Poetry Critique Thread

Penis poo poo
Fart lick dark sticky finger
Nigger toes
Steely Dan
Wholly asshole holy as whole wheat bread

I yearn for a thesis (your milieu), an antithesis (theirs), and then some kind of a synthesis. You don't need to progress in exactly that way, but as it is I feel there to be no sense of an ending.

On the whole, though, this is a tragically easy poem. Perhaps there is hope for you. Bloom, as you may know, talks about the first encounter of the novitiate poet with the great precursor, where the novitiate is "thrown" by the precursor, as Satan by God. You are all too textbook a case of that phenomenon--you even think the poet is literally fucking you with his words! Nonetheless, it's not a bad read. Now write something that isn't about another book.

Why the hostitlity to poetry, my man? Are you afraid you might actually feel something for once in your life?

Why are you assuming that my poem was hostile in nature? Don't be so defensive about what you think poetry should be. I wrote exactly what I was feeling.

I assumed that it was hostile because I thought you would rise to the challenge. There's no point in shitposting (here literally) without being agressive about it.

I'm an abstract surrealist, baby

You're meaningless, darling.

I've found meaning in the meaninglessness

i'm glad you picked up immediately on basically what the poem is about. honestly i wasn't even sure if that could be gathered from the poem. it's not specifically about rimbaud, it's more about that whole 50 or so years of poetry that is so revered but translates fairly poorly.

> I should note that the opening stanza seems to have some really unnecessary fluff
totally agree. i want to pack the whole thing into a fake sonnet form (14 lines, but only with slant and unstressed rhymes and only faux metrical, both because i like the form and because it fits the subject). a lot of the stuff can definitely be cut.

> I also rather hate (see what I did there?) Beat-era oxymorons like "somewhat holy,"
you're probably right. the sentiment im trying to convey there could be better expressed.

>I'm not sure I quite understand "puncture" in the first line
i like it more than "gap" because a puncture is circular. i was imagining the spot a nail hangs in. it's both a gap and a center. i could have conveyed this better obviously.

> In the second stanza, I'm not sure if you meant "my mind's palm," but in any case the penultimate line is rather ugly when I think it ought not to be, both because of the word "squeezed" (I find Eliot's famous usage in Prufrock rather distasteful as well, actually, so maybe it's a personal prejudice), and because of "mind's palm" without a modifier.
that's actually may favorite part probably. but the stanza is too long. it's meant to be a tea related metaphor, my "teabag" hasn't been "steeped" as thoroughly so all that comes out is weak water.

the vegetables line is bad, i agree

the last stanza is also weak for the reasons you note. it reaches such a high pitch in attempted imagery but i clearly lost inspiration at the same time. to actually make that stanza work i need better images that offer a more clear differentiation.

>On the whole, though, this is a tragically easy poem. Perhaps there is hope for you. Bloom, as you may know, talks about the first encounter of the novitiate poet with the great precursor, where the novitiate is "thrown" by the precursor, as Satan by God. You are all too textbook a case of that phenomenon--you even think the poet is literally fucking you with his words! Nonetheless, it's not a bad read. Now write something that isn't about another book.
yeah the bloomisms are definitely there, you got that right

Speedy Speed Boy - gasoline's burnin' in
Speedy Speed Boy - as fast as I can be
Speedy Speed Boy - every night and day
Wind is on my face

(Speedy Speed Boy)
(Speedy Speed Boy)

Running with my car
Running in my dreams every night...Night
Born to overtake
Born to race and to overdrive...Drive

Engine's over the red degrees
And my
Heart beats as much as I can breathe
But I
Don't want claim any stop
They wanna say I'm quitting...(Quitting)

Speedy Speed Boy - gasoline's burnin' in
Speedy Speed Boy - as fast as I can be
Speedy Speed Boy - every night and day
Wind is on my face

Speedy Speed Boy - gasoline's burnin' in
Speedy Speed Boy - as fast as I can be
Speedy Speed Boy - every night and day
Wind is on my face

Mine's better

Thump

I don't enjoy
Thinking about
My own heart beating
It gives me anxiety

Sometimes
I imagine
My heart beating
Straight through my chest

Heartbeat anxiety
Causes
Increased heart rate
Causes
Heartbeat anxiety

I wish
I had never
Dissected
The heart
Of an animal

I want
To re-abstract
My mental image
Of my own
Heart
Into something
Non-anatomical
Like a bass drum
Thumping endlessly
To the rhythms
Of eternity

slam tier

Consciousness blinks. The star of the eye seems
to recall a swiftness into being
young. Barking at play, the kin of wild
terrain junctures to relocation whether
his willingness played or not. Now all is gone,
as captivity seasons freedom’s wave.

A cage distinguishes his days as they wave,
these visitors who pass and stare. For what seams
inhabit an Arctic having now gone
artificial in glass surrounds? Being
a zoo-boxed fox, the native of chilled weather,
his sides attend a circling all the while

repetitive as dream on dream. Charging while
an earth invades an earth’s enclosure, the wave
settles its grazing eye. He wonders whether
curiosity is worth this space. Seems
evolution had a trick in mind when being
planned, a pup among a mother’s pups, gone

awry. Into summer now, he is too gonzo
to remember his wintered twist of interest. While
fowl and frogs plea for the wind to cease being,
the Arctic creeps to the shore’s northern waives.
The sea keeps creatures moving at what sees
a city of their own demise, crisp weathered

ice continuing. For what is whither
but the orb of wander? All chasing has gone
graced, in embracing his cage at what seems
to shine. For dimness always is the wild
nocturne. There is no light, only dream that waives
under the slip of pasture and plain, a non-being

who muscles between the wheels of his being.
A cage awakens in a stir unwaived
beneath the crawled in place. All effort has gone
through glass. Nerves clutch in shadow-like vane, while
silenced in tracing, a fibrous seal
unentering, nor slipping freedom. Whether

a fox dream matters or not as real or seemed,
one cannot know in grasping for weathered
glaciers, unending worlds of world, the wild wild.

The spirit resigns. The trees grow higher
than the pain in the knee. What sense is pain?
It just alerts the almost mighty doctor
that the body is its own universe.
A comfort grows. In the mind it exists
as war emblem against the material,
as self and despair enjoy their brief reign
over the mind, which similarly rules
over its things divine and things mundane.
The spirit retains. The light grows greener
through estuaries of broken leaves, which shift
in the wind no spirit knows like the skin
which births those primal things, as desire
wonders:
will love be the last my mind will work?

Rhyming poetry is so played out

You're trying too hard at the wrong things

So when I finally blew up I remained sick
Earning respect in ghettos and 'burbs for word placement
Back when the independent scene remained faceless
We were the only crew who promised your ass we'd take it
Mold it, shape it, living outside the matrix
Hold it, make it, more than miniature major labels
Hold it sacred, living it for the culture
Told ya plainly, protected it from the vultures
That's why I always get respect from true soldiers
While half of the critics claim it every year: "Hip hop's over."
FUCK YOU, hip hop just started
It's funny how the most nostalgic cats are the ones who were never part of it
But true veterans'll give dap to those who started it
Then humbly move the fuck on and come with that new retarded shit
New slang, new thought, new sound
Who's heart you thought you had?
You clown, you don't, you drown
I won't dumb it down, I'm dumbing now for these rounds
I'm a live mothefucker plus I'm gunning for clowns
You're a mime motherfucker, don't be coming for pounds
So you can break out of that invisible box, you're not down

i can't really write anything that i like since started and then stopped antidepressants, but this one is ok i think.

twitching black dog sniffing untethered at my knees
touch my eyes and see it in the aura.
out of sight lies a black disc
behind my tender scalp
sitting amongst inactive, blank grey coils
every year i feel it twist and cut a little further towards
the seared and worn vessels in my eyes

I like the rythym. But you probably should consult a therapist.

Come,
let me lead you, love, by crook of hand,
with step that soon will fall in line beside
you, through the borders of adulthood and
the boundless no-man’s land.
No, put away your passport, for inside
the customs booth,
your splayed, unchartered palm is paper proof
enough; a spurt of scarlet pressed from weave,
a bruise, a ring of oozing ink; the roof
through dormer oculus observes our leave.
Don’t turn,
but tread in dirt a trail for me to tail;
each wisp of hair is a tendril prising dust
from space, concatenated cells in rails
of air of new nativity, whose gusts
shoot vertical and rend
the span of time and space.
But we, compatriots-in-arms, can pause
and tend to love here as the sun withdraws.

Thank you
Thank you. I don't think my therapist would interested in reading my poetry desu

God's Pizza Bagel
Never put in the toaster
Potential gone stale

I feel like this might benefit by being put into a prose-poem. In particular, the line breaks in the penultimate strophe are just painful to read. I like the last image, though.

I hate to break it to you, but this poem is quite awful on every level. It is first of all incoherent--by the time we get to "For what is whither / but the orb of wander", we have dissolved into simple nonsense verse. You seem to be trying to convey a certain "aesthetic" of col alienation. Not only has that been done many a time before by many a greater poet (Wallace Stevens, whom you seem to have read a bit too much of, comes to mind in particular), they have done it while also depicting a coherent scene or idea.

Formally speaking, this is a disaster zone. You have not kept with the formal paradigm you set yourself (that of a sestina). I would welcome sestina with unpredictable substitutions (substituting homophones like whether/weather is a rather interesting idea) were it not for the fact that, again, the poem is generally incoherent. It's alright not to have every single line end-stopped, but a form like the sestina, which is so dependent on the line-ends, should have some kind of mechanism for at least drawing the reader's attention to those line-ends. Your poem, despite its pretended formality, reads like broken prose.

I say these mean things only because this reminds me of some poems I wrote a while ago. Put down thy Stevens, thy WIlliams, thy Marianne Moore; pick up thy Swinburne, thy Yeats. Stevens is one of my very favorites, but one must remember that he was more intelligent than anybody you are every likely to meet, so he was able to get away with certain things that other poets with less intellectual gravity could not. And even then, I often get annoyed with his style: but (almost) all of his poems have something substantial to say. This does not.

This one is much better, although it would benefit from stanza divisions. I should say that the evidently heroic subject matter deserves less frigid language, and since you seem not to have really set yourself any formal restraints other than each line should be in the vicinity of a decasyllabic, I expect more pyrotechnics. Also, the last line remains incoherent and is not a fit ending. You must simply go over this poem again and think a bit harder about the actual message.

I admit that the general rhetorical style of the poem is quite "played out," but not because it rhymes. We are living in the 21st century: all experimentation is over. All formal decisions have become quite arbitrary, the only question is if they work for that particular poem. Perhaps they don't in mine. If so, I would net a more specific argument, and not an obvious dogma.

Eh, the question of the black spots when one presses one eyes is indeed a curious one, but it has been dealt with many times before. If you must write something on the topic, I would recommend a prose poem (cont.)

(cont)
And besides, your poem almost is one already. What might interest you are Gerard de Nerval's poem Le Point noir and Yeats' A Vision, where the strange artifacts our eyes create take a strangely prominent place in his occult system.

O, how banal! A poet should only consult a therapist if he intends to argue with them and prove them wrong, for psychoanalysis is a poetic system just like any other. And actually it's the ideas in the poem, not the rhythm, that are somewhat compelling. The rhythm's downright ugly.

Wow! A poem that I actually like (though, as always, I feel it would benefit from capitalized lineheads)! I am somewhat skeptical, however, of some parts of the opening: I am not sure if I like "Come" set out at the beginning, as I feel that's quite cliched, though I can't at the
moment think of a poem that does exactly that off the top of my head. Also, I am not sure what "crook of hand" means--are you referring to the space between the thumb and index finger? If so, the image remains incoherent. And it was so close to a really grabbing line too: if you had said "crooked hand" or "claw-like hand" or even just "clawed hand," I would have understood, and there would still have been some good ambiguity, as we would not though whose hand is crooked our clawed. That's my solution, but perhaps you can come up with a better one: it must be fixed, in any case.

I see the mention of step falling in line wholly unnecessary, so try and come up with a better rhyme. The "borders of adulthood" thing also falls rather flat: you're not Humbert Humbert, are you? And even if so, there are more colorful ways of expressing that, and this is a colorful poem. Where the poem gets good is at line 8, and the metaphors, coming in rapid succession, are really quite creative. You have even done me the service of teaching me a new word: dormer.

A minor thing: "of air of new nativity" is clumsy, though I like the idea. Try to avoid the repitition of prepositions: that is ugly in English. I'm also skeptical of the line break between "rend" and "the span of time"--rend doesn't even rhyme with anything, so why not put the two lines together? The last line is a virtuoso finish, however.

Was this poem about someone in particular, or an imagined individual? Either way, I like it very much.

I'm afraid there are too many memes here for me.

Here are some Blooms to keep you all terrified and motivated.

as we would not KNOW whose hand is crooked OR clawed*

Sorry, I guess I got rather excited there.

>oh great a poetry critique thre-
>it's free verse galore

Well, give us some metered verse, then. Be the change you want to see. And actually one of the poems here, though it is not in meter, is very good (for Veeky Forums).

I don't write poetry, but I enjoy reading it. Free verse is cancer in a linguistic shape

What one?

How idiotic! If you read Eliot, Pound, Baudelaire, and think they're "cancer in a linguistic shape," you simply have no taste for the art of poetry.

This one:
It's certainly rough around the edges, but it is very creative.

Well, I guess I can bump with one more of mine. It is not good at all, but at least it might encourage someone to think about their own poetry.

Art Understood as Spanish Moss

When I behold these scraggled, hoary corpses,
I cannot help but think of those ink’d fingers
Which lay ‘neath Yeats’ or Shakespeare’s coffin lid.

From them at crazy intervals red petals
Concede their beauty to a corpsèd eye,
So that that eye may bloom in other seasons.

They bear no odors. When, as a child, one fell
On you, its scentless stillness mortified
The tender forearms, though they knew not what

The languid tendrils meant. Now I will tell you.
The scientists contrive (for so they must)
Another, falser name for it than moss—

Yet here, as other instances, I trust
Far more the common dialect. ‘Spanish’?
Forsooth: They are conquistadores’ beards

O’ergrown from hard prolongèd habitation:
Their eyes (their oaken eyes) have lost their sheen,
Their strict and lisping laws of conquest, no more green.

And ‘moss’? Indeed: it needs no gentle usage,
And may cling fast to even the stoniest mind.
Its curls are surly masters’, not white maids’.

Its grey complexity can only grow
In sweaty tropics; yet, when it coolly fades
And frees the mind, one misses those twined veins.

Obligingly it drifts with any wind
That blows it with sufficient heat and gusto,
And wishes its complexities unfurled;

It is the great Anatomy of lust—O,
How near through it will seem that dusky world,
O how its hands the Inward Eye do mend!

And, when the sky is purple, vaguely turns
Encompassing the Ear with gamic peace—

Then on the instant all finds that it yearns,
And Process packs itself in sapphire urns.

I'm . Thank you very much for the critique. I'm glad you liked it. The poem was written for my girlfriend on her 18th birthday, so the part about the "borders of adulthood" is, in a legal sense, quite literal. (Although I do see now how it could come off as Humbertesque.)

Google's dictionary defines "crook" as "a bend in something, especially at the elbow in a person's arm". I remember double-checking the definition when I wrote it, because I wasn't sure I could use it like that. Does it work? Should I look for a better word?

The reason "rend / the span of time and space" are not one line is because I wanted to separate them from the pentameter lines, which all follow a (more or less) strict Shakespearean sonnet rhyme scheme (ababcdcdefefgg). I could change "rend" to "cut", which would create a half-rhyme with the preceding "gusts". What do you think?

I really appreciate the depth of your critique. I'll definitely try to incorporate your suggestions.

Actually you have not followed the Shakespearean sonnet form with any amount of strictness, but that's perfectly alright. It didn't scan as iambic pentameter at all, at least on my part. I'd say give up the idea that this is a formalist poem and just do what feels "right." In any case, the lines ending in "rend" and "space" felt somewhat jarring, whereas the two short lines ending in "no-man's land" and "booth" somehow did not. I suppose they are slightly less enjambed. But "cut" might be something of an improvement: "rend" is perhaps a too predictably poetic word.

I know the definition of crook, but it leaves me no less mystified. I don't know what the crook of one's hand is, and I tend to like to know what the objects in a poem are. By the way, the name for the space betwwen one's thumb and forefinger is purlicue. Not a terribly poetical word!

All that said, I do like it quite a bit. Are you still with the girl you wrote this for?

The man on the bus has eaten it all-
the banana, the grapes, the tomato, too,
in an odd salad made of vegetables
and thought. The girl sits alone with the glue
of what was, and walks the small streets to school,
where no child embraces her, and the swings
are not warm with play, and the day has cooled
with the coming of decades in between.
The man on the bus was white. Now she says
to herself that the school would segregate,
and the walk was full of wandering eyes.
Yet, imagine the girl thought as one of us,
and the fruit just as fruit we can all relate;
then what of the hungry man on the bus?

Death rises and blows. Not with water nor sun
does it surround all that matters. What is rare
is its absence. In a century or two
natural forms decay, unless a sphere
of unity intervenes- a body
of perfection which challenges the gaze
of aesthetes emerging from a darker place.
Imagine the flea’s panic in ungroomed hair,
tossing at night, upon peregrine pillows,
and you will know the black hand, unlicensed fear
which hardens into the familiar, and then
loses itself in worlds askance and askew
from the adamantine world the senses show,
and eyes sifting the shapes of uncertain urns

You probably mean well, but you are simply not ready for the poetic landscape of the 21st century.

You're gonna carry that weight.
There's no one, nobody cares to ask why,
because you're not made for happiness.
All the skies' beds'll drop your dream
since you're not made for happiness, Saturn.
Where off to, sunless, you've that jungle rain soul,
ain't no one who'll house a kink-in-a'-ring.
And you'll make be and move out forever.
You'll slingshoot the dark film, you'll be alone again.
Again and again.
And each second you'll be alone reminding yourself,
it'll be a cold forty-maybe years. Then?
There is no then.
You've got that load none's gonna ask you what for,
let the act yap tills it dries, do again do again.

And you're gonna carry that weight,
until there's no he or she left in the world to love.
Then you'll still carry on, loneliness ain't no less a vengeance.
And you'll die in sixteen languages,
but what does it matter, you'll sing till you're song,
even when you've no one to break the new day with in the morning,
even when you've no one to gaze at clouds with in the evening.
even when you've no one to warm the bed with in the night.
I'd rather be dead than do many things alone.

And you're gonna carry that weight alone,
until the black that bleeds through your white turns it darker.
That's because you aren't made for happiness,
otherwise I wouldn't send you so far away from here.
Is dark.
Is low.
The worst of it is it is.
I don't so much know what the feeling of her is.
And so much of her, so much good, that she deserves better than me.
I am content long as I make her happy.
You're gonna go, gonna carry that weight.
Time better hurry, best time not be late.
Time must not betray me.

And it'll be the end of you, Saturn.
No coffin can bear the weight of your ring.

>Steely Dan

Perhaps this one's just too lofty for me, but I'm not sure I get it. I feel almost as though a line or two were missing (though I see you have somehow envisioned this poem and the next as very loose sonnets of a sort). I don't feel I can really judge it, since I don't even really know what it's about.

I think I like this one. The bluntness of "What is rare / is its absence" somehow strikes me as very Audenesque, which is a quality I can admire, and the similar turn in "unlicensed fear / which hardens into the familiar" is equally good. The transition between the image of the struggling flea and that of the black hand is somewhat difficult to make, however, and so you might want to think of something else. The ending is also rather weak: you seem to think that obscurity can save you from making a substantial (and hopefully surprising) point at the end, but it cannot. I have to know why I've read what I've read. The potential is certainly there, though.

I like to think of it more as, the poetic landscape of the 21st century is simply not ready for me. The only things I criticize are mediocrity, and I like to think I have no prejudices of prizing one stylistic label over another. If the poetic landscape of the 21st century is essentially characterized by mediocrity (which I think it is, though that has arguably been true of the poetic landscape of every period), it must be scolded.

I don't know if this is your writing but if it is, I'll only say that you write like one of those people who bitches about the low quality of critique threads.

Don't worry my friend. You can still be saved yet. I recommend a hardy course in Dan Schneider:

cosmoetica.com/top.htm
cosmoetica.com/S3-DES3.htm
cosmoetica.com/s2-des2.htm
cosmoetica.com/Poetrylinks.htm

birdcall, in morse

I call you
with my crushed paper voice I call you
with my beaten yellow sound I call you
Ribbons for th gallery I found a way out
and so
I call you
What now?
Now is the same
The blueberries are on fire where we painted them
The information is scattered along the boulevards
Why do I call you?
Yesterday I saw a train without any flesh but I was too fat to cry
and so I must call you
Pomegranate juices for the pope of Korean drama
I forget to ask myself
where does it all go?
Lead poisoned we dread the fall
of 20,000 sycophantic doves
I've been cold but you've been told
I astral projected into a Wendy's
just so I could call you
When Lucifer borrows my phone
I'll tell him to call you
When the eggplant man loses half his car to a sour baby
I'll tell him to call you
When the golden dress you wore falls almost silently to the floor I'll tell it to call you once more
I deserted a river's projector just to call you
Your smile kills all the cooks in Portugal
On the beach there are forty frogs waiting to call you, their tongues memorized with your number
your number
your number
The number of wings on a raven's skeleton
the number of amphitheaters blushing from the burden of forgiveness, all for you
I buried a pot of green tea because it tried to call you
Birdcall, my wings are worn the words of an enemies soliloquy
Birdcall, my wings are black with the blood of icicles
Birdcall, please answer without your silence
I know how hard it is.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. It is indeed my writing, and I think it to be quite bad, but actually I'm not really a regular peruser of the critique threads. This thread has had a fairly good ratio of decent poetry, but I've been really the only one giving any substantial critiques.

There is certainly something wrong with this man. He must be schizophrenic or something. Also, shouldn't he be off fondling the uncalloused feet of underage TV stars?

a prototype for my series 'Hole Sonnets"

To fuck is fashion burnt to ashen form,
so push inside the holy temple mound
and push until the temple feels this warm
watery pulse that breaks the relics found.
A crying whore is found in ancient script,
fifteen and dashed against the rock of man
a cornerstone to bare the shock of man
to bare herself, to bare her son, to strip
her flesh and fly into the drying sun,
so fuck to ash and smear it on your eyes,
and hope the smoke can cover what’s been done,
The rain came down and washed away the lye.

This is the sort of poem that would get rejected.

very forced and amateur. the rhymes are forced. it's not a sonnet. and you need to learn about metrical substitutions, the meter is dull and also forced

Sarcasm is a good sport, but sadly you are displaced from the subtleties of the critique. If you are lucky, you will make maybe a handful of poems worth anything, but born from a narrow formal temperament. At worst, you will merely spin out the old variations and derivations, playing the academic game, before dissapearing into obscurity. You will never understand what it means to be sprawling.

Even then, although most likely it wont come to fruition, I hope that you come across and epiphany of that certain something. Otherwise, sadly, that will be your fate.

On sheets velvety and red
she lay, football stomach, decomposing,
lungs still working, undulating
the fresh rotten mass of her.

Lacy and brown, those she wore,
in the basket, at the bottom,
placed in the upper left corner
exactly where I found them.

Shot into the sink
the streaks of a syncopated heartbeat
and that elasticated holding,
encrusted pale yellow, the padding.

>rhyme is force
yeah i am pretty weak on rhymes
>this is not a sonnet
am i missing a volta or what?
>meter is forced
well shit, i know about substitutions (such as WAT-er-y PULSE) but i'll work on that

I really like the beginning. The missing "e" in the.
I did not like the image of blueberries fire. It's the kind of jarring thing that sounds like it would be good in a poem, but it feels shoehorned into this one, not serving the main theme but distracting from it.

The part from scattered information to "I'll tell him to call you" is good. Very interesting stuff. I don't like the "river's projector" line. The juxtaposition of the machinic and the natural would work better if there was at least one clear, obvious commonality between a river and a projector.

Burying the pot of green tea is a little too precious for me as well. The word memorized in the frog line is semantically awkward. I think something like "imprinted" would work better.

It ends strong.

Are by any chance referring to Whitman's Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking?

Anyway, the poem has potential but needs some work.

I like it.

The Broken Compass

The carbolic scent
of after-garage hours
before errands:
buying milk, paying the one bill
you haven't set up with automated payments,
dropping off a PVC U-joint to the brother-in-law for his plumbing problem,
the damp smell of the towel,
perhaps a day overdue for a wash,
these are the moments when
the pungency
of the empty space
in bed beside you
at night,
comes home
to tickle your brain
with its unwelcome
rind of unforgiven
transgression.

I like Whitman but I wasn't referencing him, thanks for the feedback I appreciate it.

a sonnet is 14 lines

I am the one
dont weigh a ton
dont need a gun
to get respect
out on the street

under the sun
the bastard sun
will provide meat
by any means

I used to walk past a cemetery
On a pathway to my boy’s house to
Sit, get lifted and dream about
How we wanted to live. Irony
in actions.
Fractions of honesty
Divide
People into
factions
Those who will
And those who actually will

I guess things aren’t what they used to be
Memory lane had the yellow bricks removed
And the pavements now seem stained
With cigarette ash and shards of broken
Glass

Smells like home

The sirens
A familiar melody. But doesn’t sound the same
without the Nickelodeon theme tunes I would use
to drown out sounds. Oh nostalgia
You wicked wicked temptress you

I remember

If not through the eyes of
the innocent who else could see potential?
For limitless, second nature. Survival
A mind set primitive.
Adapt and discover, that
pound coin won’t stretch past that panda pop,
these days… It’s monkey see what monkey do
For the trees. Forest fires and friendly conversation
Searching Amazon for new ways to burn
the bamboo

Smoke filled lungs till
Speech slurs. streams of consciousness
Tangled. Gathered, with like-minded.
A demand for retribution if left with the roaches
Burned it’s ooh ah ah ooh

We haven’t come that far
Since evolution.

Stand two feet
No alpha male
But still blessed with
Another tale of the hypocrite
Still blessed with the eyes of the vigilant.
See senses fall
to pensive states of temporary
Aspirations. Then pass it on, like
Tales around the campfire
Unified in dream state
Then put the blindfolds
To our eardrums for session of ignorant bliss

America! Her spirit energy is coursing through me. in this night where light throws winter on the bank.

I'm no airman best in the world you sweet cold light on the stair,

the thunderbird drumroil
all eterning in the air!

who to I thank,

you cold vast desolate unword

you unworld, you giant light!

let me be lost in the breasts of the night

sweet pallor, bold gloaming,
Kin to the doom!

Let me know, see,
drink from it soon.

the glaze that sunlight throws upon the frozen air. ten thousand voyagers,
thrifty thrillion eons bursting in the air!

O lovely liberty, o nonce—my tongue is dumb.

memories, mammaries, of no use to none of us, no use, user, the song is sung.

oh you beast of the world.

>reads Whitman once

sexy

Why are these threads so garbage? None of you understand the first thing about poetry. Are you all retarded?

ma free verse

These intricate ideas that permeate my thoughts

Are incommunicable to the minds who might listen

Be they a meager expression of passion

Or a qualm with religious teachings, but

I absolutely would that my tongue could utter,

These thorough contemplations that arise in me.

Unfortunately, I have not the language to convey adequately

These thoughts that pervade so deeply.

With nowhere to go, they slowly dissipate

Eventually disappearing into the same, brimming abyss

That has stolen from humanity a lifetime’s worth of lessons learned, confessions of love,

Grateful appreciation; anything I wished so desperately

To convey, but was incapable of expressing due to

A profound lack of willingness to settle for imperfect English.

Such a tragedy it is to be left silent from too small a vocabulary and understanding.

Yeah they're never an expression or description of something profound it's just a bunch of lines selected because they sound right. It's ugly to read and reveals nothing.

greens a lil woozy
and not sure hes feeling suzy
and the floor is melty gee whats that
concentric rings in his head
Aristotelean machination
molten goo in every pore
a hand on the end of an arm
a foot on the end of a leg
a badge and a patrol car
his veins run fire hot across the walls
here comes the hobo now
a drainage ditch bandit.

All poetry no critique
All poetry and no critique
Do I sound bad, good, or unique?
All poetry, but no critique.

maybe because it's hard to write good poetry.

Fee-Fi, Fo-Fum.
All I want is to bang on my drum.
From nine to five
I'm working dead,
But after that
I'm a happy pleb.
I drink and drum, drink and drum
Right until next morning comes.
Bossman asks me why I'm late,
Stumbling in with vomit breath.
But nine-to-five I work again
And give him all I have got left.
Then I drink, drum, drink, drum.
Right until next morning comes.

"Put my cock and balls inside
your mouth". Swish!
Tonsils steeped in man-brine fluid
Percolating for six hours.
Prepared this earthly fluid for you
And trained myself to munch on
Strawberries and celery sticks
So it goes down nice
When I jack on my face.

Feels so good being bad
There's no way I'm turning back
Now the pain is for pleasure
'Cause nothing can measure

Love is great, love is fine
Out the box, out of line
The affliction of the feeling leaves me wanting more

'Cause I may be bad but I'm perfectly good at it
Sex in the air, I don't care, I love the smell of it
Sticks and stones may break my bones,
But chains and whips excite me

O you're the devil!

Has lit ever written any decent poetry ever?

All I ever seem to see is insincere, esoteric, pseudo intellectual garbage that's either rhyming for fun or meme-verse.

I very rarely see anything that seems authentic in anyway because everyone is too up in their ass with artifice.

A STUDY IN COMMENSURABILITY

Aloft the intricate complexities of desperation,
I machinate the introspective sad plasticity
Of two-and-five mechanoclastic beats irregular:
Go SHOOT the cars among your metal feats,
Go BLAST your cycles with them micro-leaks,

(I cannot interpret the moral feasibilities of this,
I am too bold.)

GO circumvent conspicuous signs of hope,
And fetch some more of me to cope, I say:
This may not more of say that love may pay,
But I as far as she is fond to be, I think,
I think I might as she be more to me than sink
In old sad plastogenic fitful ires of wistful mists
And there to turn, insists she me, to dear old mysticism.

post your poetry

Veeky Forums has a poet laureate. And yes, he was good.

So I can say it's shit.

Has he been identified? Who is this laureate that you speak of? What poetry has he written?

He remains safely user. His works have been collected in a tumblr. But since you are that new, and I don;t like your attitude, and everyone knows that Veeky Forums's style is for hit and run style moments of genius punctuated by long periods of mediocrity, I'm not posting a link.

But I bet some other oldfag might gibe you a hint.

I saved one of his, the young man is very witty. Quoth he:

"Mary's a sweet, sweet sweet-heart, Rose is not.
Read scent-full asphodels in Mary, yet
Resentful lilacs dead is Rose's set."

The sky was blue and full of blue
The hill was a huge, green
bounty that protruded

The wholeness of the sky
I decided to climb the hill
As I saw happiness in my mind's-eye

But after climbing the great hill
I found out to my surprise
That that same happiness I saw before had nilled

Nigga I don't write poetry BECAUSE it would be shit. I aint a poet and I aint going to punish other people with my incompetency.

Everyone has to start someone, I don't mean to offend honestly. But I find that post-modern esoteric poetry should be left to the great like Pound or Elliot.

Here is one I did for Veeky Forums. See if you can redeem yourself by noticing one insightful thing about it.

Vanishing Point

(-for David Markson)

I make a fish sandwich and I
sit, park benched, and eat it,
alone as the gravestones
where great great grandfathers,
are also never visited, closer
now than ever to their rainbow
view above, unconcerned for blue
light screens and earbuds' white
cry they have been replaced by.
Hands, pecks, bushels, drams,
the chain, the league, the talent; the
standard candles now make demands
in pixels kilometers long, angstroms thin.
Shakespeare and Chaucer might shake
hands but could not understand
each other, English having reached
its fill of war, trade and French bits.
We are all about thumbs now, see
the pretty girl about to fall in the
fountain for lack of looking? Counting
characters instead. Not an actor,
a movie star. Her erolalia
could use some work. Should
the peaches be eaten, we
know, now, the day, though
darker, is not all lost. Rather
say that, mis-mementoed, today
still is less mori than forgotten. Will
any of us be so lucky?
Kings of apple barns singing
in their sky blue chains don't begin
to count toads' earned runs: Too few
memories to bother to ask them
why it is we are dying.

i don't think you are as knowledgeable as you think you are. several of the poems in this thread are passable. of course they aren't as good as a titan like eliot, but there's a thousand tiers of quality between ts eliot and bad poetry

Not this guy, but now I'm curious.

Anyone have any more of his poetry?

the irishman is very overrated here but not bad. i suspect all the hyperbolic praise of him is samefagging

Most poets are remembered for one or two great moments that get anthologized so everybody has to read them. So everybody thinks Frost is summed up with Stopping By Woods, and Bishop wrote little beyond the Fish.

He hit the high water mark with Belfast. I've argued against the cancer one. I would have told the editor at New York Review to print Belfast. It deserved it's qurater of a page, in a frame.

>park benched

dropped

even the rupi kaur parody poetry is bad and not in the intended way

it's alright, clever, and likeable. good light verse. i agree it's worth a quarter page but not being called genius or anything like that

It is for here. That's why he's immortalized. Along with Mary and Bill. And Holden raped Phoebe guy.

i think we've had better poems though. certainly more talented people

Because cats.

The Ninth Life

he is careful of dogs now:
he makes shorter leaps
and he stays on the inside,
when frost starts to creep

round the borders of windows.
he still walks the ledges
but nowadays two or three steps
from the edges.

The mice whom his forays
would terrify nightly
he just looks on and nods
as they pass him,
politely

When he dreams of the kitten
of eight lives before
he shudders, and takes
a slow stroll to the door

And I rise and assist him
out into the sun
and he shuffles along
where he once used to run

And I take shorter steps
and I take smaller breaths
and I want to inquire
about his other deaths

But he’d just raise an eyebrow
and look up to heaven
and say “I wouldn’t worry
till you get past seven.”

Astonishingly mediocre.
No discernible talent.

There are two people I am going to be so happy to outlive. One is John Ashbery, because his utterly meaningless bullshit is now enshrined in the canon, advancing the death of poetry by decades, and Harold fucking Bloom. Fucking meme.

A sonnet I posted a while back but didn't get much feedback on:

O stately boughs, who’ve shed thine leafy fleece
Sunken canopy, laden upon Earth,
As craquelure glacier; glassy sheets, sinking firth
Ebbs to the dark sea floor alone, in peace.
Too ebbs the sky: azure, then gloom from east
And distant torches flood the sunlight’s dearth
Emblazoned night, pale glow on mountains inert
Snow sank softly, fluttering silent elegies

Winter pastoral, thou lyrics embossed!
Return thee to halcyon days I’ve lost
Circular is nature yet linear is life.
O, what sorrowful disquiet this strife!
To rise as dost sun or bloom in Spring’s start,
Is to belie death – his unbeating heart