Post Your Poetry

Pretty bad use of the word 'cunt,' desu.

Words on a wall, they mean nothing at all.
Obtuse and concave, like scribbles in a cave.
They mean something to some, and nothing to none.
Wherever you stand, those words will stand tall.
A shimmering tower, making the powerful cower.
We use lies to tell truths, we paint hues to provide proofs.
In the end, we contend. From booted heels we defend.
Our hands brandish paper and the magnificent pen.
We'll struggle, we'll fall, we'll toil endlessly, we'll crawl.
May those words on that wall protect us all.

I take it wholesale
for sale
words never known

I'd appreciate any feedback from fluent German speakers. I'm learning the language and have recently been practicing by writing poems. I don't expect them to be great, but I want to at least make sure that they don't have glaring mistakes (grammar issues, unnatural phrasing, etc.)

In der trüben Nacht von innen den Augen,
als die durch der stille Schlaf gedämpft,
geht ihm der Traum, gleich die Einsamkeit des tausends,
den er mit Angst und Trauer kennt.

In der Weite erscheint es ihm von draußen,
als das leuchtende Gesicht die Seele verbrennt.
Er wacht am Morgen nach das Rausch im
Bett allein, und abgetrennt.

When did poetry stop being a craft and instead turn into unformed, vapid, narcissistic fuckery?

Was it the 60's

that has literally been poetry since the beginning

>Implying any poetry written since the first line of the Iliad has ever been good

Derek Walcott died

If you're so sure then post something of your own.

Posted this last thread. For my girlfriend. Her surname is finn which means fine in gaelic. Title is gaelic. Appreciate feed back

Conthrom siad abair

It's true, as told around
I find you rightly fair
For a pale beauty crowned
As Vibrance Which ensnares

You being fine is much
Is more than looks alone
Persona bright and such
Is taken not on loan

A smile lasting long
Internal beauty quaint
It budding, shall prolong
The least of dull complaints

Mediocre use of words

horrible breaches of aesthetic taste in the flow of words

mediocre depth of meaning that is written with too much words

blurry stanza and line management that ubstruct intentions of artist in transferal of meaning

name literally any artistic expression that has ever been touched by human hands that doesn't directly involve the artists self

Last moment we're left alone
With each word, an impression
Fast forward and we're past dawn
Grows, impassionate session

Victories vindictive
Tantalizing stares
Pursuit, purely addictive
Trajectories once dared

Last moments beg to prolong
Lips of dew abound with moss
Roads past peg our song
Hips anew, we found

What we once lost.

No...

You need to work on your rhythm

This feels lazy. The second stanza especially. "Is more than looks alone". You can do better.

...........................................................................................................................................are you retarded?

No it happens in the late 1800's/early 1900's.

bad

I appreciate that you use metrical feet. Like seriously holy shit no one does that anymore, especially here.

But yeah like that other guy said, it feels lazy. Poems really don't need to rhyme, they actually probably shouldn't. A cute couplet to wrap one up is nice, but that's the most I recommend, unless it is long and you can use a couple throughout.

Sonnet I penned in lecture a while back:

When finally my mind had come to rest
It lingered on a thought from long ago
This thought, I knew, could never leave me, lest
Her outcome, one day, I could come to know
Yet time for such a day had long since passed
Died waiting as her hero never came
Courage for comfort that could never last
Love traded for a day too safe, too same
And so I sit now in my lonely room
Between hours filled with anger, joy or glee
While alone encompassed by empty gloom
Thoughts that never were; things that could not be
And mind goes mad for the word unspoken
And soul lies bare in silence heartbroken

the biggest joke in these threads is faggots posting """""poems""""" that don't rhyme

lmao

Pretty sure this is a translation of a Houellebecq poem.

The bus plows air like broken waves,
As buildings pass like passersby,
Each empty tree bequeaths to me
That immanence of yours whereby
I chart the course of coming days
By map and contour of your thighs:
The compass point leads to your eyes.

i actually have no fucking clue what you meant to write but i'll try to bring some sense into it. maybe you could post it in english too so i get an idea of what you tried to say ...

In der trüben Nacht vom Innern der Augen,
als durch den stillen Schlaf gedämpft,
geht ihm der Traum, gleich die Einsamkeit des Tausendsten (?) (der Tausenden?),
den er mit Angst und Trauer kennt.

In der Weite erscheint es ihm von draußen,
als das leuchtende Gesicht die Seele verbrennt.
Er erwacht am Morgen nach dem Rausch im
Bett allein, und abgetrennt.

Sonnets are typically written in an iambic meter

Noted. Its for her birthday. Kind of meant to be a pretty simple piece with straight forward rhyming. So she can appreciate it easily

Yeah. I feel you as well, same thing goes to the guy I replied above. I like writing in meter. Kind of used this and most poems I write to practice meter

Thanks for the feedback though

Honestly user
For what it is,its pretty good
U wrote it quick for a gf (who we'll assume is a pleb)
She'll prob think its sweet

I haven't worked for over a year, but I will repost a couple from the archive which are mine.

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.

As A Stone

The locomotive clattered through;
it sounded not like a tornado.
Nor the ocean as it crashed
and sifted like the breath
of a conch shell at all;
an even exhalation, withal.
We may be relatively doubt-free:
no one has ever heard a Banshee.
There are many types of drum
which are actually rather loose.
A profound eulogy delivered
in squeaky voice yields poor succor.
When one of these silent cars whiffs
by, I commune with the first
farmer who abhorred the first
car he saw, and mourned
his horse the loss of its primacy;
he knew futility,
and now so do I.
That the church is permitted to peal
its carillon at dawn is neither pall-
iative nor ever meant to be. The bells
were never clear. What the clock tells
to be Matins or Vespers may well
mean a daughter's train and veil,
or be the dreadful clang and call
that one of our neighbors is dead.

after the estate sale

only mothers garden left
her strip of retail flowers
aside the stone pavers
to the chain link gate;
her tiger impatiens agate
veins, bubblegum geraniums,
purple loosestrife volunteers

and other family-bereft
guests. Down the pavers
gusts tumbled sweetgum
spike balls to the gate,
while Munchkin sunflowers
bowed to the code-compliant
fence they must be shorter
than to die here.

Spirits Of Radio

PanPan PanPan PanPan Coast Guard Station Calumet Harbor requests that all vessels monitor radios for distress calls from sailing vessel Lake Victress last heard at 10:42am local time in the vicinity of the R.

Securite Securite Securite Coast Guard Station Calumet Harbor requests that all vessels be on the lookout for wreckage in the vicinity of the R which could pose a threat to navigation.

All-hazards radio WXJ95 broadcasting on a frequency of one six two point four zero megahertz and covering the near shore waters of Key West and the Florida Bay.

Spotter activation may be necessary.

SKY KING SKY KING SKY KING DO NOT ANSWER

Mister and Missus America, coast to coast and all the ships at sea.

And all the ships at sea.

Coast to Coast.

East of the Rockies.

West of the Rockies.

United four seven seven confirm company traffic two miles at your 12 oclock. Turn left heading two three zero and climb to angels twenty.

Columbia, Houston you are looking a little hot and all your calls will be a little early. You are looking good going over the hill and we'll see you in Madrid.

CSQ CSQ, Houston. Did he say he has a stuck hand controller?

Negative, Houston, he said he's in an increasing left roll and he can't stop it. Coastal Sentry Quebec for Gemini seven.

Switching to 16 and standing by.

Manko*

Nice

I would post, but Veeky Forums formatting doesn't allow for the long-s, so there's absolutely no point.

To start: this is incredibly sweet, and she'll love it. But let's make it clear that you should want to edit this not just for her, but for your own self.

>First:
no contractions with archaic language.
Just doesn't fit, especially as the opening. You open with a interesting, flowing title, and then immediately contradict it with, not just the first line, but the first word.

>Second, but it honestly should be first:
you need to edit your own stuff before you put it out into the world.
First drafts are for YOU to look over and change, not us. Don't do it unless you're masochistic--the few replies you'll get will be hate letters that oscillate between caustic specificity (of course ranting on the shit a vegetable would know to change) and comments marginally less vague than "I guess I like the concept," "Eh," or "Shit, gtfo back to goodreads you dyslexic cunt." For instance,
>You being fine is much
>Is more than looks alone
Did you mean to say "as"? Did you look over this at all? If so, what did you think this would mean, or sound like to the reader? You need to consider these things. In fact, the entire second stanza sounds awkward. Get rid of it, start from the ground up.

>Third:
considering the structure, you should have punctuation at the ends of necessary lines.
You're not trying to write Emily Dickinson, mate: you're trying to write Pope. Line breaks do have inherent meaning, but they don't imply some invisible and omni-applicable punctuation that fills in for whatever you want. Use dashes, use commas, use periods, use semicolons if you feel the desperate need, but use something. The break between
>It's true, as told around
>I find you rightly fair
is ambiguous in a bad way. It implies some kind of punctuation, but we, as readers, don't know what to put in. Colon? Comma? Does not work, especially in this kind of poem. Contrary to this, the next break, between
>I find you rightly fair
>For a pale beauty crowned
actually is a very good use of the same ambiguity. It could be a comma-representational pause, but it could just be a simple space. It retains meaning both ways, you see? The problem is that the majority of your other lines don't have that--just a hole waiting to be filled with something.
But even more than that, the trouble lies in the lines that DON'T have the ambiguity. They are screaming for specific punctuation, and Jesus are they in pain. Relieve them. End their suffering, give them a boon. Look at this poor fucker:
>Internal beauty quaint
>It budding, shall prolong
It needs a DASH. Goddamn, man, give that poor fucker a dash. It should not even have the potential to be read "Internal beauty quaint It budding, shall prolong," especially when the very next break has no implied punctuation.

I guess I'll stop there. I haven't touched word choice at all (what does beauty prolonging "the least of dull complaints" even mean?), but know this at least: the idea is sweet, and though I don't think the archaic form fits, especially in its current condition, if you really slave at it (and read a good deal more of love poetry than you have already: I suggest Petrarch and Shakespeare, obviously), you will have something worth giving your girl.

She doesn't just want a poem, she wants your time and effort. This can turn into women being considered leeches, but in this you can consider yourself lucky: all the time and effort you put into this poem and into bettering your own creative self, she will read as time and effort towards her.

So basically, keep working at it.

a letter aleph-malfeasible

i posted this in the critique thread but i'll post it here too.

the owner’s manual says
change the oil every five thousand miles
high octane, unleaded fuel only
tire reads thirty-two pounds of pressure
check the treads every time you drive

doesn’t care anything about
leaky trunks
rainwater
my neglect
rusting
jack and iron

tire blew out on the interstate
pistons plowed through the engine block
tow trucks don’t come at three AM

the owner’s manual says a great many things
about preventive care and routine maintenance

but it will not say
how to love your car

Thank you for the in depth response. I do think that most of your peeves could be simply fixed up by me putting in periods. Wrote in on my phone so kind of left them out. But it make sense, need to consider how other people will interpret it so ill be putting the punctuation in. Other than that you make very valid points and I will consider them. I often have difficulty evaluating my own poetry so I really appreciate you taking the time for such a long response

No problem, my friend. Glad you appreciate it. Good luck

This...this is fucking phenomenal.
What's your name? Are you published? Please publish this, this is some of the best original work I've read in years. Are you the same user that posted the Aye Aye poem a year or two ago?
Fuck, man. Post more.

As someone who obviously is educated in poetry. Could you help me out with meter? I the same guy with the poem from before. How strict should you stick to a meter in a basic poem? Obviously the type of poem doesnt call for it to be in meter

"The Classmate"

I saw you in class
You had big circular glasses
I said "hey"
You looked at me in disgust
I wondered why and took my seat
The lecture began

I'm looking at you
You're taking notes
Your blonde hair and nice clothes
And those big circular glasses
They compliment your face
You notice me staring
I look down at my notes
Nothing is written

Soon we'd be at lunch
We'd walk the same way
And not say a word
I'd be far behind you
Walking slow
You'd arrive at the cafeteria
I'd shortly follow
You'd sit at a table
Maybe I'd sit across from you
And try again

the soul as a massive, unholy knot
that slowly, year by year, life by life
is teased away at by these books
another string pulled apart

or shall we light it on fire?

Medallions I've been given, trinkets gilded in gold,
Rings of finest wrought silvers,
Spoils from ancient kingdoms, from cities grown cold.
Gifted baubles from kings and their queens, crafted statues of stone;
Would allay this hardened heart, so entirely, my own.
Although,
No present as precious as the temptress' hand
Could cause forfeit to such treasures,
As only a steel eyed concubine can.

I felt like contributing here so I wrote this down just now. I know the rhythm gets off towards the end and it could certainly be longer and more fleshed out but fuck it.

since modern times of course

all classic poetry to renaissance was written by certain conventions that should not be by any means overlooked

Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes is The Equator of this

Critique my alt lit-esque bullshit plz

I'll be honest, man: serious meter has been dead for a long while. It is rigorous, confining, and for a good deal of its existence was more a means of measuring wit than genuine aesthetic pursuit (with obvious exceptions of true genius or divine inspiration--these being the ones that actually tended to last past their own eras, as opposed to the innumerable pieces of shit doomed to Lethe).
If you have a specific idea of what you want to write about, meter will either lead to expending huge swathes of precious paper (and therefore audience attention) in getting to the fucking point, or otherwise force you to skip over that point entirely. Look at Pope's translation of the Iliad: it's done entirely in English heroic couplets, and fuck is it a slog. Even Paradise Lost suffers from this when Milton gets to Heaven.
The ultimate "point" of poetry is debatable, but I can definitively, with the weight of history's most beautiful works behind me, say that it is not supposed to be an outlet for the author's ego. It is an aesthetic pursuit.
There is a reason William Wordsworth is known for "Tinturn Abbey" as opposed to "We are Seven." The latter is in verse, and it is one of the shittiest serious artistic pieces you will ever read in your life. An interesting question, but the execution is so unbelievably forced as to render the entire work irredeemable. The former (or at least its first 112 lines) is the starkest contrast to Seven one could ever expect. It is shockingly beautiful. It makes Seven look like a joke (which, in a way, it was: Wordsworth was trying to write poetry "for the common man," not realizing that he was actually calling all of them retarded and that Tinturn Abbey would be the only poem of any real repute to come out of "Lyrical Ballads"--he backtracks hard on this in the preface to the second edition, hilarious).

Will continue

Meter is just another convention. It has the same value of rhyme, alliteration, enjambment, metaphor, parallelism and so on.

People nowadays thinks really wrongly about meter.

Opinion strongly noted. It feel the way I do about meter/poetry because my education in it is completely nil, my feelings being uneasy. I can list of every technique one can use but meter is more enduring. As the internet is my only resource it has been hard to gather much information because every one on the internet is retarded (I respect you however). Thank you for the input, I'm a big fan of an iambic meter, but i do think of how vigorous I tend to stick to it can hold me back, not so much on something straight forward like the poem about my girlfriend. But some of the other denser stuff which I appreciate and is more abstract, which I can see myself leading down because it is my interest in prose

Thank you for taking the time for the reply. Assuming you have a formal education in literature, would you recommend it to a working class guy? Want to get off the tools for a bjt

>
I just don't find it very interesting. Hone your focus, what am I supposed to get from reading this?

Whoops, didn't mean to include that second reply. Disregard.

>tfw not smart enough to get meter

Its pretty easy. Just start with iambic. Unatressed syllable followed by a stressed. Use the internet to get started

I love her, loved her to say
Her gentle touch, i miss

Wrote that in two seconds.

Not strictly following it. Her and to are both unstressed. But that doesn't really matter

I'm getting there. user wants to be Andrew Marvell, as is evident in his poem, so have to do away with that first.

>cont.
Wordsworth was the unwitting death-knell of the rigid, court-life poetry and its cast-iron metered structure. So, with Coleridge really being the last notable figure to embody the spirit of aesthetic invention within regular meter (Shelley to a lesser extent), poetry just continued to evolve.
Here's where you pay attention: along comes Walt Whitman. "Free" Verse. From this point onward, people seem to think poetry is indistinguishable from chopped up prose.

Fuck them.
Human speech contains inherent structures and rhythms--Whitman, being the lover of humanity he was, considered these structures beautiful. Speech has pauses and breaks more subtle than the oversimplified distinction between commas and dashes and periods. A man's distaste results in a specific way of speaking, as does his excitement--education, upbringing, values, outlook on life, all result in ways of speech. For Whitman, the subtleties of speech were a more reliable means of truth than its content alone. He knew these subtleties could be reproduced in writing, and thus, the music of "real" speech was put to paper. Poetry is inherently defined by meter, more so than any of the other "conventions" mentioned by , and every since Whitman, a poem defined by its conformity of iamb/trochee regularity, line/word length, rhyming structure, etc., is not only dismissive of history, freedom, and clarity, but is inherently disingenuous (this is discounting metacommentary on poetry as in Ezra Pound's work, but even that is an aesthetic sacrifice).

will continue further

But what if you wish to throw back to something more classical. Instead of getting tied up with poetry progressive. Just working on a more traditional style. You surely cant discount them because of this.

Or are you not really alluding to modern poetry I.e. last 50 years. And getting at the actual start of "modern" poetry in the literary sense

i stood at a crossroads once
and did not know where to go
drunk off the starry night -
and possibly the bitter wine

and in this stupor - the fool I was
the world turned upside down
and with a mighty epic crash
i was laying on the ground

and as I laid there on the ground
breathless with the dark blue sky
the moon's false and hollow light
so deep, inviting, new

a strange outreached hand
attached to a strange man
who was not there before
rudely blocked my view

"it is no shame to fall" he said
with a twinkle in his eye
"rise again, my friend
ill help you out this time"

"i'd much rather stay right here
its very nice and calm"
I said, dizzy and confused

"In that case I'll join you!"
and with another crash
two lay on the ground
in the cold wet grass

"the night is young!
why waste it here"
and pulls a glass
out of thin air

lets drink to rebels
lets drink to freedom
and to our will
and to our egos"

"i've had enough tonight
no thanks" I said
"moderation
and temperance"

"you fool! how ignorant you are
to derive yourself of pleasure
come and drink with my my friend
to this night that we so treasure

and so I did
and took the glass
and drank to that
and all that jazz

the stranger gaily smiled at me
and with his teeth bare like a lion
he asked of me these fateful words
that I remember to this day

"do you want to know it all
oh the secrets I could tell you
the arcane - the divine - the whole
the universe! at large!"

and drunk off the starry night
and possibly the bitter wine
we shook hands on that fateful night
the stranger with the gayous smile

and suddenly I was not upside down
and I knew

There's a poetry reading in a local bar tomorrow. Is this good enough to read there desu?

Don't do that. Why would you do that? If you wrote it in two seconds, it doesn't have any more worth than any other structure of words. Less, even, considering you're conforming (in your own words, loosely) to a rigid and outdated structure of expression. You're missing the point if you turn your poetry into some sort of ad-lib structural puzzle.

I mean "modern," as in divested from social status and as an aesthetic pursuit rather than a chance (or need) to prove one's ability to conform a story or emotion to a set of rigid guidelines.
Honestly, if you want to do it to challenge yourself, to better learn the art, or you want to do it for fun, or you want to reference something particular in the style or era you're emulating, there is absolutely no skin off my nose. Done it myself a few times. Best of luck, godspeed.
What I dislike is the traditionalism that has sprung up in response to, as I say, "modern" poetry, i.e. free verse, and the idea that it is somehow less strenuous or less considered, no doubt due to its unfortunate name. Expanded below.

>cont.
I have seen so much hate for poets like Pound, W.C. Williams, Wallace Stevens, because people think that their free verse is inconsiderate of meter. Instead of treating meter as a set of guidelines (for some to follow just to prove they could, and for some to elevate their subject matter to prove it was good enough for educated attention, because god forbid, if you wrote a sonnet deviating from iambic pentameter, you were just fucked) as was the case for most of literary history, these poets decided to extend that realm of possibility. Pound was all about changing how people viewed art and its usage, and his poetry basically took everything it could to its logical extreme, so he's not as fun to talk about.

But Williams and Stevens, in ways, took poetry even further than Pound. While Pound never really divested himself from attaching metaphor or parallels to a work ("petals on a wet, black bough"), look what Williams does with The Red Wheelbarrow:
>so much depends
>upon

>a red wheel
>barrow

>glazed with rain
>water

>beside the white
>chickens.
What does this poem contain? Nothing. No metaphor, no alliteration, no rhyme, nothing...except an image expressed through meter. Williams uses nothing but four groups of four words, 3+1, 3+1, 3+1, 3+1 (with no hidden numerological meaning) in the attempt to prove that, at its most fundamental base, poetry is the connection of a subject (note how vague that word is) and a meter. So in response to : meter, and its relation to the subject, is THE convention. It is poetry. Without meter, a subject would just be a statement, and without a subject, meter would just be music.
This is why rigid meter is flawed: it doesn't take into consideration its own relation to the subject. As we've long since moved past its use as a means of elevation, the gaudy bracelets have warped into mere shackles.

nearly finished

>Poetry is inherently defined by meter
Wrong. You could say "occidental poetry", then you would be ok. Whitman's verse is the same you'll find in the Bible, and he uses a huge ton of figures of speech, which I called conventions up there.

You could have picked a better example. Concrete poetry, for example. Or the provençal poetry. The problem with you (and every other casual reader) is that you don't even try to visit others shores, e.g. oriental poetry, nahuatl poetry and so on..

So you had to read Stevens to discover something that medieval poets already knew it? In all this matter the sonnet is the devil, said Pound in regard to the provençal poetry. And of course, he's refering to all fixed forms, not only the sonnet. It's a well know fact the provençal poets always created their own forms, and only used forms from another poet when they wanted to satirize him.

okay, hold on

We are conversing in the English language. As a culture, there are distinct definitions of what art is, and what it is not, just as there are differing moral regiments for Cambodia vs. Laos. But I have no stake, nor formal training in Nahuatl poetry or the vast majority of Oriental poetry. If they conform to different rules, then that is to be expected, but they are not the rules of the Western, specifically English, poetic tradition. As the user I was responding to wrote in English, I would assume he'd be concerned with English poetry.
Now, if you have as grand an understanding of oriental and Nahuatl poetry, please enlighten us. I would be very interested to see how the no doubt song-based poetry of the Aztecs is not metric, considering the fact that human speech is inherently so. And how Oriental poetry (ranging from, what, Turkey to Japan, and Russia to the southern tip of India) manages to circumvent this inherent structural function as well? What makes it discernible from prose? Was I just hallucinating when I heard the Bhagavad Gita recited, or when the monk reader commented on how the pulse of the universe was made manifest in the passing of the words? What about haiku? Or wait, what about Persia--I could have /sworn/ that they were so in love with the rhythm of their own language that entire medical texts were written in verse, or that even some censuses have been found with verse dedications? God, I just wish I wasn't so fucking casual and obviously deluded.
And you're right, the "working class guy" I'm lecturing to obviously has a intimate knowledge of fucking twelfth century French troubadour performances. Maybe I should have referenced de Troyes, or Piers Plowman instead. I'm sure the needless obfuscation would have given a much deeper and more intimate understanding.

jesus. is this pasta?

Firstly, we are having a conversation, so try to argue as an adult person. Butthurt is not really enjoyable, m8. Secondly, all of them deal with meter, of course, but also with the others tecniques quoted above, like alliteration, parallelism and so on. And last but not least, yes, you should try to extend your bordes of knowledge of poetry. Guess what? There is great poetry all around the world, and not only in english, despite what people on this website think.

And try not to muddle "meter" with "rhythm", especially when talking about aztecs, bhagavad gita etc.

If you want to, try giving pic related a try. He wrote a lot about rhythm.

OOOF

>cont.
Back to the topic at hand. Disregard the melodrama of that last sentence. Meter, and its connection to the subject, should always be the primary consideration when writing poetry. Of course, it needn't be the only consideration. I break out in hives whenever people talk about Williams as if "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "This is Just to Say" were the only two poems he ever wrote. They were statements, experiments to help define what poetry was in the crater that Duchamp and Dada left. It was a statement that slapping words on a page as a visual statement above all else was /visual/ art, not poetry. Verse is defined by verse, and the attempt to label such experiments as poetry were inherently misguided. Honestly, Williams was a goddamn messiah for modern verse.

But /how/ you can learn to use meter is honestly just akin to fumbling around in the dark, following the noise somebody else is making. If you want to use it to insert unique rhythm into your poetry, once again, Whitman is a great place to learn, as he is both fairly overt in the ways he presents its structural manifestation, and doesn't muck about with needlessly high-brow content. Emily Dickinson is even more obvious in metrical manipulation, as her poems would typically follow a rigid meter if read ignoring the punctuation and spacing. This distortion of the traditional structure has a great many varying results, but each depends specifically on the content of the individual poem. Read through her again with this in mind, if you haven't before. Stevens' later work is a good place to learn how to display specific emphasis and mood with meter. And, actually, yeah, that other user is right: if you find the time to listen to recordings of untranslated 12th century French, the provençal poets had a unique culture of creating specific structures to their poetry in order to establish themselves as unique. That said, the conformity to these structures was frequently based solely on the desire to distinguish themselves from the crowd, and therefore was less in harmony with content than "modern" poetry.

So, basically, don't restrict yourself to a rigid structure just because you feel it's necessary to writing good verse. If you want to, just for the hell of it, then more power to you, but you can be every bit as much a detailed craftsman without it, and you'll likely convey your subject better.

I like it

breddy gud

Part of a poem I made about my routine

In the offices
Sleepiness is the great evil that afflicts the evenings
Of the poor servants who crawl through
Endless labyrinths of the paperwork:
Like a snail, drowsiness wander on the brains,
Greasing them in mucus of apathy.
Our salvation are the many cups
Of coffee, whose embrace warms our entrails
And shakes the soul: the brains use it
To make electrifying mouthwash and spit
Out the lazy jelly and the yawning
Rancidity of sleep: the bitter and dark
Blood of coffee is the true
Nectar of the active God of Production.

Another one.

The End of Love

Alone I rest my life upon the hands
Of unforgiving time and prizeless seeking -
The birds have flown away that once were squeaking,
And on the river's place is now dry land.

I tried so much to keep in my command
All my knowledge of joy and tender speaking
As youth was going down and age was wreaking,
But now my voice is dry, my mind's bland.

So will I see again that rose of roses
Who came to kiss my brow when I was young,
And flew like flowers fly when winter's coming?

I don't think that I will. My mind reposes
Too much, and tries too much to end my song,
While my heart has no force to keep it running.

Will I ever be able to publish a poem in English? It's not my first language. I wrote it in 30 minutes, but it sounds wholly artificial.

Hey, fella, sorry to get heated, but I was merely responding to accusations in kind--plus, the butthurt was pretty enjoyable for me.

Yes, I absolutely agree, most do contain all those techniques (disregarding Haiku), which is why I said that Williams' commentary was so impactful: in the face of radical Concrete poetry, which you referenced, especially the subsets of Alphabetic and Letter "poetry," Williams is establishing boundaries.
And of course there is great poetry outside of the Anglosphere! God knows. I'm slowly working my own self towards a multilingual existence (a few months ago I tried to start on French and Basque in at the same time, having Spanish already in my cap, but have since taken a respectful hiatus from Basque--fascinating, but completely alien to me).
It's funny that you reference Meschonnic in your next post along with that statement, though (if that was you--can never tell). I agree with him, as should be plain in the rest of my posts, that form is absolutely inseparable from content. They define each other. I only believe that conformance to adamantine structures is needlessly confining. Iambs were fit to love poetry because they mimic a heartbeat--they shouldn't be shoehorned into a poem on existential angst (as I've seen done) just because it sounds archaic.

Also, I was using meter in the most literal sense: the rhythmic structure of verse. Meter creates and is inseparable from rhythm. I can't speak for the Aztecs, of course, but Sanskrit as a language is based inherently around compound words and their specific relation to one another. Originally a oral tradition with very few definitive writings, Sanskrit was actually set definitively into the form it is today with post-Vedic texts like the Gita because they were penned in a specific way. But despite that grammatical connection, the Gita's dialogic form allowed a structure more conducive to verse. The structure is is fluid, manifesting in distinctly different ways when faced with varying emotions, situations, and speakers. It consistently morphs itself to the situation. So yes, the Gita's rhythm is inherently different from what would be possible in an English translation due to Sanskrit's nature, but the meter is still its most definitive feature.

And yeah, you're right, this is probably the best conversation I've ever had on Veeky Forums.