Any poet worth his salt can write prose. But not all prose writers can write poetry

>Any poet worth his salt can write prose. But not all prose writers can write poetry.

Oh fuck. W-was he right?

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Poetry is for faggots anyway

of course, poetry is literally held to a higher standard

I've had an argument about a single punctuation mark before

>of course, poetry is literally held to a higher standard

Hardly, its way waaaay easier to get away with being a mediocre poet than a mediocre writer especially these days.
>I've had an argument about a single punctuation mark before
Oh never mind I'm talking with one

They're two different disciplines. 100 meters vs a marathon.

Am I a mediocre poet? Yes
300+ pieces and I might be able to get like 4 published by a decent place.

Insulting me doesn't make you right. It just means you're snarky. The acceptance rates for just one poem is abysmal, and you need to be established before you can even think of putting a book out.

Except when it comes to long-form poetry and short stories?

Its hard to get published because literally no one reads poetry, because 99.99% of it is valueless garbage. It's not an indication of quality control, its an indication of desperation

>valueless garbage
as opposed to what?
novels?
research articles?
what lazy metric are you using to justify your difficulties understanding poetry?

Yes, it's true.

>I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

That was said by Faulkner. Roberto Bolaño was also a failed poet turned author. James Joyce was also a failed poet. Vladimir Nabokov too. The list goes on.

I think it's important for every author to try their hands at poetry. A poet looks at language and at the art of writing distinctively, and truly when Nabokov and Joyce write in the way that they did they're using poetry in their prose. They wouldn't be able to develop a rich prosaic style if they hadn't read and written a good deal of poetry.
And yes, poetry is more difficult. Writing poetry requires you to use language in a completely different way than in ordinary life, not just or necessarily because it's labored and high-brow, but because its goals and methods of communication are of a completely different order.

It's so exhausting, you know? Having to read this non-stop, overaggressive trite you people write. Do you really believe that? I mean, DO YOU REALLY BELIEVE THAT? Probably not. At most I imagine you are indifferent to poetry and have release some pent up malaise so you come on here, take a side, and start writhing around angrily. Get a hobby, dude.

You don't need to know how to tell a story to write poetry, you only need to know how to conjure strong feelings with vivid images and have an ear for rythm. If a poem is long enough to tell a story, the line blurs and you could be dealing with a short story or even a novel written in verse IMO. Poetry is powerful and concentrated and require skill. Some people think that just inserting random line breaks in prose is enough to transform it into poetry. Prose can be poetic too, but if it obscures too much what it's trying to says, you can end up shooting yourself in the foot. Short stories and novels are different too, but as far as I'm concerned the vast majority of short stories are more similar to novel than to poetry.

A creation that is never engagement with is a worthless creation. Even the most basic bitch young adult novels bring more intellectual engagement and enjoyment to the world than any poet in the decade

can you help me "get" poetry?
what am I looking for? should I be feeling something? be at awe at the rhytmic/metrical/technical qualities?

>Get a hobby, dude.
This is my hobby though

Long form poetry is generally not as dense as short form, with exceptions such as Milton, who spent a half lifetime writing PL, where most novels require a few years to write. Short stories *usually* take less time to write than short poems, of the poems are good.

By order of difficulty, effort, and skill to execute:
Bad poetry < bad prose < good prose < good poetry

>what am I looking for
The first thing is the effect it has on you. If it works. All the rest is secondary.

>You don't need to know how to tell a story to write poetry,

man, this is so rarely the case its crazy. I know you're not really being disparaging, but take a look at any great poet and you'll see narratives in their work. no, they won't be like a novel, but the story is still there. I do get what you're saying, but even people like cummings or Ashbery have tons of stories in their work

>All the rest is secondary.
(obviously, if you like something, it's good to be able to articulate why, but there are a lot of art which is technically fine which is still completely dead, so you can't really judge by the technical components unless they're really exceptional)

It's useful to study poetry as a means to improve one's prose; other than that it's pretty worthless.

>enjoyment to the world
if this is your metric, then yes. prose,being easier to read, is more popular

>more intellectual engagement
ur just dumb

just get used to reading everything out loud
makes a lot of things work better, and helps set up for getting a grasp on meter

I agree with this mostly, except modern (not modernist, but rather post-1900) long-form rarely feels less dense per line looking at H.D., Olson, Zukofsky, etc.

I believe in the same ranking you got there

the only poetry that has any effect on me is the sparse and vague kind, like haikus or w/e that just feel like quick vignettes. but in this sense, I could be presented with a random two or three software-generated lines (like a twitter bot) and experience the same effect. would this be poetry too?

Yeah, of course, there are still narrative elements - it could be argued that everything has -, but their relative importance is hugely different. In most cases, it's not what's at the forefront in poetry, at least from what I've seen.

Poetry is like music and random software-generated text is noise. Noise can be musical or pleasant in some cases, it happens, but most of the time random noise won't create good music.

I agree, the past hundred years or so have yeilded very few really great long poems. I think the form is relatively unpopular right now, since it's historically such a sincere and unironic form. Don't forget though, we're looking back on a relatively short period of time, which somewhat limits the potential for good works to be created. The sample size is pretty small.

>the only poetry that has any effect on me is the sparse and vague kind, like haikus or w/e that just feel like quick vignettes
It's possible that you're just used to stronger stimuli (vidyagames, tv, etc.). It's also possible that you're simply not wired to enjoy these things. People have different sensibilities. There are weirdos who like people's feet. There are others who like poetry.

>Don't forget though, we're looking back on a relatively short period of time, which somewhat limits the potential for good works to be created. The sample size is pretty small

There's more people alive today than have ever lived in written history

>Any novelist can write a poem. But not all poets can write a novel.
>me

Don't get me wrong, I think Trilogy is the best thing to come out of modernism and before it became a 180-page Opera, it looked like I was gonna really like 'A'. Olson is one I'm iffy about. I'm honestly surprised more fantasy writers haven't worked at it. Stuff like Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red excite me (I've only had the chance to read a sliver of it) and hope to see more like it soon.

:( just open your heart user

This is unironically more accurate

one should expect poetry be one of the stronger stimuli due to the condensed nature of the form, no? as opposed to novella-length prose or longer
I'm clearly not including epic poetry as it has a narrative dynamic that a reader of prose is generally more familiar with

>There are weirdos who like people's feet.
yeah, those weirdos h-haha

>one should expect poetry be one of the stronger stimuli due to the condensed nature of the form, no?
It can be extremely powerful, but you still have to be entirely there to appreciate it. If you can't focus enough to hear what it says, you can't hope for it to have any effect on you. That said, I don't know you, so I'm just giving a random possibility.

Most "poets" can barely write poetry anyway. If you can shit out 5 great poems in your entire career you're hall of fame worthy.

Kenneth Koch wrote some great long poems

>reader response

Fuck off dude. New Criticism is dead for a reason.

Poems aren't objective. The quality depends on the person and the time that they read it. Poetry is incredibly personal, what is great at 20 is trite at 40 etc

Fuck off with your reader response bullshit homie and go back to reading Rupi Kaur.

This. If a poem is really good and you give it all of your attention it will exhaust you to read, like reading a large chunk of a novel in one sitting. Elliott's "preludes" has caused me to cry before.

>Fuck off dude. New Criticism is dead for a reason.
I don't even know what new criticism is, but from looking at wikipedia it doesn't seem to be what I've said. I've said that "does it work" needs to be the first criteria and then if you're inclined to do so it's fun to look at why it works for you. There are many techniques the poet may have used, but it would be incredibly stupid to just look at technical elements without seeing if the whole thing is functional. All these formal criticism movements are cancer anyway.

So this is power of "great poems". Doesn't seem to be doing you much good

I agree with you. You don't think this is only applicable to poems though, do you?

user, I love you but you seem pretty misguided. Judge poems by their own - overall and technical - merits and not on the basis of whatever the latest literary theorists tells you to think.

Say it out loud. Read it out loud like you were performing it for an audience. Read it how you would present whatever poem you're reading so other people understand how it makes you feel.

It's half and half. Poems can definitely have objective qualities (a good poem will always be a good poem and a shit poem will always be a shit poem), but yeah they like everything there's are subjective aspects that will impact how much it resonates with you too.

It's funny, I always prefer to read poems in the most monotonous way possible to hear better their innate music and will rage at any expressive readings. :)

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Oh I definitely don't disagree. I mean, I fucking hate, absolutely fucking despise slam poetry. I'm not talking about slam or so expressive that you're playing to the back of a theatre. I mean like you're reading it to your child before they go to bed. Or to the love of your life. Or to a dying soldier. I didn't mean to insinuate to a huge crowd.

>the level of discussion in this thread

My God, this is on a complete layman's level or below a layman's level, do any of you even read? Do you read poetry, do you read about poetry? Have you read Bachelard, Pessoa, Rilke, Berryman, Hegel, Aristotle, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Saussure, Bataille, Goethe, Nietzsche and their insights on poetry? If you do, you might begin to understand what poetry is. As it is you're discussing a concept of which you don't even know the definition, which makes it not a discussion at all but just an exchange of vague platitudes.

First of all, any intellectual judgement of poetry is misguided. A psychoanalytic (through its author), a socio-historical (through its context) or a philosophical (through its themes) analysis of a poem might bear some fruit, but not insight into the poem itself, however, an intellectual value judgement of a poem is entirely useless. Any proper analysis of a poem would be first and foremost phenomenological.

Poetry isn't a genre, it's a function of language. You can find poetry without stanzas, scansion or rhyme, and you can find very prosaic writing which does not resemble poetry at all in fully metered verse.

As soon as you start categorizing poems into ''good'' or ''bad'', you've lost. Not because of some sort of artistic egalitarianism or anarchism, of course not all poems are equally as valuable, but to read a poem and determine its value through judgement defeats the purpose of a poem and is incompatible with the nature of poetry. The truly valuable discussion to be had are far beyond petty vanity.

(You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You)

No but I think your way into a poem is more slippery. A poem can just click one day where as a book is more linear, it builds up through rereading

god you were everything i hated in college

Sounds like you had a miserable time. That's a shame

If informed, non-reductionist discussion of literature was everything you hated in college, then you really don't belong in academia. Though I can't attest to the quality of whatever college you came from.

What is this meme?

teach me

>As soon as you start categorizing poems into ''good'' or ''bad'', you've lost. Not because of some sort of artistic egalitarianism or anarchism, of course not all poems are equally as valuable, but to read a poem and determine its value through judgement defeats the purpose of a poem and is incompatible with the nature of poetry.

Lol.

Yes. Of course he's right. Poetry is the highest form of literature - or the lowest; it depends on who is writing it.

Then you must love it.

Faggot

Yeah I agree with this dude here. It's conceptualization of the written form at a higher level than prose.

Meanwhile
You don't listen.

Damn you, damn you to hell.
Icarus flew too close to the sun
And I do not lift my feet from the ground.
Replete with anger
You never realized.

Damn you
Easy for you to walk away.
Seems like yesterday, I
Unable to bear it, turned inward.

>Roberto Bolaño was also a failed poet turned author.
False, Bolaño started writing novels to support his family, he always considered himself a poet. Look it up if you want.

Clark Ashton literally never said this. You're a liar.