Poetry critique thread

Alright, enough with this meme drivel, you fucks. I would like someone to read my poetry over (not that you people are really qualified to do so), but it is so very bad that I would be too embarrassed to share it with anyone who is not behind a veil of anonymity. This thread is for those in a similar predicament, as I am sure there are many very bad poets around here. Prose is also welcome, so long as you believe your prose to have the same ends as poetry, and to be written in a poetic manner.

I will begin with two sonnets I've written. The second was at the behest of a professor of mine, which is why I subtitle it "A Schoolboy's Exercise," with the absurd hope that it may stand as an early work along with the likes of Milton's Prolusions, which generally are not terribly insightful in themselves, but which are illuminated by Milton's later grandeur. Of course, my education is not nearly so good as I would like and deserve, and so my writing suffers.

Sonnet: An Evening Online

If to the monocle-acquainted eye
The aeroplane and piston seemed profane,
It’d flood the ages’ gloaming with its cry
To suffer this too-enchanting window-pane.—
And yet to call it windowpane were wode:
The analogy would fail this ópaque lake
Aboding vermin and the verminous ode,
The wording destitute, the feeling fake.
‘Turning blankly toward the blank page, churning
‘With desire, stranded in a house on fire,’
Runs the ode, ‘I abandoned fecund learning
‘For mere abstraction; a sterile, lustful mire.’
Nor can be saved the drifting hedonist
By monkish virtues: only amethyst
In verbal landscapes questioningly laid
Can make the Angel able to be kisst.

Contradictory Sonnet (A Schoolboy’s Exercise)

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
I still may call that hue unto my sight
As shows in Earth in spite of burning lime,
Outpacing music’s evanescent light.
Think how the amberlaid soprano cleaves
Unto the accompaniment, yet still is heard
Above that mumming beat commanding leaves
To hang and fall in sepiatone, and bird
To sing piano. Therefore, two lives we make.
For that we ne’er will live so long, nor so
Inter eternal visions, we must forsake
That one which perjures or true fire or snow—
But, that life which shines the dark on blazoned Sense
Shall mire me, but send you baptized hence!

Bloom is officiating as a reminder of your inevitable physical and literary mortality. Of course, the job of poetry is ideally to defy the inevitable.

Other urls found in this thread:

pastebin.com/EsRN3Bhi
discord.gg/fQxwa
youtube.com/watch?v=RpMVh0OoJ9s
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

I guess I'll bump with more schlock until someone gives attention or asks for it. The second of these requires expansion. I think it to be my best poem so far (which is awful), but the meditation it implies needs more time to unfold. I'll have to at least double it while maintaining its reverent feel, which is difficult for me, because I'm not naturally reverent. Oh well.

The Sorrow of Literature

Think.
--The Waste Land, §II

Think of the brawling song in which achieves
The milky violence of a poet’s sigh.
One’s thought can make a harmony in sieves…
And yet the image of ‘milky violence’—Why?

Because the mournful myth of cadence dips
Beyond the living, loving World that leers
In laboring hands and every page that rips;
Is murdered; and becomes the domain of fears.

It dips, and now the clamorous Muse achieves
The fully empty heart that cannot sigh.
Dead leaves, the fruit of myth, are brought in sieves,
Whose sighs compose a silenced singing: Why?

Paean to Shakespeare

The lass who graces
This serest of spaces
Is indivorcible from Shakespeare.

She will seem an image isolated,
Undebated,
Yet know the debate was won by Shakespeare.

Her curls, you’ll surely say,
Smack of ambrosi-ay—
But know ambrosia is monopolized by Shakespeare.

Say: ‘Your gait, dear, traced in cloudy fluff
‘Is in form earthly enough;
‘Yet ambrosia is its stuff.
‘It is a like a play of Shakespeare.’

Say: ‘Your smile, dear, is philosopher and stone,
‘Yet it is not your own:
‘The first alchemy, and the first at alchemy, was Shakespeare.’

Shakespeare, Usurper-King!
Thy play’s the thing
Wherein Beauty taketh wing.
But, whoreson magus! the wing is always thine, Shakespeare.

One more bump. This is a metrical exercise of the worst kind. Formally, I was consistent, but I think it to be a truly ugly piece of writing. Pitifully, it is my longest poem also.

Commandment in Reverse

Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
--‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, §IV

The banyan tree was fed
Upon an empty husk;
This poem, though born dead,
Shall smelly up the dusk.

It can’t do any better. Smell,
Though lowest of the passive senses,
Can by the figgy tree do well.
I won’t presume to use incenses.

Poetic inspiration, I’ve been told,
Is like a heightened epileptic fit:
Pressed tongue. The New assumes its throne; the Old
Expires. Heaney says, ‘I’ll dig with it’;

Or Beckett snatches grey ideas from out the foam;
Or Joyce engraves the Host upon a sooty face.
The entire enterprise becomes an onyx dome
Astride an emerald harboring a faery race.

And yet without that dome and race, the verses would go nude;
So Stevens pulses metaphysics’ strings; so pavement square
Comes to be haunted by white legs, and mind’s first quietude
Is burnt by shroudless Personage or concept. These all dare

A poet (how absurd!) toward actual expression. But Shakespeare knew
That absolute Construction must conceal all things t’reveal the One.
Obscurity should take its strange and truest Self: ‘A girl whose dew
‘Put Life, they say, to shame; for this verse first was gathered ‘neath the Sun.

‘From then on, prose will grow to rule the Earth. The dome’s obscuring tint o’erwhelms
The necessary hopelessness of nude ideas, dead in th’ heart. Enjamb-
Ment glints its bitter claw and beckons. No more the promise made by emerald helms
That house heads hollow, marching but to Poem’s simple beat. No more the Lamb.’

No poet claims this as the story of his Fall or his Decline: What is it then?
List, traveler: it is the grave of thought and self-appointed Creativity,
Who hails from indices and stars instead of rebel Bacchus and the Spirits’ din.
From this point on let these my lines flow backward, and the dangerous Truth my doctrine be.

Interesting, and in some ways excellent. Thanks for sharing, user. Your wit and clever wordplay is refreshing, though oddly out of time: this reads like someone from Dryden and Pope's circle of friends, or Swift. Whence the Augustan sensibility? Do you like Horatian and Juvenalian satire? Have you read Lovecraft's hilarious Eliot send-up, Waste Paper? I enjoyed them all, even the "Shakespeare did it!" and lesser exercises. You have legitimate poetic dimensions and abilities, though they obviously serve your head more than your heart. Skill is not your stumbling-block, but sincerity might be, if you want to also write poetry that demands to be taken seriously, even at the risk of being scorned. It took Eliot a long time to stop winking at the reader for even a few lines. Just my two cents. I'm an adjunct prof, so I have seen a terrifying amount of amateur poetry (and real poetry too, of course).

Well, thanks. I confess I have read almost no Augustan poetry, although I can somewhat see what you mean: this is certainly formalist poetry (in the worst sense of that term), though it lacks that absolute confidence in technical ability that marked Pope. I suppose that an unconscious imitation of someone you haven't read is better than a conscious imitation of someone you have. I personally detect an overabundance of Wallace Stevens. That one which took Yeats's 'The Sorrow of Love' (which is an incredible short poem, and criminally underrated in my opinion) as its formal model tried to be a bit more in the freely eloquent Yeatsian spirit, but failed miserably, becoming even more convoluted and, I suppose, metaphysical. And yes I have read Lovecraft's parody, although I have a hard time taking it seriously even as parody, since Lovecraft's intellect is so manifestly inferior to Eliot's, even if in terms of pure imagination he might be considered comparable.

I'm glad you think that technical ability is not the issue. I've mostly been following the commonplace that beginning poets should learn strict formal models before loosening up. But perhaps I'll loosen up a bit in the next stuff I manage to write. The Shakespeare thing is doggerel, but I think it turned out much more nicely than really anything else I've tried, the overly silly third stanza notwithstanding. It's wise of you to advise me to stop 'winking' at the reader; I'll try to follow that advice.

I've got a few minutes, so I'll give it a quick go line by line. I'll focus on criticizing and not praising; this is not to say that there's not some virtue or craft to the poem, but that's in this forum I think it's more productive to point out the issues that need revising or correcting.

>Sonnet: An Evening Online

This'd better be really good to justify calling a 16 line poem a sonnet. I mean, Hopkins wrote 20 line poems that broke most of the conventions of the sonnet, but still called them sonnets. Hopkins, I think, can do this. See his poem The Nature is a Heraclitean Fire for an example.

How will the "Evening Online" affect the theme or language of the poem? Does it?

>If to the monocle-acquainted eye
>The aeroplane and piston seemed profane,
>It’d flood the ages’ gloaming with its cry
>To suffer this too-enchanting window-pane.—

I'll get through this, but the first line already strikes me as incredibly pretentious (which I think you want as you invoke an image of a tof, right?) and artificially formal. Maybe this is part of the effect, too. I'll continue.

The struggle in sonnet writing since the Romantics at the latest has been trying to strike a genuine and natural tone and language usage while still conforming to a very contrived a structured form. Keats can do it, though most people's earliest attempts are too formal and consequently come off as wooden and insincere.

Lines 3 & 4 have one syllable each too many and the metre is broken in both. The "It'd" already upsets the iambic pentameter established by the first 2 lines, while the "too" of line 4 has to be spoken accented.

What is flooding the gloaming of the ages with its cry? The aeroplane? Modernity? Industry? Whatever it is, the syntax of line 4 strikes me as nonsensical. What is suffering the window pane? Is the cry suffering, as in patiently abiding? How does that work? Or does the window suffer from the cry? There's a play on words between suffering and pane/pain, and maybe a romantic/modern dichotomy developing.

>And yet to call it windowpane were wode:
>The analogy would fail this ópaque lake
>Aboding vermin and the verminous ode,
>The wording destitute, the feeling fake.

Again, there's too much language occurring here, and though it seems like the poem wants to comment on its own wordiness, I don't think it's sharp enough for that. Wode? The hell? Archaisms smack of the self-agrandising amateur. If you plan on intentionally writing archaically, line 6 should begin Th'analogy to accompany the unnatural accenting of opaque. What is the analogy of line 7? I don't feel that it's clear from lines 1-4. Line 8: The wording is not destitute, though the feeling is fake.

cont.

cont'd.

>‘Turning blankly toward the blank page, churning
>‘With desire, stranded in a house on fire,’
>Runs the ode, ‘I abandoned fecund learning
>‘For mere abstraction; a sterile, lustful mire.’

The metre turns all to shit in these lines. If you were writing a petrarchan sonnet, the logic should have turned by now, but it's a supposed quotation. I do wonder where it's going. Going with the Evening Online theme, is this supposed to suggest surfing for pornography? Desire, fire, sterile lust, abstracted sex? If it is, it's the unsexiest and least sensuous way of describing sex. Maybe, again, that's the intent, but I should think that these lines were where the language should be most alive and full of earthy anglo-saxisms (like the word fuck, for example. Moist is also good.) The dry formality of ll. 1-8 is stripped away to reveal something pulsing and alive. See Shakespeare's sonnets 20 & 129 for examples.

But since the metre is completely lost, though, attempts at sense making are hindered. If there's been a sustained and incremental meaning-making occurring, I've lost track of it because this is a train wreck. And no one can justify bad poetry as intentional.

>Nor can be saved the drifting hedonist
>By monkish virtues: only amethyst
>In verbal landscapes questioningly laid
>Can make the Angel able to be kisst.

Again, a sonnet should have ended at 14. The final couplet of Sonnet 129 could serve as a model... end in sensual despair, wanting escape but overcome by your own desires. Instead there's something like a puritanical turn to language and poetry with some promise of further abstraction. Given the terms of the poem, I prefer burning to death in the house on fire. It makes me think of St Jerome, who learned Hebrew to distract his own lustful thoughts and desires, giving us the Vulgate as a result. Or Augustine, who also struggled with both literature and desire in his attempts to know God. These lines dismiss christian virtue as a means of controlling the desires, but instead turn to completely hollow language and images. Where's the consolation there?

The reversal in line 13 (verb then subject) always sounds conrtrived and fake to contemporary readers. I understand that you're likely trying to make the metre work, but it shows that you're forcing it into shape.

The rhyme scheme is mostly alright, until the last four lines. Why two couplets? They're not even couplets, though, since line 14 enjambs into 15.

cont.

So look, I'm not saying that this poem is without its charms and virtues, and I think it's better than the shy self degradation you've pissed all over this thread. But it has plenty of problems if you mean for it to be a sonnet, or iambic pentameter, or pleasant reading. What you do from here, then, is revise and revise. Drop the sonnet nonsense, change the rhyme of the last quatrain to the abab that the rest of the poem had been. Drop some of the pretentious imagery and overly formal language and make the verminous ode sexier. I think the theme of the poem is something that should invite the sympathy and identification of your reader... become something like the anthem for Veeky Forums: I wanted the glorious heights of langauge and learning and instead I'm wanking to donkey bestiality porn. We've all been there. By using such formalised language and odd imagery, you're intentionally pushing away the reader who would otherwise want to share the feels.

And above all this, I commend you for writing. 16 lines of poetry that need work is better than no poetry at all. No good poem was ever produced without hours of difficult revision.

Remember, poetry is a form of seeing with your eyes closed and not a code to be broken.

i would kill myself but nobody would know
i would throw a party but nobody would show
nobody would care, they wouldn't even stare
brains on walls in empty halls
i swear i'd do it but i don't have the balls

where the fuck is my Poolitzer?

Rainy rainy Sky,
Why am I so gay?
I just wish to die
Want to be away

Take me take me please
user that I Trust
I'll give in with ease
to the Power of your thrust

Sorry to have scared you
Please don't go away
I had not prepared you
To the lust within my say

Wake up from a dream
End it at fourteen