Poetry Critique Thread

Inward, I turn. My house, it is big
My belongings, they are broken
My spine, it is twizty
My house, it is tiny
My big balls, they are big
My hat, it is tall.
My phat ass, it is tasty.
My glock, it is bout to blast your ass.

Hey Veeky Forums, I've been working on this for 15 minutes and I think I might be onto something, let me know what you thinlk

Attached: anti-nihilist nihilism.png (612x201, 19K)

Other urls found in this thread:

allpoetry.com/The-Broken-Tower
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Nice work so far user, here’s what I have for you: I like the freeform structure for this piece, but it might be better to give it a little more definition. After all, you don’t want to give the reader too much of a headache. Maybe include something between lines three and four that really accentuates the free form.

Oh, and you should omit Line 5 from the poem entirely. It makes you seem like an edge lord.

Other than that, it seems to be coming along pretty well for only fifteen minutes. Keep working!

Here’s your (You). Sage.

This is a shit thread so far but I'll make it better with my own work:

All I can hear
All I can see
the green pastures call out to me

swinging in the thick and suffocating
darkness
my heart fills with anguish
at the thought of any gentry
fellow with two cents to toss
giving me his lip and saying he's the boss.

my perishable perishing,
my broken heart doth lay,
at the sound of that gentry fellow,
skipping merrily away.


What do you guys think? I was gonna say "merrily and gay" instead of "merrily away" but I was afraid that people would just laugh at the homosexual word and not really consider the true meaning of what I said. Ignore the other shit in this thread because it's clearly not that important.

Thanks! I'm a creative writing major so this stuff kind of comes naturally to me. Bukowski is a big influence, though Veeky Forums seems to hate him for some reason.

Attached: 4.gif (750x1000, 32K)

Do they? I like him

The other thread hasn't even died yet
>
>

Absolutely disgusting. Bukowski is Kaur-tier shit. Any rational person would rather peruse Ginsberg's work than actually pick up anything by Bukowski.

Attached: The Almighty Ginsman.jpg (193x262, 10K)

Sunlight
Stings the eyes
Like biting flies
For hollow men (pretentious I know but I think it works)
The embodiment
Those who dwell
In four walled shells
Bored to hell
And taco bells
Talk to themselves
Do not pick up the phone
And if you do
Say all is well
In four-walled shells
Bored to hell

I pray everyday in the hope God will take my atheism away
Moths to a flame and
Flocks to the flay
Noodle broth left to rot in the microwave

Watch the clock
Tick tock
You gather moss
You've lost the plot
You'd rather have a mob
But something's off
You're cut from rotten cloth

Obviously, needs work but I'm hoping to finish before May.

I would lose the "hollow men" line. It takes away from the overall idea of it in my opinion.

Attached: tsEliotSucksMyBalls.jpg (475x562, 51K)

Just going to throw some drunk thoughts at the wall.

"Style Guide"

On the advice of a friend
I made the choice to get serious
And so I tacked on letters at the end
Of the words I wrote
Like -th, like -st,
And wrote heavy sounding phrases:

THOUGH THOU MAYEST SEEKETH
THOU MAYST NEVER KNOWETH

And on and on and on and-

Oh- you say,
That is not what my friend meant
by getting serious.

Shallow, boring, cliche. 2/10 buy yourself a brain

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope - cleft to despair?

The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) -or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure…

And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip
Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

Holy shit, this is really fucking good.
I always thought these threads were shitty wannabe poets and people spamming terrible modernist poems, but you actually have some insane talent.

Sorry bro but you've been reused

allpoetry.com/The-Broken-Tower

that's because that's a Hart Crane poem
at least you passed the test and recognize good poetry when you see it

>tfw when you ruse someone into thinking you have good taste when in reality obviously you recognize Crane because you have good taste

In other news, Hart Crane is still a major poet. If you want adulation so bad you feel the need to post someone else's work, don't pick people you can literally plug the first stanza into google and find.

And The Broken Tower at that.
Atleast try something relatively obscure, like the sad indian.

stop ruining my fun guys

I mean I'll give you credit for potentially turning another user onto Hart Crane but at least put his name at the top you jerk.

>he thinks he tricked anyone

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

This is totally original. Am I a good writer now?

POETRY FOUNDATION
POEMS
POETS
PROSE
COLLECTIONS
LISTEN
LEARN
VISIT
POETRY MAGAZINE
ABOUT US
Newsletter
Search
Search by Poem or Poet
The Snow Man
BY WALLACE STEVENS
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Hey this is the sequel bros. I just made this up in my mind.

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Life, Life
1

I don't believe in omens or fear
Forebodings. I flee from neither slander
Nor from poison. Death does not exist.
Everyone's immortal. Everything is too.
No point in fearing death at seventeen,
Or seventy. There's only here and now, and light;
Neither death, nor darkness, exists.
We're all already on the seashore;
I'm one of those who'll be hauling in the nets
When a shoal of immortality swims by.


2

If you live in a house - the house will not fall.
I'll summon any of the centuries,
Then enter one and build a house in it.
That's why your children and your wives
Sit with me at one table, -
The same for ancestor and grandson:
The future is being accomplished now,
If I raise my hand a little,
All five beams of light will stay with you.
Each day I used my collar bones
For shoring up the past, as though with timber,
I measured time with geodetic chains
And marched across it, as though it were the Urals.


3

I tailored the age to fit me.
We walked to the south, raising dust above the steppe;
The tall weeds fumed; the grasshopper danced,
Touching its antenna to the horse-shoes - and it prophesied,
Threatening me with destruction, like a monk.
I strapped my fate to the saddle;
And even now, in these coming times,
I stand up in the stirrups like a child.

I'm satisfied with deathlessness,
For my blood to flow from age to age.
Yet for a corner whose warmth I could rely on
I'd willingly have given all my life,
Whenever her flying needle
Tugged me, like a thread, around the globe.

The Windhover
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Skip to Content
POETRY FOUNDATION
POEMS
POETS
PROSE
COLLECTIONS
LISTEN
LEARN
VISIT
POETRY MAGAZINE
ABOUT US
Newsletter
Search
Search by Poem or Poet
Filling Station
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
esso—so—so—so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

“Filling Station” from The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. www.fsgbooks.com
Source: The Complete Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1983)
AUDIO
Filling Station
FROM POEM OF THE DAYFebruary 2012
By Elizabeth Bishop

Read More
MORE POEMS BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
Two Mornings and Two Evenings: Paris, 7 A.M.
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
Two Mornings and Two Evenings: A Miracle for Breakfast
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
Two Mornings and Two Evenings: From the Country to the City
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
Two Mornings and Two Evenings: Song ("Summer is over...")
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
The Mountain
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
See All Poems by this Author
Poetry Foundation Children
Poetry Magazine
CONTACT US
NEWSLETTERS
PRESS
PRIVACY POLICY
POLICIES
TERMS OF USE
POETRY MOBILE APP
61 West Superior Street,
Chicago, IL 60654
Hours:
Monday-Friday 11am - 4pm
© 2018 Poetry Foundation
See a problem on this page?

Skip to Content
POETRY FOUNDATION
POEMS
POETS
PROSE
COLLECTIONS
LISTEN
LEARN
VISIT
POETRY MAGAZINE
ABOUT US
Newsletter
Search
Search by Poem or Poet
Palling Around
BY GREGORY PARDLO
He heard in curtains of sleet cleaving
from magnolia leaves encrypted Aztec
frequencies, he said. When the sun
god liquors loose each ashen tongue
the planet tattles. We are advised
to listen: this he'd grunt to signal his

dwindling fuse and the bartender would
show him the door. In his honor I tune
my form to the emanations of this vibrant
life: Either someone's dropped a blue
coin and I've picked up the murmur of its
ribs—a quarter kiltering beneath the blond

brick arcade of the whispering gallery
at Grand Central—or someone's table
is ready. No matter that I set my phone
to airplane while I thumb these lines, I can
still be reached by tender thought: a dirgeful
brass cortège stirs the ear inside my chest.

The man has passed. I got the text today,
and now feel at least obliged to observe
silence. Observe this café thick with humid
bodies, mugs wafting florets of breath, steam
revealing patterns in the glassy chatter.
For that he is a phantasm rumoring now

a timeless doom, quiet as the carousel
of a partial print. For that he is finally
transcendent. For that we convened for
drinks by some clockwork of urban chance
each week, my year adrift in the East Village.
For that I renounced him, and now regret

having done so. For that I vibed with his
passions—more, the deeper we reached in
our cups, rifling our mind's files for magical
thinking and secrets in our blood's chemical
record. I've traveled years through boot-black
redactions of thought to find his apparition

greet me with a raised fist in the dream of a
leather trench coat that crunches like gravetop
snow, dream of the self-schooled on secondary
sources. He hung a cardboard pyramid to cover
the bed in which he slept and quested visions
toward the headwaters of paranoia: nightsweats

of tar, drumbeats marooned in the distant hills,
Legba tapping his cane on the edge of sanity.
If you see something. What a fear of hobgoblins
and philistines can blind our better senses.
At the table beside me children play mosquito
tones they say are there, but I am unable to hear.
Gregory Pardlo, "Palling Around" from Digest. Copyright © 2014 by Gregory Pardlo. Reprinted by permission of Four Way Books.
Source: Digest (Four Way Books, 2014)
MORE POEMS BY GREGORY PARDLO
Written by Himself
BY GREGORY PARDLO
Double Dutch
BY GREGORY PARDLO
Raisin
BY GREGORY PARDLO
ZoSo
BY GREGORY PARDLO
For Which it Stands
BY GREGORY PARDLO
See All Poems by this Author
Poetry Foundation Children
Poetry Magazine
CONTACT US
NEWSLETTERS
PRESS
PRIVACY POLICY
POLICIES
TERMS OF USE
POETRY MOBILE APP
61 West Superior Street,
Chicago, IL 60654
Hours:
Monday-Friday 11am - 4pm
© 2018 Poetry Foundation
See a problem on this page?

Again
BY ROSS GAY
Because I love you, and beneath the uncountable stars
I have become the delicate piston threading itself through your chest,

I want to tell you a story I shouldn’t but will and in the meantime neglect, Love,
the discordant melody spilling from my ears but attend,

instead, to this tale, for a river burns inside my mouth
and it wants both purgation and to eternally sip your thousand drippings;

and in the story is a dog and unnamed it leads to less heartbreak,
so name him Max, and in the story are neighborhood kids

who spin a yarn about Max like I’m singing to you, except they tell a child,
a boy who only moments earlier had been wending through sticker bushes

to pick juicy rubies, whose chin was, in fact, stained with them,
and combining in their story the big kids make

the boy who shall remain unnamed believe Max to be sick and rabid,
and say his limp and regular smell of piss are just two signs,

but the worst of it, they say, is that he’ll likely find you in the night,
and the big kids do not giggle, and the boy does not giggle,

but lets the final berries in his hand drop into the overgrowth
at his feet, and if I spoke the dream of the unnamed boy

I fear my tongue would turn an arm of fire so I won’t, but
know inside the boy’s head grew a fire beneath the same stars

as you and I, Love, your leg between mine, the fine hairs
on your upper thigh nearly glistening in the night, and the boy,

the night, the incalculable mysteries as he sleeps with a stuffed animal
tucked beneath his chin and rolls tight against his brother

in their shared bed, who rolls away, and you know by now
there is no salve to quell his mind’s roaring machinery

and I shouldn’t tell you, but I will,
the unnamed boy

on the third night of the dreams which harden his soft face
puts on pants and a sweatshirt and quietly takes the spade from the den

and more quietly leaves his house where upstairs his father lies dreamless,
and his mother bends her body into his,

and beneath these same stars, Love, which often, when I study them,
seem to recede like so many of the lies of light,

the boy walks to the yard where Max lives attached to a steel cable
spanning the lawn, and the boy brings hot dogs which he learned

from Tom & Jerry, and nearly urinating in his pants he tosses them
toward the quiet and crippled thing limping across the lawn,

the cable whispering above the dew-slick grass, and Max whimpers,
and the boy sees a wolf where stands this ratty

and sad and groveling dog and beneath these very stars
Max raises his head to look at the unnamed boy

with one glaucous eye nearly glued shut
and the other wet from the cool breeze and wheezing

Max catches the gaze of the boy who sees,
at last, the raw skin on the dog's flank, the quiver

of his spindly legs, and as Max bends his nose
to the franks the boy watches him

struggle

to snatch the meat with gums, and bringing the shovel down
he bends to lift the meat to Max's toothless mouth,

and rubs the length of his throat and chin,
Max arching his neck with his eyes closed, now,

and licking the boy's round face, until the boy unchains the dog,
and stands, taking slow steps backward through the wet grass and feels,

for the first time in days, the breath in his lungs, which is cool,
and a little damp, spilling over his small lips, and he feels,

again, his feet beneath him, and the earth beneath them, and starlings
singing the morning in, and the somber movement of beetles

chewing the leaves of the white birch, glinting in the dark, and he notices,
Darling, an upturned nest beneath the tree, and flips it looking for the blue eggs

of robins, but finds none, and placing a rumpled crimson feather in his mouth
slips the spindly thicket into another tree, which he climbs

to watch the first hint of light glancing above the fields, and the boy
eventually returns to his thorny fruit bush where an occasional prick

leaves on his arm or leg a spot of blood the color of these raspberries
and tasting of salt, and filling his upturned shirt with them he beams

that he could pull from the earth that which might make you smile,
Love, which you’ll find in the fridge, on the bottom shelf, behind the milk,

in the bowl you made with your own lovely hands

Skip to Content
POETRY FOUNDATION
POEMS
POETS
PROSE
COLLECTIONS
LISTEN
LEARN
VISIT
POETRY MAGAZINE
ABOUT US
Newsletter
Search
Search by Poem or Poet
Dover Beach
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

ARTICLE FOR TEACHERS
Talking To, Talking About, Talking With
BY TOBY EMERT
Language Arts students in conversation with poetic texts.

Read More
MORE POEMS BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
Apollo Musagetes
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
Bacchanalia
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
The Buried Life
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
Cadmus and Harmonia
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
Consolation
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
See All Poems by this Author
Poetry Foundation Children
Poetry Magazine
CONTACT US
NEWSLETTERS
PRESS
PRIVACY POLICY
POLICIES
TERMS OF USE
POETRY MOBILE APP
61 West Superior Street,
Chicago, IL 60654
Hours:
Monday-Friday 11am - 4pm
© 2018 Poetry Foundation
See a problem on this page?

Hey so I wrote all these poems they are all pretty deep. Please give me praise. It is what I wanted to accomplish.

Also poetry is cool and you should read more.