Novels are long, empty, and deal more with gossip than anything else. Most of them could be reduced without loss. As time passes, I am finding that, more and more, I read novels in order to say I've read them instead of reading them for elevation. The only other occasion in which such things happen to me is when I read famous hack poets, like cummings and such.
Honest question: why don't you read poetry instead of novels?
A single canto of Dante can easily surpass a whole Nabokov novel. And it has music. And it has better images. And it is more direct. And it can be memorized.
Novelists aren't even the best prose writers. This honor usually goes to philosophers, priests and historians: Plato, Cicero, Machiavelli, the many authors of the Bible.
There are some exceptions, like Cervantes, but nothing that could justify the appeal the novel has for the common reader.
I agree there should be a kind of music that sentences create when telling the story of a novel. Poetry is better for that but it should be in novels too. All I can say is...I try. It takes me a year to get an 80,000 word first draft down, then another six months to polish it up.
Elijah Myers
I do read poetry. I Write poetry. I think it can be a step above novels. The novel writing club is a bit like the art and fashion scene. Rich dickheads, pompous and nepotistic
I think most people are persuaded into novels because they are pretty easy. The hardest part about writing a novel is writing well for such a long period of time, likewise appreciating it can be similar
Alot of people disregarded poetry because of all the trash out there. Just take a look at the Veeky Forums poetry threads. These people are allegedly in touch with literary tastes. Also literally impossible to ever make anything of yourself by writing decent poetry
Jordan Wilson
A novel teaches you how a good person lives, how a bad person acts, about the interactions between people, and how well adapted things are to the environments around them. In some ways it does this better than non-fiction does.
Poetry is flowery prose, nothing more.
Luke Williams
The fashion aspect of the novel certainly has a great influence on this disparity. Novelists tend to be invited to do talks, opinion articles and interviews by the mainstream media all the time. Not so with poets, who mostly do talks and interviews in very particular, poetry-dedicated settings.
It was vers libre which started the idea that poetry can be easy. In reality, it cannot. It demands higher concentration and higher exactness of phrase than prose does. It demands more years of training. I read poetry every day, have been doing so for years, can read it five languages and yet... The best I can do is third-rate petrarchian rubbish.
I think anyone can become a good novelist. If you copy down ten great novels until you absorb the style, then proceed to talk about your first online love using the styles you've learned... There you have it: 'a decent novel that explores in breathtaking prose one of the most thought-provoking themes of the contemporary age'. Not so with poetry, however, not so with poetry... When you write poetry, you've got to learn how to be eternal in your own way. There's simply no escape. Either you do it or you else you'll be forgotten. And there's nothing more pitiful than a forgotten poet.
Jaxon Lee
You talk as if you had come straight out of a creative writing course. Are you not ashamed? Do you also read The New Yorker?
Aaron Murphy
I don't believe in minimalism.
Luis Barnes
Camões and Torquato Tasso are still much superior to Thomas Pynchon.
Jaxson Lopez
Canada put its most popular Poet in the olympic ceremonies. It didn't put its most popular novelist there. It made people hate Poets more.
Plenty of places pay for poet laureates. Poets get respect because of their tradition. They don't get attention because television doesn't put them on air, they don't get attention because people genuinely don't want to listen to them, they want to listen to Musicians.
Luke Scott
I don't care about people hating poets nor anything of the kind. I care about the common reader spending more time with novelists than with poets.
The common reader is miles apart from the common person, but even he has degenerated into a pleasure-seeking idiot.
Christian Sanchez
I should add that the man in the video is no poet whatsoever. You don't know anything about poetry. Learn Italian and read Dante.
Chase Hughes
>Poetry is flowery prose, nothing more. If you really meant this, you are wrong, dude.
Juan Morales
How much poetry is even aimed at the common reader? I know there are practically entire libraries worth of novels aimed at the common reader, but I can't say the same of poetry. I imagine that goes a long way to explaining it.
Jonathan Gutierrez
Yeah, well it's the public face of poetry. I'm not shitting you when I say the two poets I'm aware of in Canada are that guy, who is a poet who can actually live off his work, and this girl.
You know what the problem is? Poetry is a movement very tied to aesthetics. Yet all I see from Poets in public are awkward faggots who recite cringeworthy shit with an overly inflated sense of self worth. I literally cannot read poetry without an image of a neckbeard or legbeard flashing through my mind. I can be reading any prose, no matter how beautiful, and pic related will flash through my head.
Furthermore, book writers AIM to be accessible, they make books for kids, they make books for teenagers, then they also make books for adults. When Poetry snobs are proud of how inaccessible poetry is, shouldn't they be happy it has a small audience, since it shows how inaccessible it is to the plebs?
Joshua Baker
It shouldn't matter. Back in the day, the common reader would read Shakespeare and Homer. He would do his best to raise himself to a level in which he could at least superficially be able to enjoy those great masters.
At any rate, lots of poetry are aimed at the common reader. Modern poetry is the exception, but it's highly unimportant anyway.
Christian Carter
>Back in the day In what day?
David Carter
You do know Shakespeare was criticised in his own time for using flowery language to pander to the masses, right? The common reader read/watched Shakespeare when his work was aimed at the common reader.
Carson Gutierrez
> Back in the day, the common reader would read Shakespeare and Homer.
Back in the day, the people listening to Homers poems were predominantly illiterate, and Homers Poems were at the time very accessible works.
You would know this if you read more books.
Logan White
I think that you are unintentionally making a false dichotomy between Poetry and Prose. I completely understand that many novels can be unappealing, and that the ambition that fuel some kind of machinery turns the whole into a bulk of pretentiousness or mere dry pages on the page. Notwithstanding, and paraphrasing Roberto Bolaño, Poetry and Prose must go hand in hand. What he actually said is that the best poetry of the 20th century can be found in prose works, such as Joyce's Ulysses
I completely agree with the Dante/Nabokov point, as well as that novelists aren't the best prose writers. But take a moment to think about the following: with Poetry, with Prose, and with Philosophy you can synthesize hundreds of verses or pages into a short paragraph, or even a line, but what one ought to take as a result isn't really "a moral lesson" or the mere point an author tries to get through. What one ought to take after reading a good book is the experience of having read a tome, whatever the length of the book. The good prose, in my opinion, should feel poetic: the lines on the page have to use the abilities of language to convey more that what the words themselves mean, either by connotation and/or by leaving an aesthetic afterimage on the reader. The work to be a piece of art.
I recommend you to read Victor Shkolvsi's "Art as a Technique". I know that he writes about poetry from a formalist perspective, but his point can be stretched to what I said above without overreaching.
Henry Howard
>What he actually said is that the best poetry of the 20th century can be found in prose works, such as Joyce's Ulysses
Then he didn't read TS Eliot, WB Yeats, WH Auden, Fernando Pessoa's Mensagem, Anthony Hecht, Geoffrey Hill, Federico Garcia Lorca, Konstantinos Kavafis and many others.
Robert Gray
>Honest question: why don't you read poetry instead of novels?
Meh, this is a crap conclusion to draw. It'd make more sense to say "why don't you read more short stories?"
Poetry -- and let's be clear and say "poetry that isn't primarily known for its musical/singing accompaniment" -- can never fully scratch the itch that people have for stories. Novels may not be the best format for storytelling, sure, but they're still *a* format for it.
Ultimately, poetry is just fancy talk. A perhaps good, perhaps bad part about modern society is that we're all jaded as fuck about fancy-shmancy speakers. Sure, we like rockstars (except they make music, which almost all poetry is not intended for) and sure, we occasionally "like" politicians/philosophers/etc. (except we almost solely like their ideas and the fact that they don't stumble over their words, not that those words arranged in pretty/beautiful/fancy ways). But I can't imagine any sane person exclusively reading poetry for most of their life, unless they live a short and shitty life.
Ethan Phillips
>the Bible >good prose
Oliver Myers
>long >empty >dealing with gossip more than anything else
So are you OP
Nathan Rodriguez
>literature as didactic
i'm gonna freak the fuck out right now
Jace Hernandez
Shklovsky also writers extraliterary ostranenie exists as well (Stendhal, Tolstoy) and it's best used in the form of a novel.
Which leads me to a speculation OP is a pseud blowhard who barely understands the form of a novel. He also has only a superficial understanding of modern poetry and romanticises a model reader "in ye olde days."
And separate point, nothing is more cancerous than this Veeky Forums meme that only way to achieve great style is to abuse asonance and consonance like you are Nabokov on steroids. Some of you people have really narrow preconceptions.
Joshua Foster
>spergs about vers libre >“The best I can do is third-rate petrarchian rubbish.” IMAGINE MY SHOCK
