of most things, isn't it? I think we've talked about that with respect to hifi. I read this piece and thought he was just saying "stop liking things I don't like!" Didn't The Cure do this with Friday I'm In Love? I feel like I heard that once.
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My broader point is you can buy a stereo without running afoul of the audiophiles. You pretty much have to seek them in their lair if you want to find out about low oxygen cable. On the other hand, if you say something positive about Kipling in a room full of English majors, you will be informed of what a cultureless rube you are as a matter of conversation. Expertise in poetry is performed by slagging on the opinions of novices. The audiophiles? They'll help you pick out a stereo at your chosen price point. Sure, if you ask about speakers that look like Daleks they'll pontificate until you walk away but the pontification is optional, rather than the fundamental demonstration of expertise.
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Try telling a room full of audiophiles that you dig Bose headphones. The reaction won't be far off what Kipling gets you. In both fields the self-appointed connoisseurs and defenders of high taste will do everything they can to shore up an identity they spent years building. Imagine if all those years of careful study and/or all that money spent didn't make you any better than you were before you started, or any better than this rube who's so infuriatingly confident! Imagine if it didn't gain you anything! Imagine if you'd done it all just for love! The horror! So... gotta fight for that hard-won identity.
What's the maximum famouseness poets ever reached in the USA? As someone that grew up in french speaking Canada, I honestly have no idea. In russia, poets during their lifetime were mega famous at some point. Like celebrity level famous. Was there a period like that in US history too? Or were they all just famous amongst intellectuals and then just canonized to be taught at school? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/books/03poets.htmlVoznesensky’s generation of poets, which included Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina, declaimed their work in sports stadiums to overflow crowds. A moment presented itself — the relative artistic freedom of the early Khrushchev era — and these poets pounced on the microphone. As Mr. Voznesensky put it, with a punk lip curl: “The times spat at me. I spit back at the times.”
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Edna St. Vincent Millay enjoyed supposedly quite a lot of popularity among the "common people" in the 1920s and 1930s based on a biography of her which I read a while back. However, in discussing poetry and popularity with a poet or two here or there, I've been cautioned that even the accounts of her popular following from that time may be exaggerated, and that she wasn't quite as ubiquitous. Here's an index to a book on the subject I found; it's JSTOR, so if any of you have free access and want to, might be worth it. (But I doubt any of us truly have the time?)
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thenewgreen · 68 days ago · link ·
Ok Original comment above. Below is what I meant: Ah, got it. I understand. Thanks
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Well, you can get my point, which is that reading 7 poems in a row is different than reading 40, (not to mention many things, like for instance the time between when I put out that collection and now) or you can do what you just did in your comments, which I'll refrain from calling anything but less than thoughtful. Did you want a ribbon for reading a book of poetry or did you want to offer a different insight into the experience of reading a book of poetry via, idk, communicating about that experience and how it differed from mine?
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Like in the conversation of "ref hating on modern poetry and expressing how she doesn't feel her writing fits into it," where does throwing shade bc you bought a minichapbook jawn of mine even fit in? I think the whole point of my argument is I don't feel my writing fits in with the ethos of the modern-day poetic community? Smdh fuckin lol
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thenewgreen · 68 days ago · link ·
What? I have lots of books of poetry and I count yours among them. You let me know that it's too short to meet that qualification and I replied with "ok." I didn't think you were hating on poetry? Not sure where this is coming from. My favorite book of poetry is David Berman's "Actual Air." You should add it to your list.
I have. In fact, I still own multiple books, from Basho to Dorothy Parker to what the fuck ever, I'm not naming more cause name dropping poets is a good way to step into a dumb ass hipster minefield. Anyway . . . The trick is to just pick one at random, open it, read a poem, and mull on it for the rest of the day. Read poem after poem and not give them any thought? They all quickly muddle together and start to lose any meaning.
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Well, and my question is: how is that any proper way to read a book? If the trick is that you can't read more than one or a few poems at a time without negatively impacting your enjoyment/understanding/recall of them, singly and as a group, then it stands to wonder why anyone writes or publishes books of collected poems at all. I'd wager it's because the book is the traditional vessel to convey money from readers to writers and so poetry has unfortunately been pushed towards that format despite that 50-75 pages (enough to warrant a volume) is really far too much poetry to send out, or process, at once. I do think lit mags are the best way to absorb poems. Better than books and chaps at any rate, for the most part. The lit mags are much easier to read, the many different writers featured within offer variety and a certain amount of discontinued freedom to the content which prevents readers from being overcome by the emotional monotony of poetry. But if you are reading lit mags you are already really putting yourself out there and doing work to be involved in the literary community; they aren't money makers for publishing houses. I think we agree that poems are like very rich bon-bons and enjoyed best spaced out hours or days apart from each other. If that's the case however it really begs the question, "why present poetry in books?" aka "how present poetry for enjoyable/successful mass media consumption in any way?" As for my experience with poetry books, I can read through one in an afternoon. I like to take a fair bit of time between poems especially weighty ones and more time at the end of a book to digest. But that, in my mind, makes poetry books really bad entertainment, if half the time I spend with it I have to close it on my lap and toss over in my mind everything the poems show me that I'm trying to process - if I have to spend an hour thinking about a movie to figure it out, it's just a bad movie. Anyway, just rambling ranting.
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thenewgreen · 67 days ago · link ·
The best bands, imo, are still releasing albums that are meant to be listened to all the way through. My guess is that books of poetry are similar. The best can be consumed poem by poem but collectively create something larger than the sum of their parts. You know, like Voltron. love that about art. The same can happen at a photography or painting exhibition too. So cool.it stands to wonder why anyone writes or publishes books of collected poems at all
In music there has been a transformation to creating "singles" and having an album be a "collection of songs" instead of a cohesive work of art.
ArtemusBlank · 69 days ago · link ·
I can read a book of poetry but it has to be a poet that interests me. What poets have you tried to read?
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lol Sorry, if I leave this at "lol" it's going to look rude, but as an amateur poet the list of poets I've read is extremely lengthy; here goes but imagine several volumes from many of these and countless unmentioned one- or half-dozen-offs. Louise Gluck - 4+ volumes Sharon Olds Robert Frost Dana Goia Claudia Rankine Danez Smith Dean Young Tomas Transtromer Patrizia Cavalli Charles Simic Mary Oliver Dorothy Parker Edna St Vincent Millay Bukowski Theodore Roethke Neruda Borges Elizabeth Bishop Li-Young Lee Bob Hicok Robert Hass Philip Levine etc etc etc Anything you can name that got named in your college intro-to-various-eras-of-poetry classes, I probably read it.
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Sidenote I was at the marketing retreat at my new job today and they keep saying stuff like " we're constantly trolling for pictures of our product on instagram"."we're trolling all the time" Has trolling acquired a new meaning? Cause they clearly meant browsing/searching.
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Wintermute · 69 days ago · link ·
"Trolling is a fishing-derived term that basically means browsing/searching in common English. After thinking about it for a moment, I'm not sure whether the internet-common term derives from a verbification of the noun "troll", a copting of the fishing term, or a combination of the two.
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ArtemusBlank · 68 days ago · link ·
I'll be honest, I never expected that this article would lead to this amount of conversation. I expected just a couple of comments at best.
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Despite that fact that this poet thinks he's writing crappy poetry, that fact that more people can easily identify with the short, pop poetry means that often, that's what people have the energy to read and understand. And you can make a case that in some ways that makes it better. I know we're supposed to glorify deep, esoteric poetry that's hard to figure out because such poetry supposedly comes from deep, esoteric people with complex feelings, but the reality is that most of the time, most people's feelings aren't complex, and that's okay. There's virtue in simplicity. If a four word pop poem reminds someone of some fond memory or feeling they once had, and they feel a little bit better about life for a few minutes, hasn't it done it's job? I wonder where it all went wrong. Most of the 19th century poets I've read have fairly easy to read poems, at least compared to the 20th century ones, which is strange since the 20th century folks supposedly had more similar lives to me and spoke a language that was closer to mine. I think what happened was that academic poetry started valuing differences rather than similarities,. To be good, you now had to show how special and different you were from everyone else, rather than writing poetry that everyone could identify with. As a result everyone without an English degree stopped trying to read poetry.
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Free verse. As soon as you can call any goddamn wordvomit a poem, the only arbiters of taste will be those sheep-dipped into an inward-looking culture of exclusion. the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox, and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me, they were delicious - so sweet and so cold. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCKI wonder where it all went wrong.
I have eaten
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Yeah, I was thinking of T.S. Eliot, who is from the same time period as that. The article had a sample of a supposedly good poem at the bottom: and had grown gills and he sat in a pool of water with dull black eyes and a tongue that swatted flies out of the hot dry air later that night they ate fried steaks and hash things were different now but they didn’t say anything as they watched Johnny Carson knowing he died long ago It's basically the same as the plums, just trying harder.She came home
One of my creative writing teachers was very into surrealist prose poetry. They very much tried to get me to try my hand writing surrealist prose poetry. With the exception of one that I wrote when I was delirious with food poisoning, I hate every single surrealist prose poem I ever written. All three of them. Edit: Also, this kind of literary trolling isn't new.
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History seems to have a tendency to repeat itself.Both Bynner and Ficke were accomplished poets of their time, but the Spectra poems are probably the most widely remembered of their work. Both authors admitted to the hoax having backfired to a certain extent, as it overshadowed their more serious work. Nonetheless, Ficke stated that he learned a good deal about composition while writing as Knish, adding that it actually influenced his later work.
ArtemusBlank · 68 days ago · link ·
I can see why a poem like that can be frustrating as it seems like something anyone could have made. It definitely is head scratching. Out of boredom, I did a parody piece of that poem today. She dreamed of ice She got up and took the last popsicle It was lemon flavored I got hot I dreamed of ice as well I got up I wanted a popsicle I saw that she was eating the last popsicle They were in her luscious lips All she could say was, "I'm sorry I ate the last popsicle, it was delicious." All I could say to that was, "I'm sorry I'm not William Carlos Williams, by the way we have no more plums."It was hot
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coffeesp00ns · 68 days ago · link ·
if only to be contrarian, i would say that I do find this poetic, even in its single line form as you recreated it. now, that gets into an argument of what is poetic and what is poetry and where do the two intersect, but I don't think it's unfair to say that the feeling you get from reading something that is poetic and the feeling you get from reading poetry is similar, if not the same.
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Now argue that I need to find it poetic. I give two shits what you find poetic. However, the act of teaching poetry means defining what is or isn't poetic, assigning grades to those opinions, and stifling dissent against the prevailing view of what is or isn't poetic. Here, I'll say something controversial: poetry is a vestigial remnant of an era of illiteracy where the majority of the public was incapable of creating or consuming the written word, so words written with particular artistry were elevated to a new art form through their sheer rarity.
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coffeesp00ns · 68 days ago · link ·
I don't think we have to find the same things poetic I think you're railing less against poetry and more against the prevailing culture of how we teach art. I don't disagree with you either, that what academics see as "good" versus what is often actually good (or perceived as good by modern taste) can be quite different, or that academics can be unnecessarily exclusive. Spoiler alert, they are, because most academics can't survive without an air of exclusivity. Universities can be gross about exclusivity and I say this as someone who's got two degrees and is heading back for another diploma. This is actually a decent explanation of the beginning of written poetry. I totally agree. We went on to do other things with poetry after this, but this is exactly where it came from. Or even to go further, Poetry came from when we used rhythm and rhyming to remember long stories, such as the Sagas, or Beowulf, or the works of Homer, or the Epic of Gilgamesh. But how did we decide what was good enough to write down? the words that were written with, as you say " particular artistry". It's not like Beowulf was the only story being told, but it was one of the ones that someone thought was good enough to write down, and the one that someone thought was good enough to save from a fire, and the one that people thought was good enough to keep preserved for almost 1000 years.poetry is a vestigial remnant of an era of illiteracy where the majority of the public was incapable of creating or consuming the written word, so words written with particular artistry were elevated to a new art form through their sheer rarity
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Absolutely. But I also think that poetry, more than any other art form, is inextricably intertwined with that prevailing culture. Poetry, for practical purposes, has escaped to song lyrics and children's books. Poetry, for academic purposes, has disappeared up its own asshole. So if you want to enjoy poetry, listen to song lyrics and read children's books. But if you want to learn about poetry, enjoy being up some academic's asshole because even if you type "modern sonnet" into Google you get Edna St. Vincent Millay and if you want to read the "pushcart nominated" poetry of the guy who started this whole dumpster fire with his Instagram slagging you get love but you'll know when you feel it because it will be forever Poetry used to be this shit. Now? We're giving awards to Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey and slagging on kids who can't tell the difference between faux intellectualism and parody faux intellectualism. You know what? The spiritual successors of Coleridge aren't Instagram fuckhead, they're goddamn Public Enemy: And now, Ludacris freestyles a Llama Llama book.I think you're railing less against poetry and more against the prevailing culture of how we teach art.
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My feeling on modern poetry is that it becomes modern pedantry. It's 10% about the content and 90% about the qualifications of the content. It seems, more and more, it's a way for intellectuals to practice debating without discussing anything of meaning.
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coffeesp00ns · 68 days ago · link ·
Most poetry ever written probably follows that percentage, and that definition. I'm going to make what might be a bold statement here: Most art is garbage, even the educated stuff (sometimes especially the educated stuff). Take classical music for an example (as it's my main focus). There are thousands of composers writing music right now. Maybe one of them will be remembered in 100 years. Even of the people we think of "Great 20th century composers", Copland, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Gershwin, Shoenberg, Ellington, and others, perhaps two or three will be remembered and celebrated in the way that we remember and celebrate people like Bach and Mozart. Even then, not everything the "Masters" wrote was great- Beethoven's "Wellington's Victory" has generally been seen as awful from the moment it premiered. You have to run under the assumption that most of the art you will ever see created in your lifetime with be crap, and even the stuff that will be good will be forgotten, just like every other age. Museums can make this deceptive, showcasing the greatest art from 500 years and more, but it's not that those people didn't have to deal with crap. It's that the crap has dried up and blown away, leaving (mostly) the good stuff. So what i'm saying is that your statement is correct, but it is also correct for every other era of poetry, and every other kind of art.
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The problem is that academics get to define what is crap and what isn't, and force that narrative. John Gardner blew several chapters arguing that people teach what is easy to demonstrate, not what is good, the end result being that pedantry defines a genre, not quality. And, the longer someone's been dead the less controversy there is. I had an English teacher argue that James Fenimore Cooper was art because millions of people loved his books but Stephen King was not because. And then she changed the subject. The fact that we're forced to choke down Leatherstocking bullshit purely because everyone read it back then is like arguing kids 200 years from now are gonna have to read goddamn Twilight because it was on every supermarket shelf, while arguing no one should read Twilight now because Stephanie Meyer isn't a hundred years dead. Most art is garbage. But "experts" get to elevate their garbage choices and lord their expertise over the rest of us. And we hate you for it.
ArtemusBlank · 69 days ago · link ·
The thing with pop poetry I have seen on Instagram is that it really doesn't try too hard to be different. It's the usual love things. It's things that people have written time and time again but are just wording a little differently. There's no problem with people enjoying short and simple things but at the same time, it should try to challenge somewhat but not to the point that no one can understand. There just needs to be something in the middle really. I think there is only two really prominent poetry scenes these days if you would like to call it that, academic poetry and poetry slam scene. Both scenes are scenes that a lot of people just don't fit into because it's scenes that are just trying too hard. One, you need to be really into social issues and the other you really need to be serious with no humor at all and just follow the guidelines given by the leading academic poets no matter what it is. There really isn't anything for people in the middle. No voice for the common man and when that happens, everyone definitely tunes out.
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Does something need to be different or new to be good? I think there's a time for challenging people and expanding their horizons, but there's also time for reminding them what they already value in life. The more ways we find to say things that are true, the more that people will believe them, and the more they can identify with people in the past who felt the same way. It's too easy to get caught up in the drama and the mechanical business of life, and forget about all the reasons why putting up with all of that is worth it. I agree though, that whatever good poetry is, it needs to be something that people can identify with.