As a medium of cultural conveyance, poetry has run its course. There will be no great poet of the 21st century, because poetry can no longer be great.
Our time is that of the novel. It is inescapable. Not the short story, not the play, but the novel. Nobody will be remembered within the context of literature who wrote anything other than an immensely popular and well-received novel. When considering what were the works of "high culture" from this period of time, nobody will point to any poem or play.
When you write poetry, it is not socially necessary. It is forced. None of the poetry I read from anyone sounds like anything other than the grossest pretension, because you are not a poet. Nobody can be a poet anymore. Poetry is dead.
to bad I'm writing poetry that will be remembered for at least 200 years long form poetry has every device availble a novel does and on critical important extra piece
Jeremiah Mitchell
>When you write poetry, it is not socially necessary. It is forced. None of the poetry I read from anyone sounds like anything other than the grossest pretension, because you are not a poet. Nobody can be a poet anymore. Poetry is dead. you are the real crackpot here
Noah Gutierrez
...
Jack Williams
poetry can still be great just not in the way you think it is since you're unfamiliar with (post-)modern ideas of how poetry functions
advertising is effective when it uses the mechanics of poetry
Benjamin Lee
art criticism is dead because no one can develop sustained arguments about art anymore, and without critics selling art to the everyday plen (You) it appears dead
Ethan Fisher
you cannot kill both poetry and grammar one always survives
Liam Rogers
Novel is dead too.
Our time is that of the shitpost.
Robert Collins
This isn't wrong. Imagine what the average person thinks of poetry.
Eli Russell
Not for the overman.
Grayson Bennett
poetry = faggotry
Eli Gonzalez
Books in general are dead.
The future is Netflix/On-Demand TV (& possibly normal TV), the internet and above all memes.
Any ideological/propaganda wars will be fought on these fronts. Not enough people read anymore for it to be an effective medium.
Landon Long
All these wrote in meter simply because printing presses didn't exist and poetry is easier to memorize
Gavin Wright
Homer was most probably, if he existed, something like a very popular bard.
Joshua Cox
>Our time is that of the novel.
Lol what? The novel has died too.
Brandon Smith
the novel hasnt died because it still sells well. That is what matters.
An art dies when it becomes a subsidized piece of museum, or when it has more creators than consumers.
Charles Collins
you will die unknown and unread, faggot
Lincoln Richardson
idiot
Lucas Ross
>the novel hasnt died because it still sells well.
Not really. Not literary fiction. It's subsidised by academia.
Lincoln Butler
You don't warrant any more complex rebuttal than this. Who the fuck are you to dictate what the major literary artform of our time is?
sage
Matthew Campbell
Maybe this is presentism from my part, but I find it hard to believe that any roleplayer was popular, no matter what class they mained.
Michael Ross
>painting was never alive
Michael Moore
This is one of the most cardboard fucking unread psued opinions I've had the displeasure of seeing become popular on Veeky Forums.
So, please stop posting on Veeky Forums
Tyler Green
it was demanded and paid for. Patronage by the wealthy and nobility isnt the same as State subsidy in a modern State.
Logan Roberts
>As a medium of cultural conveyance, poetry has run its course. There will be no great poet of the 21st century, because poetry can no longer be great. >Our time is that of the novel. It is inescapable. Not the short story, not the play, but the novel. Nobody will be remembered within the context of literature who wrote anything other than an immensely popular and well-received novel. When considering what were the works of "high culture" from this period of time, nobody will point to any poem or play. >When you write poetry, it is not socially necessary. It is forced. None of the poetry I read from anyone sounds like anything other than the grossest pretension, because you are not a poet. Nobody can be a poet anymore. Poetry is dead.
Poetry survives in pop music. Who reads novels these days?
Carter Young
>None of the poetry I read from anyone sounds like anything other than the grossest pretension, because you are not a poet. Nobody can be a poet anymore. Poetry is dead.
I think that you sound even more pretentious by stating that an art form that has been written since the dawn of literature is now dead and will remain dead.
I agree that most of the poetry produced today is bad, and I also agree that much poetry that is not accompanied by a story (not in a play, not in an epic poem, not in a book that works even a simple plot, like fables and the modern works of Dr. Seuss) is mostly limited to a very small audience, yet who are you to say what people from all the globe will keep producing and consuming in the years to come?
I see people sharing poems and poetic quotes on Facebook every day. In any popular TV series or movie, the phrases and speeches that are generally most quoted and remembered by all the normal viewers are the ones where some poetic sparks intrude into the normal, gray, day-to-day prose that the characters usually speak. People still love poetry, even if they themselves do not know it.
Daniel Ortiz
>our time is that of the novel
The 19th century calls you back. The 20th century was the century of the film.
Jose Evans
I'm talking about the written medium.
People buy novels all the time. Not novels-as-literature, per se, but novels all the same. Cultural is still conveyed in terms of the novel, but no longer in terms of poety.
I am making an observation. I am not the authority to pronounce anything, I am simply observing what is there.
Xavier Bennett
So I guess that book of poems I published last year and was paid well for didn't exist, right? And hasn't sold 10,000 copies?
>muh popularity >muh muney
99% of people don't appreciate art in any way. They consume it like food or drink, instead of viewing it as educational and ENLIGHTENING. Just because morons like you fail to appreciate it, doesn't mean that it goes unappreciated by its TRUE audience.
Dominic Peterson
>So I guess that book of poems I published last year and was paid well for didn't exist, right? And hasn't sold 10,000 copies? You guess correctly.
Thomas Rodriguez
Your book of poems isn't culturally necessary
Easton Stewart
Poetry: The Obituary, in case you missed it
Daniel Allen
>ur lyer cuz i say so >this is how insecure you sound I just explained that keeping ENLGHTENED people ENLIGHTENED is culturally necessary, you dolt. Your sub 120 IQ is showing.
Parker Rodriguez
>I pretend to be a successful poet on the Internet >this is how insecure you sound
Robert Hughes
Wrong. The novel is dying because they take too long. Poetry will no doubt make a resurgence in this century.
Carter Ramirez
>I just explained that keeping ENLGHTENED people ENLIGHTENED is culturally necessary I don't think you understand what I'm saying. Keats did.
Keats said that nobody in his time could ever write something like Paradise Lost: people just don't think like that anymore and it is impossible. Culture has simply moved to a different place. It is just the same that we do not convey culture anymore through poems: the medium has become all washed up. Television, film, memes, social media, and novels are the primary means by which this is done these days, and any concept of higher culture has really been eradicated. Even what masquerades as "classical music" now is just another form of popular music, for example.
Poetry is decidedly intertwined with bourgeois higher culture. Popular poetry is nonexistent, it has no application. It can be used in advertising, in folk sayings, in memes or what have you, but that isn't poetry proper, no more than a twitter post is literature.
Cameron Mitchell
screencapped so I can make fun of you 2100
Ryder Barnes
>Television, film, memes, social media, and novels are the primary means by which this is done these days
Lol what? No-one reads novels anymore.
What was the last big novel to have an impact on popular culture? None this millennium.
Thomas Collins
>Poetry is decidedly intertwined with bourgeois higher culture.
Bourgeois higher culture existed for about 150 years, whereas poetry goes back thousands of years. The death of bourgeois higher culture won't kill poetry, it will just kill the bourgeois higher culture forms of poetry . . .
Mason Perez
Book poetry was created by bourgeois culture.
Jaxson Williams
If I ever become a poet it will be because of anger towards bad poets.
This is what it sounds like outside, fat geese and guinea hens holding hands. I am 31, which is very young for my age. That is enough to realize I’m a pencil that has learned how to draw the Internet. I explain squiggles diagramming exactly how I feel and you are drawn to read in ways you cannot yet. Slow goes the drag of creation, how what’s within comes to be without, which is the rhythmic erection of essence.
---
I’d once have left brown behind having already left the tribe behind and her tongue and the garb that made me theirs because it felt like leaving hoi polloi behind to put behind the father in my mother’s tongue lingering in the long and deep vowels meant I could leave behind inferiority complex not really or ever but in theory
I leave behind the house we kept trying to make look like the nation and the past I know I’ll leave my hurts behind I hope I’ll leave yours probably not
---
Welcome to the endless high-school Reunion. Welcome to past friends And lovers, however kind or cruel. Let’s undervalue and unmend
The present. Why can’t we pretend Every stage of life is the same? Let’s exhume, resume, and extend Childhood. Let’s all play the games
That occupy the young. Let fame And shame intertwine. Let one’s search For God become public domain. Let church.com become our church.
Let’s sign up, sign in, and confess Here at the altar of loneliness.
---
This trash makes me physically angry and makes me want to become a poet out of spite. I could literally and unironically write better poetry than this nauseating garbage.
Easton Martinez
Have anything to back you up that isn't just posturing?
Josiah Baker
>pop music
Zachary Powell
>This trash makes me physically angry and makes me want to become a poet out of spite. I could literally and unironically write better poetry than this nauseating garbage. I have made this thread really out of a belief that culture is something akin to an organism: that all modern poetry is by nature forced and none of it seems essential.
When I think of a poet like Dante or Keats, I don't see them sitting down and crafting something. I literally see them channeling a great work from culture itself, rather Culture with a capital C. Great poetry is not something with meaning or reason, but something from the Gods, seemingly delivered.
When I think of the Aeneid, do I really think of Virgil as sitting down and rationally conceiving of the story? Or did the story just come to him, and he more or less channeled it? What about Shakespeare? How much of Shakespeare is true rational craft, and how much "revealed aesthetics?"
Logan Martin
First, go ahead. Second, they're pretty interesting in how they capture the modern zeitgeist. The last one is even pretty good.
Austin Walker
C. S. Lewis in his Preface to Paradise Lost argues that epic poetry can be split into primary and secondary epic, with primary epic being more or less "channeled" by the culture, whereas secondary epic is a reflection upon primary epic. He gives Virgil as an example of secondary epic, being a reflection on Homer. I agree with Lewis. I think the Aeneid was a conscious construction more than an automatic heroic song.
Lucas Jenkins
Is PL secondary to?
Isaiah Jenkins
>capture the modern zeitgeist
precisely why modern poetry is trash, it believes in the Hegelian myth of a zeitgeist, turning their poetry into self-reflective, navel-gazing masturbation.
Aiden Brooks
Lewis says so he says PL is more akin to the Aeneid than to the Iliad/Odyssey or to Beowulf
But actually reading the Aeneid tells me otherwise.
But at least we're on the same page.
Ryder Richardson
novel was clearly the early 1900's
we are in the era of film/script
Camden Flores
Just fuck off Spengler your book isn't even good garbage.
Isaac Garcia
>film Hi grandpa, got lost again? This is the age of memes and videogames.
Kayden Hall
>But actually reading the Aeneid tells me otherwise.
Probably because Virgil was an excellent poet and knew how to imitate the best of Homer.
Nolan Diaz
>When I think of the Aeneid, do I really think of Virgil as sitting down and rationally conceiving of the story? Or did the story just come to him, and he more or less channeled it? What about Shakespeare? How much of Shakespeare is true rational craft, and how much "revealed aesthetics?" whats the point of asking questions that cant be answered, all you've discussed is the RESULT of an artist's work. no where do you have any pretense to make claims about the CAUSE or SOURCE of an artist's work
Ayden Smith
>implying I don't know what every other's intention is Filthy postmodernist go away.
Jordan Parker
author's*
Leo Butler
jonathan is that you?
Austin Howard
So we should just ignore the effects of the internet on life in literature? Sure, older writers like Vollmann might self consciously do that, but eventually we'll have a whole generation of writers raised on the internet. You may be pessimistic, but people were pessimistic about industrialization and urbanization, newspapers, television, etc. Literature's still survived, albeit in different forms with different subject matters.
Brandon Adams
>industrialization and urbanization, newspapers, television (although one thing I'll admit, is these do suck. But never underestimate the resilience of the writerly spirit. Great literature has been created in spite of and in opposition to negative trends in modern civilization.)
Juan Myers
no
Ryder Morgan
>When I think of the Aeneid, do I really think of Virgil as sitting down and rationally conceiving of the story? Or did the story just come to him, and he more or less channeled it?
I read that Virgil was a slow composer and that he usually first wrote the material in prose, and then proceeded to versify, eliminating and adding new things that seems more appropriate. So it was not a natural and simple thing to him. He also needed to search for sources to make the Aeneid, and he pretty much imitated a lot from Homer, who was more distant in time from him than Shakespeare (and I guess even Dante) is from us.
You never know when something is going to explode again. Pablo Neruda, for example, was worldwide famous, and he mostly wrote poetry, much of it highly metaphorical and demanding. And if you see the first attempts of verse-drama in blank verse in the years before Shakespeare (see Gorboduc) you would not believe how much the theater was going to improve (of course, the fact that there was money to be made with it helped a lot): nobody could have guessed, watching Gorboduc when it was first staged, how glorious it’s offspring would be.
There was also a verse-drama that recently made a lot of success; who knows if maybe it dosent become a new trend and suddenly we find ourselves surrounded by verse-drama once again. Here, this was the play:
>who knows if maybe it dosent become a new trend and suddenly we find ourselves surrounded by verse-drama once again. I do. We won't.
Michael Williams
It is
Jacob James
a pity; i would love to see that
Henry Evans
>colon with no capitalization or end punctuation
Dominic Smith
You must love Hemingway.
Jose Foster
I did just read the Sun Also Rises and it was pretty good, but it seemed like it was literally just an old film.
Isaiah Price
>I do. We won't.
This seems to make you happy. Why?
Parker Richardson
Because you're bad at reading emotions I guess.
Daniel James
Haikus are easy But they don't always make sense Colonoscopy
Levi Price
LOL are you fucking serious
Grayson Martinez
I'm glad that I have misread your emotions. I cant imagine how anyone who loves to read would be happy to imagine a world where poetry has died, a world where drama of great verbal and metaphorical exuberance will never be possible again.
I'd probably like poetry a lot more if we were still telling each other book length epic stories by the campfire in meter. That's badass. But we don't. And it's hard to get into the more derivative art for art's sake purified form without that universally enthralling baseline.
I mean, would people enjoy short arthouse films if they never watched a movie in their life? Would people be into experimental music if they've never hear or enjoyed a pop song?
Christopher Walker
A faint ghost through the raindrops, pace a frozen train stop My brain throbs as it wanders to my day job On my way to the place that I hate most Strange though how I'm still afraid of getting laid off And every day feels the same with a different date And every face looks as plain as an empty frame So sick of waiting for the painter to begin To paint the plain away, for now a testament to emptiness and... Thoughts ricochet, through my fickle pickled brain Rain trickles down the grimace, same image, different name Fault searcher my soul’s an impulse purchase Round here we serve beer not purpose
We all look so morose Soaked overcoats, hope comatosed Folks know the ropes, don't row the boat, just float Don't delay, don't you go and chase the blown away Umbrella cross the motorway, tell 'em keep a poker face For the joker's sake, hold your plate steady while we load it up And smoke your face pretty while your throat is cut Yeah, things that go bump, know what's up Only showing love through the drugs and the modem plug Moments past only last in photographs, show some gums Fool the picture homie, no, he couldn’t give a lonely fuck So they don’t smile they just show their teeth And sit below the streets on broken rollercoaster seats With today's valid ticket like this trip is where they're all supposed to be But don't be difficult, the warning poster's read And if it all amounts to this, then all aboard and count your chips A flock of dirty pigeons fighting over water fountain sips
Now I could learn to hide a smirk behind a smile In a nice designer shirt, life of work, buy a pile of dirt And plant a house in it past the shanty town limits Where the angry crowds picket, pick a hand-me-down image And be an average bloke, the same person that you know That hates work but has to go to pay for the back he broke Toiling in the fields, what's the point of putting poison in their meals When a coin will have them oiling up the wheels For the rich man's chariot they're carrying A figjam arrogance and shrink-wrapped happiness "Hand it out" Same shit, different brand name "Gather around" Same slip, different cash claim Wait, welcome to the day it was rocket science And watch grey become a ying-yang compromise Throw the canary down the mineshaft With a gas mask for the last laugh, tip your bar staff
And welcome to the day that the daisy chain Breaks from the weight and strain, but everything remains the same And welcome to the day that the painter came Astounded every critic with a thousand different shades of grey And welcome to the day that the sweat from every brow Was ours to keep And every pawn was proudly crowned a queen And welcome to the night that while the captain slept We abandoned ship with our lanterns lit singing
Step aside
Grayson Clark
Poetry isn't dead, it's just been superseded by rap.
Sure, a lot of rap music (arguably the vast majority) is the poetic equivalent of 'There once was a man from Nantucket...', but the good stuff still takes the same skill to write as quality poetry, plus the added requirements that the speaker needs to have the proper cadence and enunciation to deliver it in an enjoyable manner. On top of this, because you're hearing it in the artist's own voice they can ensure it's delivered exactly as they intend, with the pacing and emotion that you can't get with words on paper.
Eli Morgan
there's still some good modern poetry out there, it's a matter of discernment; Billy Collins and Jane Hirshfield are both fantastic imo plus you never know what you'll find with some digging. saw this recently and it wasn't bad, a bit heavyhanded but decent writing
yeah but why should I concern myself with what the average person thinks?
Evan Adams
>I'd probably like poetry a lot more if we were still telling each other book length epic stories by the campfire in meter. That's badass. But we don't. And it's hard to get into the more derivative art for art's sake purified form without that universally enthralling baseline.
"that universally enthralling baseline.", in my opinion, is the key to make more enjoyable poetry. The lyric poetry was never a match (in popularity) for great plays, epic tales and books of poetry that simple tell a story and offer us with characters. Even in Shakespeare’s time, his narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece were much more successful in sales than the volume of his sonnets (not to mention the printed plays).
But of course, a lot of people might produce works written in verse, telling a story, and still produce something bad. We tend to look to the works of the past and perceive them as large in quantity, but they are all scattered through time, through the centuries, a few specimens of trees that sprouted and survived a in an ocean of brownish, sour and musty dead-foliage.
We look to the few decades of our own existence and get impatient because we don’t see any other awe inspiring poetic talent emerge, yet we should be aware that such kind of births are rare. These rare birds are the product a lot of several convergent factors: a decent level of intelligence; an environment of learning and stimulation; an obsessive and ambitious personality; capacity for hard-work; capacity to tolerate long periods of learning and inevitable episodes of failure and rejection, and more. No wonder than some of us reach 40 and 50 without witnessing any new poetic genius emerge.
Nicholas Baker
Atop a mountain, my goal is set Thin air and anxiety cloud the mind The birds frolic and the fog drifts The white rope I have been walking on creeks and tightens with every step It connects mountain to mountain The past and the future One step forward feels like three steps back Am I good enough? Time will tell
rate guys please
Isaiah Reyes
As mainly a reader of novels, essays and history books, I like poetry most when:
-It describes a scene or tells a story -it rhymes -the writer has a great command of the phonetical aspect of his language, what the strengths and weaknesses of the language are, and can think of combinations of words that sound very good.
Examples of this would be Coleridge's poem about Kublai Khan's palace, Xanadu, and Ruben Dario's poem about the parade of a Roman army, Marcha Triunfal.
I also think poetry is untranslatable because you cant translate sound.
