Can we have a thread in which anons who are very familiar with poetry and have much to impart, do so...

I couldn't care less about pseuds thinking their knowledgeable enough to share their knowledge on poetry.
But I do care about faggots reading the OP before posting.

>their
*they are*
kind of embarrassed now

Skipping all that high school English really coming back to haunt you

>kek
Fuck you

Any key lessons in reading poetry? Shakespeare, then, are there specifics to bear in mind when reading his sonnets?

With the sonnets probably the most useful thing is to familiarize yourself with the sonnet form in general, most especially Petrarch, but also the other Elizabethan sonneteers. That can put how good Shakespeare is in perspective.
Getting to know the tropes, subjects and familiar images that everyone was using at the time makes them a lot more straight-forward to read, and also furthers your appreciation of what Shakespeare was doing with the same raw materials.

Like in jazz everyone get Kind Of Blue first, but it takes a while immersing yourself in jazz before you realize how GOAT Miles actually is.

taught creative writing to high schoolers once upon a time, now wasting away in Florida with nothing to do but read and write and abuse opiates an alcohol. i wrote 4chanlit.wikia.com/poetry when i was drunk one day. published, etc, all that good stuff. i mostly write poems about flowers. ive never posted my work on this website in the ten or so years ive used it. ask me anything, i'll gladly answer to the best of my capabilities

Which flower is your favorite? and why?

>Poppy flower
I'll let you guess why.

western foam flower. they're pretty, and delicate.

...

thanks.

Poetry isn't hard to understand, only 20th century poetry.

Anyone can read Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne and understand it. But others feel dumb for not understanding Wallace Stevens and then thinking they don't 'get poetry'.

Remember to ALWAYS try to read a poem out loud at least once, before trying to make a judgement. Especially modern work because of how obscured the sonics are on paper.

Doing this for a few weeks will give you a big headstart in learning meter (which you should do at some point).

Think about why a line break happens.

Be perceptive to any little effect that presents itself, because its there on purpose (and assume everything that could be an allusion is an allusion).

have you ever noticed how hard some poets lean on hyacinth being a pretty world.

Poetry is a cadaver I cannot bury.

Is that a saying?

If you say so. I just wrote it.

I assume you were replying but I know america has a couple very strange sayings and this sounded like it could be one.

Yes, I was replying to you, sorry about that.
I do write poetry like it's used-up sayings, mostly. So thanks, I guess, I was genuinely trying to help answering OP's question.

Read some John Keats

You, like, pick up the book, and read it, man. That's all there is to it. This ain't no lie!

>Anyone can read [...] Donne and understand it.
Nah, Donne is a seriously intellectual poet. Unless you're familiar with Spanish mysticism and Renaissance science you'll need notes to understand him fully.

Read Balzac's Les Illusions Perdues. You'll get why when you've done.

Also, post one poem.

Building on this. Don't just read a few randomly chosen sonnets here or there; try to read many at a time, or ideally, the whole sequence. Read them the same way you'd read the Canzoniere. That way you'll notice the ideas, themes and tropes that recur, and you'll get get a much better idea of what Shakespeare was preoccupied with. You'll also notice the difference between the procreation, fair youth and dark lady sequences. It'll put you in a much better position than the people who just did 18 and 130 in school.

Why does this board attract so many addicts and alcoholics?

Basically my advice would be the following:
1. Know what poetry is.
Poetry isn't just a random string of words. Poetry is defined as something with rhythm. Rhythm isnt a very difficult concept, it's simply the sound a poem makes when you read it out. How you give poetry rhythm also defines the kind of poetry youre writing. Metered Verse, which is what is classically called poetry (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats to name a few from different movements wrote this kind of poetry) gets its rhythm from meter. In English, the main meter used is "iambic pentameter". research "iambic pentameter" because it's very important.
The second kind of poetry is called Free Verse and this gets its rhythm from different rhetorical devices like alliteration, consonance and rhyme among many others. This is what the Beats (Allen Ginsberg and co.), the modernists and post-modernists used. This form is what causes alot of confusion. Because it doesnt necessarily have any meter, plebs just assume that anything they write can be considered poetry.

2. Read.
Read all the poetry you can get your hands on. Start with metrical poetry so you get into it properly. Shakespeare's sonnets are a great place to start. I reccomend starting with sonnets 124-154 because theyre the best to get. Then read Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis". Then move on to the Romantics, Keats ("Fall of Hyperion" is good), Byron ("Darkness" and "She walks in beauty")and Shelley ("Oxymandius"). Then read Oscar Wilde ("The Burden of Itys" and "The Sphinx" are good places to start. Then read Whitman ("Leaves of Grass"). Then read Allen Ginsberg ("Howl"). Then read T. S, Eliot ("The Wasteland" is a masterpiece). You can start with Elliot and work back to Shakespeare if you want, whatevers easier for you, just read.
3. Write
But dont just write randomly, start writing with purpose and structure. I wrote 500 sonnets imitating shakespeare in the first two years I started writing poetry. Choose a structure (e.g. a sonnet, or maybe blank verse) and start writing. It doesnt have to have rhythm at first, it will most definitely suck but stick to it, youll get better. Then move on to other forms. You have to know your history, your roots before you can innovate and write new stuff.

its nothing like the opacity of wallace stevens or hart crane

you know what to look up with donne, with 20th century poets you need to be taught them, just like how joyce had to leak two cheat sheets explaining the meaning/structure of ulysses

Not all non-metrical poetry is free verse

That post in general is riddled with inaccuracies, bad taste and general philistinism.

Can you please fuck off, you faggot? I was attempting to apply constructive criticism to a post, which, clearly, the poster put some amount of time into. If have nothing better to add than smarmy one-liners, reddit is right over there.

I meant in english, because i think in french and japanese meter is syllabic not stressed. But if you meant in english please do explain.

Alliterative verse as is found in Old English and some Middle English poetry does not follow any strict meter, but I would not call it free verse

yeah fair point. i didnt think further back than chaucer. my bad.

"Poetry is defined as something with rhythm"? That definition is much closer to music than poetry. Poetry builds more necessarily on the harmonisation ('dichten') of seemingly disparate elements, through relational, analogical associations—metaphors—, than it does on 'melopoeia', which many good poets really aren't all that good at, or use to a formal minimum (-/-/-/-/-/ ad nauseam). Music is virtually unthinkable without rhythm; poetry, not as much. And not all poetry needs be read aloud. Silent reading may even be preferable for romantic poets like Shelley or Keats.

And, say, for the choice of words in T. S. Eliot, think of his description of the "auditory imagination." It's not so much about the "sound" a particular word makes, per se, as it is about the whole sensorium or associative complex it evokes in the reader; the harmonic partials of that particular word, as it were. This has nothing to do with rhythm.

So it's no wonder that, given the challenge of setting a specific effect on the reader, poets often start with lists of words—just words—they feel are needed to achieve that specific effect.

More on analogy, or metaphor. It builds on condensation; a metaphor is fourfold:
>string/tone:harmonics::word:associations

And by the way, this:
>You have to know your history, your roots before you can innovate and write new stuff.
is propaganda

Don a mask of they
From the ends of fathoming
So nothing slips by.

What do with the young souls that are more interested in the immediate connection with the direct, "spiritual" side of art, than in the technical engines, the "nuances", the clever mechanisms or tricks? How can you re-approximate our literary values of common practice techniques to the emergent need for direct, instant-quality gesture, save through a return to an effeminate posture of intense subjectivity and all-accepting, all-embracing contemplativeness?

you can't have an immediate connection with the spiritual side of anything, that completely misses the point.

Good answer

Bump

OP here, sorry I unexpectedly had to run from my own thread a couple hours after making it.

When reading difficult poetry, is it best to simply read through it lost at first? Or should help deciphering it be employed from the beginning?

Also, tell us a little more about your experience teaching, if you would. Did you enjoy it? Are there any reasonable generalisations to be made about the contemporary student of poetry?

Have you found any good amateur poetry on Veeky Forums?

So there is no diving into poetry at any point. The start with the greeks meme is real?

Fair enough. Thanks.

If you claim to 'love' the works of poets you have read through translations then you're a fucking poseur get the fuck away from me

OP again, have some of the flowers from my garden. I took these just now.

...

I wish I had a garden.

Requires a lot of work if you want a nice one.

But it is fun,
And if work is fun it isn't really work anymore.

Where do I start with Jim?

either that or no work at all so it returns to its natural overgrown wild state and fills up with neat little bugs and spiders and shit.

well you don't want weeds and other oppressive plants in your yard though, either.

they're only weeds because that's how you define them. to me they're just plants. I practise Stoic Gardening where I sit on my porch and deny the messy tangle of native flora any kind of negative influence on my mental well-being.

>I practise Stoic Gardening where I sit on my porch and deny the messy tangle of native flora any kind of negative influence on my mental well-being

bump

Where do I start with Keats?

You don't. You start with the greeks.

How do you read a collection of poetry? I'm mostly thinking about a thematically coherent and intentional collection by one writer. Do you read a poem and then read the next one or do you linger and reread or...?

On Raglan Road of an autumn day
I saw her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare
That I might one day rue
I saw the danger and I passed
Along the enchanted way
And said let grief be a fallen leaf
At the dawning of the day

On Grafton Street in November
We tripped lightly along the ledge
Of a deep ravine where can be seen
The worth of passion's pledge
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts
And I not making hay
Oh I loved too much and by such by such
Is happiness thrown away

I gave her gifts of the mind
I gave her the secret signs
Known to the artists who have known
The true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint I did not stint
I gave her poems to say
With her own name there
And her own dark hair
Like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet
I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had loved not as I should
A creature made of clay
When the angel woos the clay
He'll lose his wings at the dawn of day

Those are the lyrics as sung by Luke Kelly, but the original poem by Patrick Kavanagh goes like this:

Poems by Patrick Kavanagh : 17 / 24

« prev. poem
next poem »

On Raglan Road - Poem by Patrick Kavanagh
Autoplay next video

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion's pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay -
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that's known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay -
When the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day.

The subtle differences might help you to "get" poetry.

>Patrick Kavanagh : 17 / 24
Is this the Beckett or O'Brien rating system?

Out of 24 of his poems it's considered his 17th best

Poets that are worth reading (in my opinion):

Sappho
Catullus
Petrarch
Shakespeare
John Keats
William Butler Yeats
Rainer Maria Rilke
Ezra Pound
TS Eliot
Robert Frost
ee cummings
Emily Dickinson
Baudelaire

Thats all I can think of right now. If anyone has recommendation based on those I'll gladly take them

He wrote a lot more shit than just 24.

yes but of those 24 :^)

It's like asking George Costanza "how do I lie?"

explaining it cannot be done

What's sixteenth? You might have the order wrong.

All of these are good, but Donne and Hopkins should be on the list