[HN Gopher] On getting poetry
___________________________________________________________________
On getting poetry
Author : apollinaire
Score : 76 points
Date : 2021-03-31 01:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (newcriterion.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newcriterion.com)
| billfruit wrote:
| Getting a good text book like Cleanth Brookes/Robert Penn Warren
| "Understanding Poetry" would be the way I suggest to get into
| reading poetry.
|
| Also getting a good anthology like Palgrave's or Anthony
| QuillerCouch, that covers a lot of poems and poets from different
| eras in small portable hand book format.
|
| Personally the most enjoyment I get out of poetry is when I seen
| words and phrases that leap out to you in a surge of meaning and
| emotion.
|
| Like for example, these fragments:
|
| "Do more bewitch me than when art, is too precise in every part."
|
| "A box where sweets compacted lie,"
|
| "Thus, though we cannot make our sun,Stand still, yet we will
| make him run."
|
| "Two paradises 'twere in one, To live in Paradise alone."
|
| "O Grave! Where is thy victory? O death! Where is thy sting?"
|
| "There is a Book by seraphs writ with beams of heavenly light"
|
| "And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor
| pair, nor build, nor sing."
| smitty1e wrote:
| "Art" is "better than I can do", no matter the medium.
|
| A Shakespearean sonnet is certainly in that category.
|
| Modern free verse might fare better if delivered by the author on
| YouTube.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| "Kunst kommt von Konnen" is a German saying. The word Kunst
| (art) is derived from Konnen (skill, capability, mastery).
|
| In the Middle Ages, Kunst actually meant something like
| engineering, too. For example, Wasserkunst was the name for a
| water distribution system.
| zabzonk wrote:
| See also "Ars longa, vita brevis"
| mudita wrote:
| I quickly googled the saying - which was familiar to me - to
| check and it is indeed etymologically correct.
|
| The origin is the proto-germanic word kunnan, which means "to
| recognise, to know (how to be able)".
|
| According to Wikipedia, the first known usage of the phrase
| by the German poet Johann Gottfried Herder is actually a bit
| more complex and references both the knowing and the being
| able to:
|
| "Kunst kommt von Konnen oder Kennen her (nosse aut posse),
| vielleicht von beiden, wenigstens muss sie beides in
| gehorigem Grad verbinden. Wer kennt, ohne zu konnen, ist ein
| Theorist, dem man in Sachen des Konnens kaum trauet; wer kann
| ohne zu kennen, ist ein blosser Praktiker oder Handwerker;
| der echte Kunstler verbindet beides."
|
| Quick and dirty translation:
|
| "Art is derived from being able to do and knowing, maybe from
| both, at least art must combine both in proper measure. Who
| knows, without being able, is a theorist, whom one cannot
| trust with regards to being able to do; Who can without
| knowing, is a mere practician or craftsman; the real artist
| connects both."
|
| By the way, I don't know you, I don't want to offend you and
| the very little info I have from your comment is evidence
| that you're a intelligent, well educated, open-minded and
| complex person.... but to be honest, when I see the phrase
| "Kunst kommt von Konnen" my first association is of a narrow-
| minded square, who doesn't like anything they are not
| familiar with. Again, this is not directed at you, I just
| wanted to share what kind of associations this phrase creates
| in me in general from my personal, limited experience with
| people, who used it.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I understand the assocation with narrow-mindedness, it
| could be used by someone who thinks all modern art is crap
| or some such. But then, 90% of everything is, in fact, crap
| (citation needed), so there's plenty of opportunity to use
| it.
| smitty1e wrote:
| > Kunst kommt von Konnen oder Kennen her
|
| ...
|
| > association is of a narrow-minded square
|
| German (married to one, not a real student of the language)
| makes a useful distinction between kennen and lernen[1],
| the latter of which seems more likely to be hidebound,
| since the knowledge isn't fully internalized yet.
|
| [1] https://dict.leo.org/german-english/lernen
| cambalache wrote:
| "Talks about his gut-reaction against narrow-minded
| squares.Take the work to google to check if a simple phrase
| explanation is etymologically correct"
| runevault wrote:
| Art is less "better than I can do" and more "something taken
| from a VERY specific perspective, but still somehow resonates
| with the person experiencing it." Skill in an artform certainly
| makes the depth of that resonance more powerful, but often
| people can surprise themselves if they put in the effort.
|
| Not to say just anyone will be Shakespeare, but much of what
| makes art great is the fact you can't see the process that lead
| them to the end. I've had things that people loved but felt
| "normal" to me because I remember the map of the route I took
| to get there. All they saw was the end result.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I define art as something I can't replicate, even having seen
| it.
|
| High art as something I couldn't have imagined existing until I
| had seen it.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I think you and the grandparent underestimate your own
| abilities. I CAN replicate a lot of art if I were to put some
| effort into it, and I CAN create original art without
| replicating it.
|
| It's just that I don't wanna, and I appreciate other people's
| efforts more than my own, etc.
|
| Art is not about effort -> result, it's an interesting
| combination of factors.
| abathur wrote:
| Right.
|
| My own framing: art isn't an object, it's an experience. I
| call an object _intended_ to trigger art experiences an
| art-object, but people often have art experiences that
| don't involve an art-object.
|
| I think this framing makes it clearer that you could copy
| an art-object that previously gave you an art experience
| with perfect fidelity and not end up with an object that
| gives _you_ an art experience (though it help others have
| an art experience).
| smitty1e wrote:
| My original definition does not preclude _experience_ in
| the slightest.
|
| It's just that really banal poetry/music/writing (looking
| at you, Country/Western) doesn't motivate me once you
| drop below, say Marty Robbins.
| smitty1e wrote:
| I like that bump, thanks.
| munificent wrote:
| _> I define art as something I can 't replicate, even having
| seen it._
|
| I dislike this definition because it conflates mechanical
| skill with meaning. I cannot replicate a Thomas Kinkade
| painting. But I don't care to either, because his work does
| absolutely nothing for me.
|
| _> High art as something I couldn 't have imagined existing
| until I had seen it._
|
| I like this more, but it also sort of conflates novelty with
| insight.
|
| To me, the best art shows me a detailed picture of something
| I have experienced but been unable to perceive clearly. It is
| like someone painted a picture _of my own soul_. Like a light
| has been turned on in some dark corner of my psychology where
| I had been stumbling for years.
| mudita wrote:
| One of the central characteristics of art, is that it is trying
| to break out of boxes. As such it resists any attempt to define
| it and I personally think that's is actually a really good
| example of Wittgenstein's family resemblance
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance).
|
| But, in my opinion, even if a definition could capture what's
| art, it won't be a lazy definition like "Art" is "better than I
| can do". Art cannot be limited like that and there are many
| things people do "better than I can do", which are not art.
|
| Art has a long and complex history of grappling and negotiating
| with the role of skill, perspectives range from equating art
| with skill, over seeing skill as a tool for carrying out a
| vision to a conscious rejection of virtuosity. Even the
| rejection of virtuosity can create great art.
|
| For example in dance, my profession, there are whole fields
| like postmodern dance or non-dance, which reject traditional
| dance skills, and non-dance artists like Jerome Bel create
| amazing, touching art, by authentically showing people failing
| to do "better than I can do".
|
| (Although you could maybe argue that in this case the artistry
| is just shifted to another level, the level of composition and
| ideas instead of the dance itself.)
|
| To see one example of how an artist reflects on the importance
| of skill/virtuosity in art, here's an excerpt from Jonathan
| Burrows "A choregrapher's handbook":
|
| "Virtuosity is just another way to help the audience to care
| what happens next.
|
| Virtuosity raises the stakes to a place where the audience
| knows something may go wrong. They enjoy watching this
| negotiation with disaster. Will the performer fall, or forget
| what they're doing, or will they get through it?
|
| The resulting anticipation, poised on the brink of success or
| failure, suspends time in a moment of in-breath. This slowed-
| down time, in the midst of risk, is as much of a pleasure for
| the performer as for the audience.
|
| However, if everything is virtuosic then there's nothing
| against which to read the virtuosity: it has to be in balance
| with other modes of engagement."
| smitty1e wrote:
| > it won't be a lazy definition like "Art" is "better than I
| can do". Art cannot be limited like that and there are many
| things people do "better than I can do", which are not art.
|
| Sure, "better than I can do" is a going-in position, like my
| default review of anything: "It would have been twice as good
| if it was half as long".
|
| I like the stated concept of virtuosity. But once the artist
| is sufficiently decoupled from the structure of the event by
| their refined genius, are not all 'mistakes' demoted to
| 'variation'?
| tangerine_beet wrote:
| The author suggests that knowing poetry's rules, and the history
| of how poets have broken those rules, can help people "get"
| poetry. I'm skeptical that cerebral understanding alone can help
| much. On the rare occasion that I've "gotten" a poem, it never
| happened through reason. If I tried analyzing while reading it I
| don't think the getting could have happened at all.
|
| As stated I don't get many poems, but I feel that cultivating the
| ability to get them probably has something to do with: 1)
| awareness of your own emotional state in the present moment; it's
| the needed reference point to connect with the poet's state at
| time of writing 2) awareness of your accumulated life experience
| -- it's the material you reference to make sense of the poem 3)
| sensitivity to the sounds & rhythms of words 4) a broad
| perspective on life that includes awareness of its ultimate frame
| -- death; Spanish poet Lorca wrote about a creative force called
| 'duende' that arises from experience of the darker side of life;
| I think such experience may also give rise to a receptiveness to
| and appreciation of the more significant things conveyed in
| poetry and other arts 5) desire and ability to connect content of
| a poem to other things, be they other poems, history, the poet's
| personal history or whatever; poems are not islands, they have
| contexts, and your moment of reading one also has a context
| consisting of your personal intellectual history and current
| mental and emotional state, among other things.
| jfengel wrote:
| Cerebral understanding can help carry you further inside how a
| poem works, and increase your enjoyment of it. It's a lot like
| the scientist who asks in wonder "Why does it do that?"
|
| But you first start with the sense of wonder coming to you
| unaided, and the author makes a mistake in assuming that.
| You're absolute right that you can't think your way into that
| sense of wonder.
|
| There are poems that inspire it, though they vary from person
| to person. And it will change through your life. If you feel
| it, you can be like a scientist, and study it, increasing the
| feeling for yourself without losing that sense of wonder.
|
| It may increase your taste for the more exotic and abstruse,
| but the author makes a mistake that those exotic ones are
| better and more meritorious. The more exotic they are, the more
| personal the appeal will be. It really sucks that some people
| get to be elites and tell you which ones are the good ones --
| and then they get to write the textbooks.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| > First, rob'd in white, the nymph intent adores
|
| > With head uncover'd, the cosmetic pow'rs.
|
| > A heav'nly image in the glass appears,
|
| This example quoted in the article is why I can't stand a lot of
| English poetry. Either be a dutiful slave to the rhythm and come
| up with lines that flow naturally or abandon it with pride, don't
| leave your lines mangled as Procrustes' guests.
| [deleted]
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| Relevant essay on whether "getting it" matters, from Walker
| Percy, in "The Loss of the Creature":
|
| https://rolfpotts.com/walker-percys-loss-creature/
| kibleopard wrote:
| Just my 2 cents: I think a lot of the reason why we feel we need
| to "get" poetry in the first place comes from our education
| system. When poetry is taught in the classroom, it is always done
| so under the guise of there being some hidden meaning that, if
| you are unable to discover, makes reading the poem feel utterly
| useless.
|
| Fast forward to my university and I was taught something
| completely different in a creative writing course -- poetry is
| about play. It isn't about having to inspire some deep meaning.
| Sometimes it can just be fun to mess around with words in a way
| that sounds pleasing. As others have mentioned, there's also this
| notion pushed in our youth that poetry has to have perfect rhyme,
| or follow some scheme; but as soon as you realize that isn't the
| case, combined with the fact you don't have to be searching for
| some obfuscated truth within poems, you start to realize poetry
| has been marketed as something much different than what it really
| is.
|
| That's not to say you can't search for deep meaning in a poem, or
| attempt to write something meaningful into one - but really,
| poetry is about play, and it should be as serious as you want it
| to be. For me, that realization made me "get" poetry more than I
| did back in my high school days.
| jtr1 wrote:
| Your comment reminds me this, by Billy Collins:
| "Introduction to Poetry" I ask them to take a poem
| and hold it up to the light like a color slide
| or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse
| into a poem and watch him probe his way out,
| or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a
| light switch. I want them to waterski across
| the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the
| shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem
| to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.
| They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it
| really means.
| Fern_Blossom wrote:
| I love how you proved the essay's point even better than the
| actual essay, while using a poem.
| pradn wrote:
| You're absolutely right. Poets play with words, sounds, and
| ideas. And extracting the meaning shouldn't be your first aim -
| perhaps it should be enjoying the sound and the cadence and the
| imagery.
|
| Consider the first stanza of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale:
|
| https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nighti...
|
| A few things that you'll probably pick up with no effort at
| all: 1) the puzzlement of what "Lethe" is or what it even means
| 2) the joke of calling your mouth a "drain" 3) the cleverness
| of "being too happy in thine happiness" 4) the way the long
| third sentence keeps going and going, ending in the release of
| singing, just like a bird flies, sits on a branch, and sings
| "with full-throated ease"
|
| At a first read, the poem is delightful to me just because it
| speaks of the happiness of a bird and the unhappiness of being
| human. The musicality is so lovely I want to memorize it, and
| bring it out whenever I see a bird or want to sing like one or
| fly like one.
|
| And then you can read the reams of analysis people have drawn
| from this poem.
| cehrlich wrote:
| This is absolutely correct, and figuring it out is what allowed
| me to start enjoying literature in my 20s, after hating books
| in school and even university due to exactly this style of
| teaching.
| [deleted]
| philwelch wrote:
| > As others have mentioned, there's also this notion pushed in
| our youth that poetry has to have perfect rhyme, or follow some
| scheme....
|
| This is an idea that actually makes more sense in the context
| of poetry as play. Schemes and poetic forms are just rules you
| could play by, and it's usually more fun to play by some set of
| rules.
| flobosg wrote:
| Your post brings to mind Christian Bok's "Ubu Hubbub":
|
| https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/ubu-hubbub-10304
|
| https://twitter.com/christianbok/status/1286894344566267907
|
| Edit: He also likes to play around with lipograms and similar
| constrained writing techniques, check out "Eunoia" if you are
| into that: https://youtu.be/zhQjfr8b9Wg?t=39
| jtr1 wrote:
| I laughed out loud listening to the recording. It's so
| grating! But very fun
| michrassena wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I don't know much about poetry, but it
| seems clear from this example that it's made better by being
| read aloud.
| gorpomon wrote:
| I've been an avid poetry reader for nearly a decade now, I went
| from not understanding why poetry wasn't a big part of people's
| lives to not caring one bit and I think this was a healthy
| evolution.
|
| Most poetry is bad. I have found in my life that the ratio is
| around 1/20. For every 20 poems one will be something you feel
| totally good. Probably a few more will have parts of the poem you
| admire, but lose you elsewhere.
|
| Why are most poems bad? My personal guess is that most people use
| poems to convey sentiments that could best be done via another
| form (probably an essay or Tweet). Rupi Kaur is a fine example--
| her poems have a character of just wanting to say something
| direct, but she ends up draping it in poetic staccato. I don't
| want to dismiss her too much, she's clearly a more successful
| poet than I am or will ever be, but in my opinion her work sort
| of misses the central premise of the form. Often times when I
| read a bad poem, I feel like the author really wanted to write an
| essay.
|
| Poetry should be used to convey something that really can't be
| conveyed by other means. You're intending to tap into "something"
| that other art quite can't. When you find that 1 in 20 poem, it's
| because it has a sense of revelation, newness, spontaneity. It
| tends to trigger that sense of seeing something new. I often say
| "I never thought to organize words that way". John Ashberry's
| poems have a habit of doing that, and I think that's why he gets
| the praise he does. Though give me Adrienne Rich any day.
|
| Ultimately though, as I said above, I don't care if people like
| poetry anymore. Not every artistic pursuit needs to make millions
| or have millions of fans (which, poetry does, but they're
| relatively quiet I guess). I also appreciate that since most
| poets you read are just people who pursued lives of literature,
| they're a bit more accessible and thus a bit more free to
| scrutinize. They're people like you and me, writing for each
| other and not with world dominating aims. Their work doesn't have
| "Weight". You can engage frankly with their poems, and how they
| do them well and how they come up short. The poems become
| friends.
|
| My favorite poet of all time is Michigan based poet Carol Atkins.
| I believe all her books were self published? I think she is about
| at the ratio I describe, most of her work is just ok, but when
| she's sublime, she's truly sublime. It feels as if she wrote art
| just for me. I've carried her big hitter poems with me throughout
| life.
|
| And that's the best thing about poetry versus other art-- it's
| carryable. You get to take it with you everywhere you go, and use
| it as you please. I guess you can open up your phone and google a
| painting, or replicate a sculpture, or hum a tune, but a poem is
| a piece of art you carry completely with you in its full form, as
| long as you remember it. You're meant to ruminate about two roads
| diverging in a wood, at the exact moment you realize you're in a
| diverging road situation. A poem is a life jacket in a way, meant
| to buoy you just when you need it. I'm not quite sure what other
| art can offer that combination of simplicity, profundity and
| carryability.
|
| Finally, let me end with this: read Sharon Olds.
| philips wrote:
| > Finally, let me end with this: read Sharon Olds.
|
| Any recommendation on where to start? She has 15 (!!) published
| works.
| medstrom wrote:
| > My personal guess is that most people use poems to convey
| sentiments that could best be done via another form (probably
| an essay or Tweet).
|
| I'm guilty of this. Why? Because I suck at remembering
| information in the moment, and writing a poem about it makes it
| easier to call forth from memory when I need it.
|
| For example, if prompted right now about who Karl Popper was
| I'd just mumble a sentence and that'd be all my mind can cough
| up. Once I get around to writing some sort of poem about who he
| was and what he did, I'll be able to talk at length whenever it
| comes up around the dinner table.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > I read a bad poem, I feel like the author really wanted to
| write an essay.
|
| I think this is key, poems that are trying to make me feel
| something ... whether a single emotion (simple or complex) or,
| ambitiously, experience the gestalt of being in love for
| decades or standing in a dark, quiet forest ... tend to
| resonate.
|
| Trying to change the mind of reader via reason ... meh.
| gtpedrosa wrote:
| This reminded me of what Audre Lorde said about poetry in the
| documentary "Berlin Years (84-92)": one of the objectives of
| poetry is to change feelings. This made me look at poetry
| differently and slowly grow an appreciation for it.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| I found the article indigestible. Your comment sums up a lot of
| how poetry works for me, and "Poetry should be used to convey
| something that really can't be conveyed by other means" really
| strikes the anvil.
| jeegsy wrote:
| Very well said. Funny enough, reading this comment in addition
| to the main article has greatly helped my understanding of the
| genre. I liked some of the 'pre-modern' stuff while in college
| but I could never get into the 'free-verse', 'spoken word' deal
| we have to day. Just personal preference I guess.
|
| > 'a poem is a piece of art you carry completely with you in
| its full form, as long as you remember it'
|
| I'm no expert but this almost sounds I daresay poetic or at
| least the beginnings of it!
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| It is much easier to get older poetry, e.g. Kipling or Robert
| Service or even Shakespeare than it is to get modern poetry.
| Modern poetry eschews rhyme[0] for various reasons (some good,
| most bad in my opinion) and because it is less structured it is
| hard to know how it is supposed to be read unless you hear a
| recording of it.
|
| I think modern poetry, like many other forms of modern art is too
| clever for its own good and normal people can better appreciate
| works done in older styles.
|
| [0]: Obviously there are exceptions.
| solresol wrote:
| This being HN... where are the poets writing about Silicon
| Valley, about rationalism meetups, about starting one day too
| late for the IPO, about the feeling of finally debugging
| something that's been a recurring problem since before you
| started with the company... ?
| microtherion wrote:
| It's funny you should ask; I've been trying to write (rarely)
| along these lines for a few years now:
|
| https://aereperennius.org/poems/surplus_electronics.pdf
|
| https://aereperennius.org/poems/death_of_a_capacitor.pdf
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| You might have to accept allegorical instead of literal
| association--most often anyway (that's the case in any
| subject).
|
| If you break what you're asking down into lower principles or
| themes, then poets have been writing about that throughout all
| of human history.
|
| If you want to see beauty in the mundane, the raw heart of a
| person experience life as it comes to them, or illustrations of
| a soul battered by the torrent of the world around it, (which
| seems to me like what you've described) then you have an
| immense amount of artwork to draw on, and I'll name three of my
| favourites: Al Purdy, Milton Acorn, David McFadden.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Purdy
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Acorn
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McFadden_(poet)
|
| You will be forced to associate with the writers on those
| themes in manners outside of the superficial aspects of your
| daily life, but that's more or less at the core of all art.
| dabreegster wrote:
| I wrote some of these back in college for a research-focused
| STEM group; not about the tech industry culture, but at least
| some comp sci bits:
|
| https://dabreegster.github.io/poetry/college/overheard_gdc.h...
|
| https://dabreegster.github.io/poetry/college/abstractions.ht...
|
| https://dabreegster.github.io/poetry/college/discrete_event_...
| (after a course in static analysis)
| souldeux wrote:
| I'm just here to make a joke about python dependency
| management.
| cehrlich wrote:
| It's prose, but have you read Thomas Pynchon's "Bleeding Edge"?
| CraneWorm wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/stdout/videos
| kubanczyk wrote:
| https://youtu.be/_2GT2PCUN3Q?t=156 I've
| finally finished, Go to Hacker News and put up a post
| But that shit had zero upvotes Somebody left a comment
| Telling me my home page ain't responsive
|
| Who that?
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > This being HN... where are the poets writing about Silicon
| Valley
|
| See Vikram Seth's 1986 novel in verse _The Golden Gate_ [0],
| which mentions a Silicon Valley in its relatively early years
| and even drops the terms RAM and ROM in the first lines.
|
| Stanislaw Lem wrote a poem about computers within _The
| Cyberiad_. [1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Gate_(Seth_novel)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad
| cwinter wrote:
| Well if there was ever an appropriate time to plug my dark
| fantasy machine learning poem this is it:
| https://clemenswinter.com/2021/03/24/conjuring-a-codecraft-m...
| jfengel wrote:
| Yeesh.
|
| I really don't like the way he privileges "art poetry" over other
| kinds of poetry. Rupi Kaur has every bit as much a claim to being
| a poet as Wallace Stevens does. (And Stevens in particular, of
| all the poets...)
|
| And that drives me nuts, because a lot more people might like
| "art poetry" if he'd stop making people feel bad about not liking
| it.
|
| While I'm not a voracious reader of poetry, I've got even less
| time for "John Ashbery, by general consensus the greatest
| American poet of the late-twentieth century", of whom I've never
| heard. And that sample is not making me rush out to read it.
|
| It's a model of the "Purple prose with line breaks" form of
| modern poetry. It's not just that it doesn't have rhyme or meter,
| but that the line breaks don't add any structure at all except to
| make it look like poetry on the page. And of all the subjects to
| write about, "It's hard to write poetry" is the reason nobody
| wants to read your poems.
|
| Here's how you get poetry: you read the poems you like. You
| listen to the poets you like to listen to, whether that's slam
| poets or rappers or singers or commercial jingles. When those
| start to seem repetitive or simplistic, you go read something
| else, something that is interesting to compare and contrast with
| the stuff you already like.
|
| Exactly the same goes for painting, and wine, and everything else
| that rich people used to like and therefore must be important.
| Now we can all have it, and if you want to share your interests
| in it, stop yucking their yum.
| criddell wrote:
| > Now we can all have it, and if you want to share your
| interests in it, stop yucking their yum.
|
| I don't think the author is talking to the people enjoying what
| he (derisively) called Instapoems. Those people like what they
| like and don't feel bad about it.
|
| The author, on the other hand, laid out 3500 words in a New
| Criterion article to reassure those who aspire to be the type
| of person who enjoys "real" poetry that they are on the right
| path. The readers of this are there for the yucking.
| fovc wrote:
| Completely agree. I've been looking to get into poetry, so
| wanted a daily poem via RSS. The stuff that's available is all
| purple prose which I couldn't stand.
|
| Shameless plug: I wrote my own feed, currently delivering
| Robert Frost daily: https://github.com/felipeochoa/rsspoetry/
| (also a good ocaml learning experience with some notes about it
| for the curious)
| jfengel wrote:
| Oh, and as a Shakespeare actor and director, there are a lot
| more things to say about Hamlet than seem to be dreamt of in
| his philosophy. He appears to be demanding the "To BEEEE... or
| NOT... to beeeee" school of acting. That's not how actors work
| or how actors connect with audiences.
| mbg721 wrote:
| I had a high-school teacher who pointed out that the modern
| RP English accent isn't what Shakespeare would have spoken,
| and had us read aloud in a light (albeit butchered) Southern
| drawl instead. It had the desired startling effect on how I
| perceived the writing.
| zebraflask wrote:
| Just as an aside, I had to laugh a little at your comment re:
| Ashbery. His poetry is notoriously "difficult" even for
| "serious" readers of contemporary poetry, that is, until you
| read enough of it that you start to understand the internal
| logic - then it can be very impressive.
|
| I suppose it depends on your patience for book-length
| hyperconvoluted and hypercontextual poems. I think his best
| material comes from some of the later and longer works - "Flow
| Chart" would be a good starting place.
|
| For Rupi Kaur, it's probably best to think of that material as
| the equivalent of training wheels on a bicycle. At least it
| gets people reading a book that claims to be related to poetry
| in some way, right? You have to remember, her target
| demographic is the middle school to early 20s crowd, and most
| of it was intentionally designed to be easily consumed on
| social media more than for any attempt at literary merit.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| > Exactly the same goes for painting
|
| the casual videos of John Berger's _" Ways of Seeing"_ / _" Art
| of Looking"_ have taught me (an ignorant pleb) more about how
| to "get" art than any opinions from art critics. There is so
| much pretentiousness and gate-keeping in this field it's
| insane. Just enjoy and see what it brings to the surface is all
| there is to it IMO.
|
| [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk&list=PLn6KyJ4PmZ...
| [deleted]
| dagw wrote:
| You do realize that John Berger is an art critic, right?
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| The best introduction to Ashbery is his long (but still
| readable in one sitting) poem _Self-Portrait in a Convex
| Mirror_ , which deals with a subject most of us here can relate
| to: being profoundly moved, stirred up, heartwrenched by a work
| of art - in this case Parmigianino's painting of the same title
| - and unable to stop coming back to it again and again.
|
| Later Ashbery is more hermetic and often downright inane, but
| _Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror_ justly won a trifecta of
| American literary prizes in the year it was published.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| My personal take.
|
| I have also "never gotten poetry" while I go through 52 in 52 and
| sometimes more than that. The part of the problem has been for
| me, early on the idea I had of poetry was "romantic stuff" and as
| a kid, meh.
|
| Fast forward to a few years now, reading Louise penny Armand
| gamache series, poetry turned out to be more than that but I
| still dont know where to start. I want to "get poetry" like
| armand and Ruth but I need a starting point.
|
| Any help?
| goto11 wrote:
| Listen to rap. Poetry and music have always been intertwined,
| and most poetry throughout history is written to be performed,
| not read on paper. A rap verse is much closer to the genre of
| Shakespeare and Homer than any free-verse poetry on paper.
| slibhb wrote:
| I've always liked a few poems but I was never able to get into
| most poetry.
|
| I recently learned that reading it out loud fixes that,
| particularly with modernist poetry. I'm able to naturally find
| the rhythm/meter and suddenly it clicks. So yeah, if you've
| never "gotten" poetry, I'd recommend reading out loud to
| yourself.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Reading out loud? Sure. Having other people read it out loud
| to me?
|
| Hell no.
|
| Especially slam poetry, which is so pretentious and self-
| important when performed live that I'd rather sit in a quiet
| concrete box for the duration.
| cgio wrote:
| To get Poetry Write poetry. If philosophy is the wrong words in
| the right order, poetry is the right words or their blatant
| absence in the wrong. You probably conjure poems and not
| realise it, in the highest and lowest moments of your days
| alike. Learn how to reel them out on paper, then copy them and
| clip their leaves and tend to them to make them pretty in your
| eyes. Submit them, get rejected, go back to read other poems to
| make sure you are better than them and appreciate in awe the
| beauty of your fellow's silent thoughts.
| jlarcombe wrote:
| It's sometimes beneficial to hear it spoken.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9eTF6QNsxA
| easytiger wrote:
| It's tricky. So for me the first poem that i clicked with was
| Gray's _Eligy Written in a Country Churchyard_ [1]
|
| Just enjoy the writing and don't go looking for hidden meanings
| etc.
|
| Now in terms of a different approach, I seriously can't
| recommend this book enough: _The Ode Less Travelled_ , Fry.[2]
|
| It in effect teaches you in a more classical sense how poetry
| is constructed and very much increased my ability to enjoy
| poetry again after a long hiatus.
|
| I would also steer almost completely clear of any modern poetry
| or academic analysis of it. It's mostly boring rubbish.
|
| Also note longer form poems that tell stories are a good way to
| enjoy it.
|
| John Milton's masterpiece, _Paradise Lost_ , for example.[3]
|
| [1] https://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ode_Less_Travelled
|
| [3] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20/20-h/20-h.htm
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| I would most definitely be trying this out today. Thanks.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| If you are into prose told as poetry, as in long stories
| written as poems, Vikram Seth's "The Golden Gate" is a very
| approachable work.
| antiterra wrote:
| I would steer clear of any commentary that modern poetry is
| boring rubbish.
|
| Look for hidden meanings if you feel like it, what you find
| is what you find, regardless of what the author intends or
| how others read it. Or don't.
|
| The Ode Less Travelled is a good entry into appreciating form
| and meter, but Fry, as you, oddly dismisses non-rhyming
| poetry with a clever but unsupported metaphor: tennis without
| a net. No one's perfect, I suppose.
|
| I can think of a great deal of 'modern' poems that I enjoy
| reading, that I get something out of or are at the very
| least, not boring (re: Lara Glenum.)
|
| I think of Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinovic, and how
| he writes about the emerging normalcy of the need to dodge
| sniper fire or get emergency rations from the UN while living
| in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war.
|
| CORPSE
|
| We slowed down at the bridge
|
| to watch some dogs tear a
|
| corpse apart by the river
|
| and then we went on
|
| nothing in me has changed
|
| I heard the crunch of snow under tires
|
| like teeth biting into an apple
|
| and felt the wild desire to laugh
|
| at you
|
| because you call this place hell
|
| and you flee from here convinced
|
| that death outside Sarajevo does not exist
|
| - Semezdin Mehmedinovic trans. Ammiel Alcalay
|
| To those considering writing poetry, I'd suggest: Crossing
| Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer's Vocation by
| William Stafford.
|
| To those who enjoy picking things apart and the technical
| 'why' of poetry, there's John Hollander's "Rhyme's Reason."
| He's not a post-modernist by any means, but much of what he
| writes applies to contemporary poems.
|
| For the record, Paradise Lost is amazing, and I memorized a
| good chunk of it. It's boisterously dramatic to recite, and
| vocalizing its elisions feels like playing grace notes in a
| piano piece.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Like music, or anything else, when you find one you like, read
| more. Find out what the writer(s) you enjoyed liked to read and
| read that, and so on.
|
| I came to love of poetry through music, but also feverous
| reading in high school followed by an unfinished classical
| education. So I started out just doing that first--enjoy
| something and then follow up on it. It resulted in my spending
| every spare period in the library going through the stacks and
| making friends with the librarian who let me access to the
| officially banned books that they kept stashed for special
| sign-outs.
|
| The writers I still read the most of are the ones I came to
| through my own meandering interest. That said, I've been
| introduced to writers and approaches that I never would have
| outside of the halls and impositions of university and I
| appreciate the insight that provided.
|
| So if you're ever invested in the pursuit enough, you'll
| definitely be exposed to art you never knew existed if you take
| a poetry course at a local college or university. Some of it
| will be a drag, and you'll also meet some people with their
| heads jammed deeply up their asses, but don't let that ruin it
| for you--those types are everywhere, just a different flavour.
| If you're lucky you'll find a kindred spirit, either in a
| writer or in a classmate.
|
| Poetry doesn't win you a lot of friends in North American
| culture, but I made one when right after I left high school and
| we still enjoy talking and sharing art to this day.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Good discussion ;) One of my favorite short stories about the
| preeminence of poetry in a young soul is "Class Picture" by
| Tobias Wolff. About a visit by an elder Robert Frost to a boys'
| prep school in the JFK era:
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/01/06/class-picture-...
| andrewla wrote:
| I think a lot of the enthusiasm for poetry has been sapped by the
| availability of music. Poetry, at least in its initial
| incarnations, was a mnemonic for memorizing. Classically, poetry
| was often chanted or sung, but even without that help, it is
| easier to remember then prose. The article talks about the "music
| of poetry" but only in metaphorical terms rather than literal.
|
| Now the advent of recorded music means that all of that has been
| moved to music instead. People used to dream of having a bunch of
| poetry memorized -- if you were stuck on an island you could
| always recite Wordsworth to entertain yourself. Now you'd just
| hum or sing whatever music strikes your fancy instead.
|
| I have personally found myself slightly more able to "get" poetry
| when I force myself to memorize it -- to me that really lets you
| appreciate the lyrical nature of good poetry and the use of
| metaphor and shorthand, which both arose from a necessity of
| fitting some rhythmic or rhyming scheme, but took on a life of
| their own.
| runevault wrote:
| I would agree with the music. Which is unfortunate because
| music doesn't tend to encompass all the different forms that
| poetry possesses, and both have their place. But, on some
| level, they both explore condensed use of metaphor/rhyme/etc to
| create powerful emotional effects in the audience, so they
| share a lot of similarities.
|
| For me, learning to write poetry and explore has been great,
| although funny enough one of the best books to help me with the
| writing of poetry was Writing Better Lyrics by Pattison, as his
| advice helps a great deal with poetry (with the above caveat
| about forms still holding true).
| yellowapple wrote:
| > Which is unfortunate because music doesn't tend to
| encompass all the different forms that poetry possesses
|
| I mean, can't it? Yeah, most music seems to be pretty
| restricted in lyrical form, but it'd be interesting to see
| more freeform lyrical styles.
|
| The closest thing in my mind would be something like jazz
| fusion or progressive rock.
| runevault wrote:
| Can it? Sure. But so far I've never heard of say a Sestina
| being made into a song (at least in modern times). Would
| such forms fit when tied to melody? I have no clue.
| danenania wrote:
| I'd go a bit further and say that song lyrics _are_ poetry in
| its most populist and accessible form. The distinction is
| artificial.
|
| Of course there's a very wide range of quality, but lyrics
| written by the best songwriters are also much better as poetry
| than the vast majority of what gets produced by ivory tower
| poets who consider themselves above all that. The gatekeeping,
| obscurantist mindset that has taken over in contemporary poetry
| is really unfortunate. You won't be taken seriously as a 'real'
| poet unless your work is completely impenetrable to the average
| person.
| philwelch wrote:
| This is particularly true of rap.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > The gatekeeping, obscurantist mindset that has taken over
| in contemporary poetry
|
| North America and the UK are now at least two decades into
| trends like slam poetry being ascendant, i.e. poetry that
| emphasizes being accessible to the public, tackling real-
| world hardships and political struggles, etc. The publishing
| decisions of major poetry presses like Faber & Faber are now
| largely centered around that.
|
| Sure, there are still more hermetic or ivory-tower poets
| around but the heyday of their influence was only up to about
| the 1980s or 1990s. Nowadays they are mainly publishing in
| small-press editions that few people will even see copies of
| (especially due to the death of the bookstore), let alone
| read.
| jancsika wrote:
| A good way in for the common HN reader is to start by considering
| that an obviously true thing could be false. Like, take the
| obviously true statement, "Courtroom judges are simply inept
| programmers who don't understand LISP." Now imagine it were
| false.
|
| From there, wrong warp through all the consequences of that false
| conclusion. E.g., when a story on HN appears about a court
| ruling, don't do the right thing of immediately writing a screed
| from first principles about what the wrong LISP programmer
| _should_ have ruled. Just sit there, looking at your hands,
| imagining them to be the hands of a judge in a far off land who,
| like you, also has hands, but somehow, some way, they are
| _different_ hands than the ones you 're looking at.
|
| After seven years of this you'll begin to smell odors that remind
| you of the impetuousness of youth, and see scenes of lovers
| laughing as you stare longingly at words scrawled into a park
| bench.
|
| Only then is it time to open a book of poetry and begin reading.
|
| There's probably also some good poetry subreddits where you can
| get started.
| codemac wrote:
| Having the imagination to have imagination always takes a
| little imagination. Great read, thank you for writing it.
| yboris wrote:
| I grew up thinking "poetry" was synonymous with "perfect rhyme
| scheme" and was thus disappointed and disliked all poetry that
| didn't have a rhythm. It felt lazy and pretentious. It felt like
| people pointing at a pile of sticks randomly thrown on the ground
| and calling it "carefully arranged artwork" (complete
| miscategorization, and abuse of the word "poetry").
|
| Now that I'm older, I think I overcame my narrow definition of
| poetry, and now just accept that just like in art, there are
| numerous styles, and it's OK not to like many of them. I like
| Poe's raven a lot. I don't get anything out of most poetry. I
| like haikus.
|
| Just like romantic movies, there is nothing to "get" - for some
| people those movies don't do anything. It's not a deficiency.
| snidane wrote:
| I believe poetry was the default way to write texts in ancient
| times because texts were spread by mouth, not by transcribing
| it. There was no printing press and it was costly.
|
| I'm no expert on this by any means, but songs which rhyme seem
| to me to be closer to what was once considered a poetry than
| what we call a poetry nowadays.
|
| Modern poetry looks like that modern art where someone splashes
| a bucket of color on canvas and if you don't understand it,
| you're just a dumbass pleb without artistic feeling.
|
| Modern art is subjective, only few will understand it (which I
| still doubt, it's more like a fraud to confuse the tax man
| about real value). Traditional art was objective as it aimed to
| be appreciated by many.
|
| I still consider poetry to be a rhythmic text, otherwise it is
| just a bucket of words spilled on a paper.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > songs which rhyme seem to me to be closer to what was once
| considered a poetry than what we call a poetry nowadays.
|
| Rhyme is certainly not required for something to be called
| poetry and European languages did without it for centuries,
| including English. For instance, _Beowulf_ , Homer's _Iliad_
| and _Odyssey_ , all the Latin poets, etc. don't have rhyme,
| they are governed by totally different rules.
|
| It is worth quoting here Milton's introduction to _Paradise
| Lost_ where he expresses his opposition to rhyme as a
| newfangled and undesirable fad:
|
| "Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or
| good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of
| a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter;
| grac't indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets,
| carried away by Custom, but much to thir own vexation,
| hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise,
| and for the most part worse then else they would have exprest
| them."
| theodorewiles wrote:
| New Yorker poetry podcast worked for me - great explanation from
| smart poets about what they like about contemporary poems.
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/poetry
| lisper wrote:
| I wrote the following in response to the "imaginary gardens with
| real frogs in them" trope we were forced to learn in high school:
| A poem is a thought that tried In vain, just once, before
| it died To reach the page's Right hand side
|
| I'm note quite that cynical about poetry any more, but those
| words still remain an accurate reflection of my feelings at the
| time.
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