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