Why is contemporary "poetry" so bad?
It's not that I have a problem with free verse, experimental poetry, or confessional poetry. Those can all be the tits. But I have a major fucking problem with lazy word diarrhea being passed off as some sort of artistic expression.
For example, "slam poetry" has more or less just come to mean "extended, bitchy monologue by a first worlder who desperately wants to have problems". For fuck's sake, look at what people have the AUDACITY to refer to as a "poem":
Other urls found in this thread:
poetryfoundation.org
poetryfoundation.org
poetryfoundation.org
poetryfoundation.org
twitter.com
You realize the major difference is not stylistic but rather we have instant access to whatever torrent of shit people want to upload, whereas the torrent of shit poetry from 100 years ago is forgotten and buried. Shit poetry is shit poetry. And the thing about slam is it's an oral form. It isn't lyric or balladry, it runs halfway between public speaking and poetry and has different rules as a result. That's why it lends itself easily to whatever dipshit with a camera wants to upload something. Kinks like that haven't been worked out since it's young and immature as shit. I won't hold my breath either, it peaked with Saul Williams.
TL;DR Amateurs + new type of expression + easy instant mass distribution = the sludge you see. Give it a decade and there'll be some other thing dipshits are running into the ground, while this movement is given the benefit of retrospect and memory loss.
sage because threads about slam,
like slam itself, haven't had anything meaningful to say in ages.
Not speaking strictly about slam, so much as most contemporary poetry, written or spoken.
Most contemporary written poems are actually worse than slam. At least slam poets usually have some sort of meaning they're trying to convey.
I mean look at this shit:
>Beauty is my irreparable and today I became geometric.
>A faux linear figure that distills a skip trace of First principles.
>In a whiteout of Atlantic snow banging stars into the femoral
>vein of Euclid while rows of lavender circuits, all porous,
>surrounded me. I genuflected before the hospital parking
>of my father’s jaundice, for I am a good daughter of the colony.
>The colony which begot the immortal heart of the markets.
>Resource nursed all young bucks of the florets, a liquidity
>I should service or else receive a lesser dessert. With my smudge
>cleanse at the ready I find myself dispensing with the usual
Literally devoid of any meaning, feeling, or thought. Just a bunch of semi-related words strung together in a way that almost forms a sentence or two.
I have a feeling you have no thoughts of your own. Regurgitating the "modern art" cliche with a few vague sentiments is not a cogent critical expression. I'm not expecting a dissertation on Veeky Forums but you have to be expected to bring something to the table.
I like and appreciate a lot of modern art. It pushes boundaries for a REASON. It has some sort of meaning behind its stylistic choices, even if said meaning is purely aesthetic.
Contemporary poetry, on the other hand, doesn't seem to give itself any reason for existing. It's language for the sake of language, and don't misinterpret that to mean language for the sake of JOY of language; oh no, that would actually be artistic. I mean they are literally writing down words for no other purpose than to write down words. Said words might happen to be broken into lines and stanzas, but it's all incidental.
It's like automatic writing, except I have a suspicion that automatic writing would be more fun to read.
>Beauty is my irreparable and today I became geometric.
establishes a very particularly cold voice, but ultimately implies the narrator is something along the line of Blake's Tyger (but also implies it fears itself)
>A faux linear figure that distills a skip trace of First principles.
reinforcing the primordial nature of this dichotomy (while necessarily complicating it by referring to the 'faux' linearity)
I'm sorry, please forgive me, but I don't feel like giving you a line by line essay because you're not willing to look up terms and think about its connotations/associations
>but ultimately implies the narrator is something along the line of Blake's Tyger
Literally how. Explain to me, logically how "beauty is my irreparable" is not both a semantically and syntactically pointless arrangement of words.
>Snow... rows
>heart of the markets... bucks of the florets
there's some cool internal stuff happening here although she goes a little hard with the repeated s sound in the ninth verse.
Not that user but you sound full of hot air. Please name a few contemporary poets that you were led to believe would be the most promising yet still found to be lacking - I'd like to know what level of erudite I'm dealing with.
>not both a semantically and syntactically pointless
linguistics acknowledges poetry as something different from generated natural speech, you can't bring those fields into a conversation about aesthetics. if you knew anything about them, that is.
I've just been looking through some literary journals the past few days. I've never had someone recommend me a specific poet who wasn't active in the 60's at the latest, probably because contemporary poets are garbage.
If you're going to argue that the line has meaning, then the burden is on YOU to logically explain how you extracted said meaning from the text.
>I've just been looking through some literary journals the past few days.
So you've barely done any research and you don't care to.
>probably because contemporary poets are garbage.
Yes but your literary sensibility is equally garbage. Plainly evinced by your inability to know what to look for and where to look for it.
well, irreparable is pretty clearly used as a noun there, and if you can see the comparison i'm making for
>(geometric)beauty is my irreparable '
to
>frame thy fearful symmetry
then i'm sorry. that's how it jumped out at me. i'm not writing an essay for someone who obviously just wants to bitch
didn't user just write it out for you? and here I'll give you something you've read.
>A bundle of toys he had flung on his back
In this context, syntactically, it is a fragment, a Noun Phrase. The verb "flung" is not outside the "Bundle of toys" structure. However we're still to understand it as "he had flung a bundle of toys on his back" where we have a full NP (He) and VP (flung). The literal syntactic structure of the verse is a fragment but we understand it's poetry and intentionally does not follow the rules, and we recognize it as such. That's why you can't bring linguistics into this in the way you suggest.
And before anyone says "Hurr durr, I'd like to see you do better", well, HERE:
>I sometimes feel that Heaven sent me down
>to find and introduce myself to you
>Because every breath you take makes a sound
>that draws me in a hazy dreaming view
>of fantastical landscapes in my head
>where neon birds glide over rolling hills
>and blinding stars collapse in bursts of red
>while every magical sight is kept still
>So, though I know I've never met you, love
>and I know I probably never will
>I think you are what I've always dreamed of
>all those nights I forgot to take my pills
>You're in my thoughts, all the time, every day
>And all I wish is you could come to stay
someone post a good poem from any year after 1960; you have 12 hours
Stop impersonating the op to make him look worse
Hurr durr, yeah, I'd write a fucking 8/10 sonnet just to impersonate the OP of a fifteen post thread.
Are you INSANE? I AM the fucking OP.
whoever you are, adjectives are not there to fill meter, that's bad poetics
wew lad
How? Why? You're fucking wrong, all of the greats used adjectives all fucking over the place.
Yet another example of contemporary poetic stupidity.
nice heh
these would make ok lyrics for a mediocre hard rock power ballad
but if you think this establishes your shakespear jr bona fides, you're fucking delusional OP
so you just can't read at all
Beauty is my irreparable and today I became geometric.
A faux linear figure that distills a skip trace of First principles.
In a whiteout of Atlantic snow banging stars into the femoral
vein of Euclid while rows of lavender circuits, all porous,
surrounded me. I genuflected before the hospital parking
of my father’s jaundice, for I am a good daughter of the colony.
The colony which begot the immortal heart of the markets.
Resource nursed all young bucks of the florets, a liquidity
I should service or else receive a lesser dessert. With my smudge
cleanse at the ready I find myself dispensing with the usual
future haunt of stability; a survival signaling my relationship
to time, or I’m out of it, entirely. Chanting hell as hair veils
my face as if this is a Western. Come polygon and I circumvent
the disaster, do not disturb my circles. Holy I went, holy
all around my head, the holy I am went careening down
the back stairs of this low-rise rental. Striated by the pinnacle
light of this city that has my blood pooled purple at the center
of its gravity. You can scan the ground from overhead for death
pits. I read this on the internet when I was dehydrated, lonely,
and afraid. Office plants all broad-leafed repositories
for cognition’s patent heart. I’ve gone and been abominable.
A column extended from the top of my head into heaven.
At the edges of my system an Anishinabek or Indo-European
projection of words my nerves could translate into the crawl
space of animal magnetism. White pine verticals send us up
as a stomach pumped by filial love. Oh, inconsequent curb
of my street I refuse to kneel, this day like any other, a cousin
charged with trafficking. Still waiting to be ordained, I make
mask of our features that are retreating. Plush pockets of rust
about another falsehood of water, a creek that pleats. I’ve gone
and got a blister. That summer a black bear’s muzzle was coated
in shellac from the aerosol can she bit through on my mother’s
porch. A half-century after my grandmother’s mother said,
don’t ever shoot a black bear, they are my people. So I continue
to speak more than this mortuary sunrise where I am only just alive.
Boozhoo, today is over.
this is actually quite beautiful
who else gets a kick out of the fact that most people don't enjoy poetry and language for its own sake?
OP quit larping as a dead person and learn to tease out the reasons for why you feel the way you do about things. HINT: the problem isn't the poems, it's you.
some plebs just can't into Ashbery
I like the first part but it's made by a contemporary woman so my taste must be at fault
There's a lot of good contemporary poetry- it's just kind of hard to find, but I'm glad to say that not everyone is writing about poopoo and making some sort of theatrical play from verse that would otherwise be empty without their force of personality. Check out poetry magazines for recent poets. The NEA has a habit though for giving endowments to people who write about poopoo and peepee, so avoid magazines funded by them. Avoid reviews published by uber-liberal universities.
Not literally devoid of meaning. Use your words better.
>doesn't know how to appreciate neon birds
The problem is that modern poetry is writing a text in prose with moderately cultured words and/or vague metaphors and/or play of words and randomly hitting the enter button to generate artificial verses.
Yes
YES
The tiger is out
Because ideology is currently favored over imagination and craftsmanship.
you're the one doing the jump here desu
doesn't help that you're going for reference credits and instead make it sound like the tyger is the only poem you know
I was going for an easy comparison I thought would help get the point across. And I was trying to make sure to use a poem everyone has read. No one uses The Tyger for reference credits, user.
except in the jillion instances when its not that, right?
You talk as if you actually spent a good deal reading contemporary poetey. Do you, though? Or are tou actually just taking some bad, popular examples as the norm? It's very easy to say "most Contemporary poetry is..." without actually being acquainted with "most" Contemporary poetry.
There ia a difference between using adjectives and adverbs in a meaningful way, and using them just to fill in the meter. The difference between use and abuse.
This is childish tripe.
When girls act assertively (masculine) it's a huge turn off for men. I cringed hard when I watched this girl.
OP here.
I read Ashbery and I immediately see that I'm reading great poetry just from the words he uses and the way they connect with each other.
I read contemporary poetry and I just want the trainwreck to end.
>waah I don't understand this
lol
It's not that I don't understand it. It's that it is objectively meaningless.
Beauty being irreparable and the narrator becoming geometric have no rational connection and there is no further elaboration in the subsequent lines. So, I can only conclude that the two thoughts, in spite of the conjunction, have no relation to each other. And so I analyze each thought individually:
>Beauty is my irreparable
Deliberate obfuscation. Is the "beauty" being referred to the narrator's own beauty or the narrator's conception of beauty? Again, no further elaboration in the text and there's no attempt to connect this thought with any other of the many half-thoughts in the poem.
>today I became geometric
Once again, no clear meaning and no explanation further on. Someone "becoming geometric" can mean any million things in any given context, so when the poet does not OFFER a context for the statement, it becomes indecipherable.
>but Ashbery makes total sense guys, see i'm not an illiterate pleb who wants to bitch about difficult poets
I don't necessarily understand Ashbery's poetry, but when I read him it's very clear that he is
>making deliberate aesthetic choices
>trying to communicate an idea or feeling
>using metaphors for artistic reasons and not for the sake of comparing two things that have no relation to each other
I see none of that in the current poetry I've been reading, with the exception of one poem I read that was about American gun violence.
Seems like you lack any actual taste of your own, so that if you see a big name you make certain assumptions about how good they are, even if you clearly don't understand them, but if you see a name you have never seen before you assume it must be bad because you yourself haven't seen it before.
Your knowledge or lack thereof is not a measure of anything.
>projecting this hard
lul
No, there are plenty of "big name" poets that I think are insufferable. Bukowski, for one.
Try actually reading poetry you fucking pleb
Saw the expression in the video thumbnail. I ain't watching that.
>T-that's not true, I'm not like that...
>I know, he must be projecting!
Who hurt you, user? Want a hug?
The problem with slam poetry is that resentment never produces good art.
OP here. Finally found a contemporary poet I like.
poetryfoundation.org
This is poetry. This has meaning and is trying to COMMUNICATE something. This is the polar opposite of most contemporary poetry.
Tracy Smith is p great, but you're still stupid.
Why? Because I don't like garbage even if academics tell me it isn't garbage?
Here's another garbage contemporary "poem":
wait, are you saying that poem doesn't make any sense either??
It might make sense, but it's not good even if it does. It doesn't seem like it makes sense to me; I'm not sure what the poet is trying to convey and his style certainly doesn't make me CARE about what he's trying to convey.
>My opinions are objective claims of taste!
Kill yourself my man
>Beauty is my irreparable
>Objectively meaningless
Beauty as a trait is something external and fixed. It cannot be changed and, contrasted with positive notions of beauty, it is a flaw or curse which can't be corrected. i.e. you're beautiful so you can't walk two steps out your house without being eyefucked, or you're ugly and people want to avoid you, or anything else, and this is something which can't be changed.
I'm not going to hold your hand through the rest of this elementary shit you retarded.
No enjambment, no cesuras, amatuerish use of iambic pentameter and lame imagery/banal message that's been overplayed.
This is terrible.
>You're in my thoughts, all the time, every day
>And all I wish is you could come to stay
You're a faggot of the worst kind. End your existence.
>babby's first poetry analysis: the thread
Wew. Really bad. Mostly just prose and run on sentences.
>Teenager relationship breakup tier.
>if I write in a traditional poetic form, it automatically makes me better than those free verse plebs! Haha, I'm such a genius
Those are good.
>for I am a good daughter of the colony.
>>The colony which begot the immortal heart of the markets.
>tfw
>>I sometimes feel that Heaven sent me down
>>to find and introduce myself to you
>>Because every breath you take makes a sound
>>that draws me in a hazy dreaming view
Doctor Faggot, I'm the Poetry Cops
Free verse is objectively trash though OP
I like this. I'm not really into or acquainted with poetry, can any kind user spoon-feed me more like this, perhaps links or names of authors? I want dense, hard shit that has a ton of meaning in each line and jumps around with creative unconventional prose and metaphor.
idk who you are, but you're legit dumb regardless of whether you're being sincere or ironic
>idk who you are
Isn't that the point of posting on this site?
: )
Poetry magazine is pretty politically charged right now, but they still always have at least 3-4 pieces that show some of the beauty of the contemporary poet. I recommend this year's April issue to everyone. It turned me on to like 5 poets I wasn't previously interested in.
the poem you said is shit is much better than this
>enjambment
>cesuras
>good
lol, if I see either of those two things I immediately know the poet is a full-on retard who can't finish sentences within the meter they've chosen themselves.
Perfect meter is easy and dull, you literal seven-year-old
So easy and dull that literally no contemporary poets could do it.
I'm a contemporary poet, and I can easily.
Prove it.
And then show us the stupid shit you HAVE been writing. Let me guess, some thing like this
>timber teeger all 'round jolly. i love miley cyrus,
>who has good tits and great voice and nice ass that makes me orgasm in my pants
>zeus dynasty forever, what? weird
>mootching off friends, butterfly pillows and the Grand Canyon where i fuck my best friend in the ass with a strapon.
>personal, yeah, i love vaginas too: red noses, baking cakes, mother in male-dominated world!
>true hero, unsung with fly swats and good pussy? who knew! i knew
>k, byebye now
Is this a parody or was it published in a respected literary journal? Nobody knows.
The meaning is vague, but seems to be related to some kind of neo-pagan feminist shit, and drug addiction. Other than that, it sounds okay, which is saying a lot compared to all the people who call themselves p o e t s, while completely disregarding the sonic elements of the craft.
Here:
Enjambment wouldn't hurt this line,
but dickbag here wants lifeless verse.
How colorful could be this rhyme,
if dickbag laid within a hearse.
Have you read Burroughs? Once you get past the nauseating degeneracy, it's really quite beautiful.
>Who is the third that walks beside you to a stalemate of black lagoons and violet light?
>Mister user is a faggot
>who presents his puckered butthole,
>pink and tight, and filled with maggots
>saying, "take me man, take me whole"
stop reading shitty poetry
...
why would I have maggots in my butt?
also, your rhythm is inconsistent (nearly had a good one going, though)
>why would I have maggots in my butt?
Implying you are filthy and unwashed. I don't know, faggot isn't a great word for rhyming purposes.
...
...
>>In a whiteout of Atlantic snow banging stars into the femoral
thats pretty good desu
...
rude, but understandable. you know that Shakespeare used enjambment and caesura, right?
Yeah, I know.
I'm just lashing out because everyone in this thread has proven me a brainlet for not understanding modern poetry.
Look, contemporary poetry, especially the Language poets, are not inviting at all. Having a problem with their accessibility is fine, but understand that hating them because of it is... also understandable.
I like them though, and I don't like when people claim its because of a lack of effort (cuz its not)
This is why the modern man no longer opens himself up and hides behind irony. Because all he'll get is an endless rain of shit.
This is by no means a masterpiece, but you have to applaud the guy who would put himself out there for all to critique. He's far better than the mindless drones who only know how to hate.
I know this is bait, but an exposed life is very different than an examined one.
bitch please. this whole thread is shifting goalposts and the blind leading the blind. anyway, i would never share good recs with you retards.