How come we never discuss poetry on here?

Lit talks about the Odyssey every fucking day.

futurists are lazy and afraid of the long shadows

I'm reading Charles Olson's Maximus Poems and Li-young Lee's The City in Which I Love You. Both are splendid though I find Olson quite difficult.

Olson woo!
I recently got it and have piddled around with it, but I haven't really dove in. It's beautiful from what I've read.

Too busy writing it poorly

Because nobody cares about poetry anymore, whether you like it or not. If you want to prove me wrong, just name 5 contemporary poets and their best works.

Who is your favourite poet, anons?
Or your favourite poem?

I can appreciate it, but I suck at writting it.

Please, share something.

Same with me, really. It's lovely but pretty fucking difficult l

Because poetry is not literature.

how do i read poetry?

- Read the same poem many times
- Read it out loud, extremely important when reading poetry to know how it sounds like
- Check for figure of speechs, rhymes and so on
- You probably want to read up on the history of poetry first, know what movement that poet was part of
- Annotate heavily

Have fun understanding poetry lad

thanks for the answer

>- Annotate heavily
What do you mean by this? I've seen some annotated poems and they looked like they were done by retards, pointing out only the most banal elements.

It's deader and more obscure than the normal narrative lit, and you have the ">translation" mentality here that prevents discussion of 80-90% of all poetry.

>- Check for figure of speechs, rhymes and so on

What do you do when you identify these things?

i post on Veeky Forums so retards get curious

How they serve to reinforce the meaning of the poem, how they link to the poet's style and so on.

The way I do it, it usually goes as follow, not that I'm an expert or anything

1) Identify the most basic stuff (obvious rhymes and figure of speechs and so on)
2) Same step as 1), but try to identify more advanced ideas and techniques

EX ;

''Voilà que j'ai touché l'automne des idées,
Et qu'il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux
Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées,
Où l'eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.''

The last two verses of this Baudelaire quatrain are meant to reinforce the image of tombs being created by water by effectively sounding like the sound one would make inside a tomb or a hole. You can't figure this out without reading it out loud many times, which is why that's so important.

3) Link those things to the poet's style, his movement, the historical context if it applies and so on

4) Try to understand the meaning of the poem

If you don't already do these things instinctively you're not gonna make it.

Don't treat it like a homework assignment. First thing you should do when you read a poem is figure out what you like about it. Do you like the rhyme scheme? The imagery?

>4) Try to understand the meaning of the poem
Don't do this. Figure out what the poem means to you. Looking for the "deep meaning" in things is futile and stupid. Poems are only surface.

You shouldn't be reading poetry or the classics if you don't enjoy them and/or find them beautiful. However, if you want to understand, you have to do a bit of work.

This is bait.

Nope, friend.
>There are..there are other reasons why people look for deep meanings in poetry, and that’s because.. I mean it’s perfectly natural to do it. It’s just, you have to control the process. I mean, you can’t teach poetry sothat all that’s there is the deep meaning. I mean graduate students come to me at Columbia (University) some time, they want me to be.. to help them work on their dissertation, “What are you writing about?” – “The deep meaning of Joseph Conrad” – “No”. I say “no”, they say, “why not?”, I say “Because the deep meaning of Joseph Conrad is the same as the deep meaning of every other writer who lived. There are about five deep meanings which I will now tell you – Life is not worth living, Life seems not worth living but is worth living after all..” You know. There are very few deep meanings. I said, “Why don’t you, why don’t you read some of Conrad’s Letters and read a couple of his novels and think about the difference between his epistolary style and his novel-writing style. I’d love to know about that.It’s very interesting the difference between the way people write letters and write novels. “That’s not deep enough” – Uh – uh – anyway…It’s quite natural – I’m getting a bit off the subject . The reason it’s natural to find deep meanings in poetry and the reason this whole critical and professorial mistakestarted, I think, is this – The almost.. The intention of almost all language is either to just keep life moving alongon a jolly way (instead of, like, rubbing and touching and stuff) – “How you doing?” -” I’m great” – “Terrific, that’s great” – “That’s a lie,you son of a bitch”, I mean that just all, that’s, you know, pushing and touching . Then, an awful lot of it is given information – “How do you get to the ladies room?” – “You go down the hall, turn to the left.”Paul Valery said the function of prose is to perish. [ “The essence of prose ois to perish – to be dissolved and replaced by the image it denotes’] That is, you find out how to go to the ladies room, you don’t go through life with the words ringing in your head, “down the hall, turn to the left”. Poetry, poetry is different, because it.. the words would besaid, arranged, in a certain way, so that they would stay in your head, and the meaning would not be so precise. Poetry’s a very strange kind of communication.
t. Kenneth Koch

Poems very rarely have one "final meaning". It doesn't work like that, it's more nuanced. Lots of people go chasing after "deep meanings" and never find it, because it wasn't there in the first place. Nobody reads The Red Wheelbarrow as a philosophical allegory. Poetry is foremost intended to be enjoyed, not to moralize to philosophize.

This senpai. Hell, even understanding a poem isn't necessary to enjoy it. One must enjoy the beauty of the sounds, words, images... The last thing one should focus on (if they even want to bother) is meaning.

Poetry, in almost every case, can't be read like prose fiction. To do so is to miss the point of poetry entirely.

Is it ok to read translations? i don't like the poetry of my language.

Probably in part because many people here are not anglophone natively, yet English is the language of communication and which is understood by all, and poetry requires a greater familiarity with the language than prose.
Actually seems like a small majority of anons here are either European (many eastern) or south American.
I have some interest in it, and am planning to get more into it in 2017, but I'll probably be mainly focusing on my own language, which maybe 3-5 other anons on Veeky Forums know.

>Kenneth Koch
>The New York School
>Modernist poetry
>What is political poetry
>What is nationalist poetry
>Rimbaud's Les Corbeaux isn't related AT ALL to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, or to his own literary failure

Yes, poems usually have multiple meanings, but to claim they have none is falsehood. The author is the one who ultimately decides what his poem is about. If he decides there is one final meaning, then there is one and that is all.

Realize your interpretation of poetry is ideology, and not objective at all.

This is extremely shallow. Do you also think Thomas Kinkade is high art? I'm guessing you must enjoy computer generated poetry?

Authors write with intent. There is often meaning in poetry, and it's extremely important.

You do not, in fact, read The Red Wheelbarrow like you read Le drapeau de Carillon or Ballades des dames du temps jadis.

Poetry is hard to translate.

This is ... retarded, unless you want to write a paper on it. Not at all feasible when it comes to time constraints, not at all feasible if you're reading for enjoyment. Be honest, do you think Shelley did this for Milton's Paradise Lost? Or Henry James, say, did this for all of Keats's poems he read? CAN you even do this for every poem you read by Keats without going insane?

overly academic, user. I'm shaking my head in sadness...

What would you recommend to do in lieu of that user's recommendation?

I'm going to do something like that, yes.

That is in fact exactly what I'm going to do.

What the fuck is a time constraint? Obviously I won't do something exactly like that for long epics like Milton, but for poetry that is mostly stuff like quatrain or sonnet, I will do exactly that.

Overly-academic tryhard drivel.

what's your language?

Read the poem. If you are genuinely interested in it, analyze the fuck out of it. reread it, even read it out loud if you're into that. For instance, Blake's The Mental Traveller was so compelling that I myself decided to do research into it and read it a shitload of times. However, I haven't done this for any of, say, Keats's Odes. Blake's poem is so cryptic that studying it deeply rewards you: you can only understand more and more of it the more you think of it, the more you come back to it. Keats's Odes are beautiful, but overanalyzing them will, so to speak, suck the lifeforce out of them. Ode to Autumn is one of the most beautiful poems in the English language and it's all imagery and sound, beautiful language itself, with no deeper political or philosophical meaning at all IMO

Says the pond dwelling philistine

I loathe people like you.

Thanks, dude. I have this ~500 page collection of Romantic poetry and have been meaning to get around to it for a while, but I've always been unsure how I should approach it. Should I read each poem several times (first silently, the next out loud, that kind of thing), should I make sure I get some kind of meaning out of every poem, that sort of thing. It's not like reading the Iliad where you have one lengthy narrative to follow, so it's not easy to know what to do. Do you have any recommendations for this sort of problem?

>How come we never discuss poetry on here?

Because apart from Blake and Rilke, there doesn't exist a good poet.

Only two poets you've read?

No. But out of all them I have read, they are the only ones worth re-reading time and time again.

Just read it. It's supposed to be enjoyable. Only research it if you want to. Think for yourself.

Help me out? I really and truly only appreciate form in poetry, firstly, and everything else, lastly.
The poems with a precise form, caesurae, rhyme, rhythm, meter and cadence are,I believe, miles ahead of free-x. But, I've read This compost by Whitman and, even if it was free-x, I immensely enjoyed it.

Any other free-x POEMS of high caliber to recommend?

>effectively sounding like the sound one would make inside a tomb or a hole
nothing about those lines evokes that sound for me

Why even make a post like that when you've read next to nothing?

it's hard, I suppose

Why are you so butthurt? The fact that you believe I haven't read anything, doesn't make you an authority on poetry.

Kill yourself.

i'd rather to keep it secret, some people get really mad when i say i hate our literature (specially poetry)

hope is not portuguese

Better not be French

Or just tell us already

no one can simply dislike french poetry

>i hate our literature (specially poetry)
If you are euro, kys

>Overly-academic
WEW

Ah, c'mon, tell us
German? Spanish? English? French?

But considering that you're speaking -reading- in English I'd bet English is your mother language.

>tfw to smart for Veeky Forums

People aren't retards, they can read in languages other than their first.

This isn't true at all. Poetry doesn't need a philosophical or political meaning to warrant re-reading and analyzing.

>when they take the bait

weeeeeeeeeew laddie buck

right to the point

i will cut your fear of the coming progress out of you with my piston powered gleaming steel bayonet of death, you regressive steam song assonance hating communist

1. Safiya St. Clair, Cannibal
2. Claudia Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely
3. Joseph Massey, To Keep Time
4. Jericho Brown, The New Testament
5. Ross Gay, Bringing the Shovel Down

here's five more

6. Andrew Morgan, Month of Big Hands
7. Mike Young, Sprezzatura
8. Jorie Graham, Place (debatable of course)
9. CA Conrad, ECODeviance
10. Kevin Young, For the Confederate Dead

>i dont care about poetry
>no one must care about poetry

ass

Poetry is gay.

>Sprezzatura
can we make this a meme again? banterfucks btfo etc?

We tried.

how about a post that doesn't start by accusing and dismissing the most relevant form of poetry

poetry cant be discussed. you can only have poetic discussions about other matters.

Because Veeky Forums reads for the plot

Yeats

An Irish Airman Foresees his Death

Literally all trash.

>nobody cares about poetry anymore

You make this man weep.

>Jorie Graham
>Kevin Young
You almost did good, user. Patricia Lockwood facefucks all of these cucks tho

''Of all living monuments has the fewest
facts attached to it, they slide right off
its surface, no Lincoln lap for them to sit
on and no horse to be astride. Here is what
I know for sure:

Was a gift from one city to another. A city
cannot travel to another city, a city cannot visit
any city but itself, and in its sadness it gives
away a great door in the air. Well
a city cannot except for Paris, who puts
on a hat styled with pigeon wings and walks
through the streets of another city and will not
even see the sights, too full she is of the sights
already. And within her walk her women,
and the women of Paris looking like
they just walked through an Arch...

Or am I mixing it up I think I am
with another famous female statue? Born
in its shadow and shook-foil hot the facts
slid off me also. I and the Arch we burned
to the touch. “Don’t touch that Arch a boy
we know got third-degree burns from touch-
ing that Arch,” says my mother sitting
for her statue. She is metal on a hilltop and
so sad she isn’t a Cross. She was long ago
given to us by Ireland. What an underhand
gift for an elsewhere to give, a door
that reminds you you can leave it. She raises
her arm to brush my hair. Oh no female
armpit lovelier than the armpit of the Arch.''

This is rather unimpressive. Wouldn't read her over any of the masters.

Find a poem/poet you like.

Read it multiple times, also try reading it aloud.

Try memorizing a short poem you enjoy. It helps you internalize it and make it a part of you.

But first, you must find poetry you like. Some poets are easier to read than others. I recommend buying a couple small/inexpensive poetry anthologies (pic related) to get started.

Here is a great introductory poem by Allen Ginsberg:

railroad yard in San Jose
I wandered desolate
in front of a tank factory
and sat on a bench
near the switchman's shack.

A flower lay on the hay on
the asphalt highway
--the dread hay flower
I thought--It had a
brittle black stem and
corolla of yellowish dirty
spikes like Jesus' inchlong
crown, and a soiled
dry center cotton tuft
like a used shaving brush
that's been lying under
the garage for a year.

Yellow, yellow flower, and
flower of industry,
tough spiky ugly flower,
flower nonetheless,
with the form of the great yellow
Rose in your brain!
This is the flower of the World.

what this guy said, but fuck allen ginsberg

Who is the equivalent of Joseph Brodsky but who's native language is english?

I really dont like this one.

>doesn't rhyme
You had one job, Moloch-fiend.

Because this is a literature board. AYOOOOOOOOOOOOO

A lot of the other answers here apply as well. Very few people, even among literary nerds, read it.

I just like it because it's accessible and doesn't scare people away from poetry.

No, the purpose of that post was to basically say how we can't bring up poetry without going insane.

I'd like to discuss poetry but I don't "get" poetry. If a poem isn't simple, I won't understand it or be moved by it.

I'm an idiot.

>Ode to Autumn is one of the most beautiful poems in the English language and it's all imagery and sound, beautiful language itself, with no deeper political or philosophical meaning at all IMO
Uh what? To Autumn is one of Keats' most deceptively deepest poems. It's about finding beauty in decay and death ("thou hast thy music too"). The "dying day", "wailful choir", "gnats mourn", the "light wind lives or die[s]" and in the final line the swallows gather for their migration south (the soul leaving the body?). To Autumn is one of the most beautiful poems in English precisely because it is a subtle vindication of beauty itself in the face of the natural cycle of death.

In comparison, Blake is about as subtle and controlled as a sledgehammer:
>I travelled through a land of men,
>A land of men and women, too
Cringeworthy.

>Uh what? To Autumn is one of Keats' most deceptively deepest poems. It's about finding beauty in decay and death ("thou hast thy music too"). The "dying day", "wailful choir", "gnats mourn", the "light wind lives or die[s]" and in the final line the swallows gather for their migration south (the soul leaving the body?). To Autumn is one of the most beautiful poems in English precisely because it is a subtle vindication of beauty itself in the face of the natural cycle of death.
Pssstt, listen here, kid: you're gay. You're just projecting really trite universal themes onto a poem about the transition to autumn. You could apply those themes to any poem, fag.

No you couldn't. Go ahead, compare it to John Clare's autumn poems if you want.

Why do you think Keats describes the gnats mourning?

Because Keats is using a metaphor of spring dying (sad) but yay autumn is coming instead (happiness from sadness, life from death). This is deeper than Kant, ain't it!

It's really not, it's just interesting use of metaphor and tone. Don't be a little faggot.

To go further, try analyzing the first 2 stanzas of it in the same way. You can't, but I'll give you points for trying.

You are actually fucking retarded.

No you fucking idiot.
>Keats is using a metaphor of spring
No he's not. He's using a metapor of late summer, then autumn harvest, then autumn-cum-winter.
>but yay autumn is coming instead
No, it's not a straightforward celebration of the coming of autumn, Keats doesn't compare autumn to spring favourably but merely insists it has its own melancholy music.
>(happiness from sadness, life from death)
??? No, as I already said, the entire point is that autumn is not happy or lively at all, Keats identifies the season with the exact opposite and yet finds beauty.
Critical interpretive failure. See me after class.

>To go further, try analyzing the first 2 stanzas of it in the same way.
Why would I? Each stanza has a different theme. The first is about maturing and ripeness, the second about harvesting and sleep, the third is the resolution of the life-cycle of the season.

Did you compare the poem to Clare's on autumn like I asked you to?

>Why would I? Each stanza has a different theme. The first is about maturing and ripeness, the second about harvesting and sleep, the third is the resolution of the life-cycle of the season.
theme does not equal what the imagery is about

>Did you compare the poem to Clare's on autumn like I asked you to?
shut up mom that has nothing to do with the conversation

fuck you too, cocksucker.

>theme does not equal what the imagery is about
Holy shit. Imagery is what creates the theme of a poem.
>shut up mom that has nothing to do with the conversation
Yes it does, because you said:
>You could apply those themes to any poem
I then asked you to prove it by finding the theme of artistic creation, death and decay in a poem on the same subject by one of Keats' contemporaries. Go on, do it.

Autumn
BY JOHN CLARE
>The thistledown's flying, though the winds are all still,
Holy shit, the thistledown is flying even though the wind is still? perhaps like how the universe exists without an apparent cause for it, deep
>On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,
First it's lying on the hill, then it's mounting the hill? like how first we're all passive little babies then we grow up to be men and mount hot women, growth from childhood to manhood
>The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;
>Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.
It's boiling like a pot --- pot is used to make food --- perhaps the whole universe is God's cooking pot to make food for himself as Gurdjieff suggests in his cosmological view in Beelzebub's Tale to His Grandson?

I trust I need go no further, my point's sufficiently been made about the beauty of this poem.

You must be above 16 to browse this board

>Holy shit. Imagery is what creates the theme of a poem.
You said the first stanza is about maturing and ripeness.

>Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.

That's like me saying the theme of this paragraph is basketball. Theme is not the literal meaning.

Just admit it, you're reading a bunch of bullshit into a pretty poem about autumn because John Keats, for some reason, is your God and must simultaneously be Hegel and Plato while writing beautiful poetry.

To Autumn is the tritest poem I've ever read in my life and if I were to study it deeply for the rest of my life I would gain nothing and it would be a complete waste.

Also
>This is deeper than Kant, ain't it!
is entirely missing the fucking point (unless you're as pseud who reads to prove how smart they are), because the aim of poetry is the beautiful expression of universal truth. As Pope said:
>True Wit is Nature to advantage dressed
>What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed
If originality of theme and insight mattered in literature we would have about six good poems ever written.

Kant just like the great poets used verbose syntax to convey ideas and in the process they all tricked themselves into thinking they had discovered some truth when all they had done is committed flowery and expansive characters to a page.
So I think the analogy is apt.