How do I make my poetry sound less whiny and more meaningful?
How do I make my poetry sound less whiny and more meaningful?
Grow up.
spend 10x more of your time reading good poetry by masters (both dead and contemporary) that you do trying to write
Suffer more hardships
seconding
Nice quads. Any recs? I'm chewing through Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost and William Wordsworth at the moment. I picked up a TS Elliot collection that I'll probably start soon.
seconding
write about things that you like/.love
Wouldn't this have the opposite effect?
No because the pain either becomes more meaningful and ripe with delicious bitter fruits or you kill yourself. Either way, it's a win win.
Include me in the screenshot
Look for meaning
Don't rely on surface, unless the arrangement of the surface reveals a depth
You're probably wrong about everything, remember that and engage with the world accordingly, as if it still has secrets to tell you
Exhaust every possibility
Take as it is given
Read your poetry as though you had never read it before -- if you can't arrive at the conclusions of the poem (its form) by the evidence given, it has failed. The poem isn't written, it is opened
stop whining
This and study all the major world religions with detail and ethusiasm.
Makes sense.
On a side note, Cioran is my guy.
Same. He's my ultimate inspiration.
Stop writing about your feelings. Write about something concrete. Don't write with the goal of "expressing" something. Write to describe. Your feelings will come out anyway. Don't force it.
Read more poetry. Dylan Thomas. HD. TS Eliot is essential. Adrienne Rich. Anne Carson. John Ashbery.
He's the ultimate example of the literary life desu.
hard to say. Classics, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Keats.
Contemporary, poets like Mark Strand, James Tate, Carolyn Forsche, Robert Hass, Cid Corman, Hayden Carruth, Ezra Pound, H.D, Gregory Orr, Yves Bonnefoy, and then there's the french surrealists (Artaud & Breton and Tzara)
and ofc the Spanish surrealists (Paz and Pizarnik)
And then there's the Black Mountain and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets but that is for later. Build yourself up to that - don't dive in immediately or you won't know what is going on
and the 4 Wrights
Charles Wright, James Wright, Franz Wright, and C.D Wright
stop reading elliot and frost. read byron, not wordsworth. peter redgrave. william blake. john wheelwright. ted hughes. laura riding. rosemary tonks. sor juana ines de la cruz.
all tried to go break out of poetic cliche/expression.
seconding
Killing yourself usually works. Normies will see your work as 'raw expression' and canonize you.
For starters, never use the first or second person when you can use the third person instead.
no u
thirding