most poetry is kind of bad

FinsburyParkCarrots

likepilateihaveadog wrote:

Well said, thumbs up.

To kind of backtrack to something you said before...I'm reading Bukowski's biography...and it mentions quite often his aversion to writing about politics or current events at all - mainly because he didn't have an opinion on Vietnam.
I mean, he hated the hippies and the peaceniks because the thought they were all just lonely and wanted to band together for something, thinking that if they were in power, they'd be just as bad as Johnson.

So, I don't know if you were saying before that touching on "bigger" or global political issues is something that necessary of a good poet...or poems...but I don't see it as necessary - and very hard to pull it off without seeming polemic.

Umm, I think all art will reflect the politics of its moment of production, whether it's in the material form of a church fresco with posh church paints that display the wealth of the patron in society. Something will give away its politics, intentionally or not. I suppose what I mean is, for me a good poem needn't be about an obviously public or political issue, but it could say an enormous amount about class. I was reading a poem by a South African writer called Chris van Wyk. The poem is called Memory and it is about a childhood trauma. It's largely written in childlike language, too. There's an accident in the homeplace. Now, the topic is very personal but on closer reading, we start noticing descriptions of the house that point to poverty, and the conditions of poor whites (a community often overlooked when people talk of South Africa, its history and politics). The poem becomes a very subtle indictment of class inequality and its effects on real people.

FinsburyParkCarrots

writersu wrote:

no, not at all. not all rhyming is corny.

hell, I have rhymed many many times in writing......

it's just when people rhyme and can't come up with a word to complete the thought they are trying to put on paper and so they write a word that makes no sense to the rest of it just to have a word that rhymes

"Moon"/"June"; "Love"/"Above."


How about "Orange"/"Tetrasporange"? There is such a word.

writersu

[quote

The real tragedy is if someone writes poetry, and plays music, without bothering to research and understand the genre they are working in, and their offerings become crude mimicry of perfected styles they've never bothered to look for and their work becomes unremarkable and forgettable as a result.[/quote]


I can feel things being thrown at me after I say this....but,....

I think the real tragedy is when people start to think that poetry is learned. A lot of other writing is learned....and there is a lot to be said for those who write well and make a living off of it.

But the writing that is used in poetry doesn't need to research other poets in its genre or be educated in a formal setting.
All good poetry needs is a true experience that has been put to words and a poet who can use words to accurately portray his/her feelings.

FinsburyParkCarrots

writersu wrote:

I can feel things being thrown at me after I say this....but,....

I think the real tragedy is when people start to think that poetry is learned. A lot of other writing is learned....and there is a lot to be said for those who write well and make a living off of it.

But the writing that is used in poetry doesn't need to research other poets in its genre or be educated in a formal setting.
All good poetry needs is a true experience that has been put to words and a poet who can use words to accurately portray his/her feelings.

Yup. Or as Kavanagh said (in rhyme),

"And I have a feeling
That through the hole in reason's ceiling
We can fly to knowledge
Without ever going to college".

writersu

Girls go to college to get more knowledge
Boys go to Jupiter to get more Stupider

(I did not really say that........)

FinsburyParkCarrots

Your daughter is a poet and a scholar.

writersu

yes, she is. evidently the apple doesn't fall far from the tree....(as they say....) Who are they?? And why are they always saying stuff???(not an original thought but one worth saying from time to time)

likepilateihaveadog

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Umm, I think all art will reflect the politics of its moment of production...

Gotcha.
I guess overt would have been the word to use.

DopeBeastie

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Sorry, Pasta, I cann't buy the different strokes argument here, because when a person engages in a public forum debating matters of aesthetics, and employs evaluative adjectives such as "bad" and "overrated", they need to qualify your assessment criteria, or facilitate discussion, enabling consensus or debate on that criteria. I see no evidence of anything remotely so thought-out, in the original post.

They don't really need to do anything, fins. as evidenced by our dear quagmire's dissinterest in actually having this conversation at all.

lol... so I'll stand

most poetry sucks ass
because it's not good (to me)
OR
it's not about me (imo)
OR
and it wasn't written for me, (that I know of)


lolololololol

FinsburyParkCarrots

PastaNazi wrote:

They don't really need to do anything, fins. as evidenced by our dear quagmire's dissinterest in actually having this conversation at all.

lol... so I'll stand

most poetry sucks ass
because it's not good (to me)
OR
it's not about me (imo)
OR
and it wasn't written for me, (that I know of)


lolololololol

Oh darling Rachey, aka Pasta
There's no earthy alabaster
shinier, more monumental
than your beauty, heaven-sent. All
poesy's nonsense, hardly artsy,
if not offered to Ms Nazi.



Ahem. Can I go now?

catefrances

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

There have been some good "What is poetry" threads on here. There's been debate, and some disagreement, but over all, the quality of the discussion was pretty high.

and this is the question i ask myself quite often. how does one define poetry.

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

There were two Marxist critics called Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, who in 1974 wrote this essay called "On Literature as an Ideological Form." They were far too sophisticated ever to make the vulgar Marxist statement that literature is a direct replication of a dominant ideology. However, they did consider the relationship between aesthetics and ideology. Is dominant taste about what is good and what is bad, dependent on dominant codes of representing the world through language? If people come to agreement about what is bad poetry, are they using an aesthetic viewpoint that is tied up with how The Man wants you to assess what is worthy and commendable? Perhaps what is bad in poetry is that obsession with formalism or "saying something new". After all, the elite usually have the education and linguistic tools to play with language, and impress their posh publisher friends with it.

and what about you fins? do you believe that certain types of poetry, or literature for that matter, reflects a certain ideology? is it possible just by studying the piece of work itself, without any context whatsoever, to determine where the author is coming from. can you make judgements, for want of a better word, about what it is the author is trying to say? or do we trully understand a work, only through full disclosure of its origins? and why do we feel the need to do so?

FinsburyParkCarrots

"is it possible just by studying the piece of work itself, without any context whatsoever, to determine where the author is coming from. can you make judgements, for want of a better word, about what it is the author is trying to say? or do we trully understand a work, only through full disclosure of its origins? and why do we feel the need to do so?"


There was a school of formalist critics who practiced something called Practical Criticism. They'd read poems "blind", knowing nothing about a composition's author, or date. Of course, their own training was grounded in certain aesthetic and ideological judgements about art, poetry and language, so in seeking to find out the universal meanings in poems, they'd miss a lot of nuances of language that might only be appreciated with a bit of historical, cultural and linguistic context.

So I do think you need to read poems in their historical, social and linguistic contexts (ie, in terms of how words were used to represent ideas in their time as opposed to in another period). I do also think some biographical knowledge of the author is useful too. Although, okay, what an author intends to say is only really discernible if it's actually in the text at some level, I do think that by considering the author in his or her society (through letters, essays, anecdotes by others etc.), we can pinpoint some of their assumptions, opinions and ideas, through careful comparison between biography and the poems.

But I must stress, the goal of this sort of criticism, for me, isn't to get inside the writer's head as a way of understanding the text. Language is unstable, and it changes all the time from reader to reader, from one use of a word to the next. The author can never limit the scope of meaning to their intention, because a reader figuratively writes a text in their imaginations, by reading it on its own and in relation to both their society, their experiences and their outside reading. And often the best works of literature are a ground of ideological conflict, where the author's intention, stated in a work, is undercut by contradictory elements.

For example, take the novel "A Passage To India." The authorial narrator seems to be intent on making a liberal imperialist commentary on the pitfalls of miltarised Raj life (especially in the descriptions of the arrest and trial of Aziz). But then the novel contradicts its own intention by creating the Orientalist caricatures of Professor Godbole, and the mysterious Marabar caves. I don't think the aim of studying that novel is to get inside Forster's head when he was writing it, but, rather, to see how his ideological assumptions conflict and reflect contradictory attitudes amongst his class to the question of Empire.

"and what about you fins? do you believe that certain types of poetry, or literature for that matter, reflects a certain ideology?"

I think all literature reflects an ideology, not just in its themes but even in the way it's produced. If it's web poetry, it declares a different readership and mindset to rural, oral poetry. To quote an old philosopher, ideology can be something lived, and material, rather than something abstract, like an airy idea. Ideology can be present in the physical infrastructures of streets, houses, running water, the use of print and virtual literature. It speaks of a certain kind of world view and way of life, whether the content is inentionally critical of this way of living or not.

EvilToasterElf

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

You had me until this part. I'm not certain that literature can, if it is to say anything new, operate strictly within the formal and ideological confines of genre. For example, critics often criticised "Jane Eyre" as an imperfect example of a novel within the realist genre (because of its Gothic elements). Literary critics over more recent years have employed historical data and feminist theory in suggesting that, because male domestic terror was silenced and never articulated in dominant representations of reality, then women writers had to find non realist ways of expressing it.

Writers adapt genres, and often I do wonder whether a scholarly knowledge of the technical conventions of a genre is necessary in the production of art, since society itself operates to perpetuate narratives of history, community, identity, nation, the home, sexual and gender difference: writers have the social stuff, the crux of the material in their everyday lives to use in their art. It is always handy to go to college and learn form too, and to have that extra grasp of the materials.

But whereas I think, not without admitted arrogance, that one needs to be trained academically to be truly judicious, and knowledgeably theoretical, critic of literature, I think that on the other hand, one doesn't need to go to school at all, to be a great poet. One just needs to live, feel, and use words to subvert dominant ways of seeing self, others, and the big old universe.

All I'm saying is that if you want to write, you have to read. Very simple. If you've never read any poetry, chances are, you aren't writing very good poetry, same with fiction. I'm sure there are exceptions, of extraordinarily good natural writers our there somewhere. Plenty of people listen to depressing music and spew out poetry without ever having cracked open a book of it, and more often than not, they're producing something so rehashed and unremarkable that it's almost unreadable.

FinsburyParkCarrots

EvilToasterElf wrote:

All I'm saying is that if you want to write, you have to read. Very simple. If you've never read any poetry, chances are, you aren't writing very good poetry, same with fiction. I'm sure there are exceptions, of extraordinarily good natural writers our there somewhere. Plenty of people listen to depressing music and spew out poetry without ever having cracked open a book of it, and more often than not, they're producing something so rehashed and unremarkable that it's almost unreadable.

Yes, there are exceptions. They tend to be driven by a comic impulse. In superior forms of tragedy, there's macabre, ironic comedy, and in comedy there's a skilful sense of ironising the tragic predicaments we face as human beings. I think a writer with a natural ear for dialogue and situational writing, who sees the structure of a poem like a funny story or a joke, will have grasped key elements of how composition works: exposition, suspense, anticipation, climax, a twist in the tale or a subtle use of language to make you see the composition from more than one viewpoint. A lot of more self-absorbed poetry lacks this sense of the communal, traditional power of storytelling or sharing human feelings in verse, prose or theatre.

EvilToasterElf

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Yes, there are exceptions. They tend to be driven by a comic impulse. In superior forms of tragedy, there's macabre, ironic comedy, and in comedy there's a skilful sense of ironising the tragic predicaments we face as human beings. I think a writer with a natural ear for dialogue and situational writing, who sees the structure of a poem like a funny story or a joke, will have grasped key elements of how composition works: exposition, suspense, anticipation, climax, a twist in the tale or a subtle use of language to make you see the composition from more than one viewpoint. A lot of more self-absorbed poetry lacks this sense of the communal, traditional power of storytelling or sharing human feelings in verse, prose or theatre.

When you stop taking yourself seriously, drop the messiah complex, which is easy to pick up, since you are the god of your own work, you gain an amazing degree of freedom as a writer...or comic writer

FinsburyParkCarrots

EvilToasterElf wrote:

When you stop taking yourself seriously, drop the messiah complex, which is easy to pick up, since you are the god of your own work, you gain an amazing degree of freedom as a writer...or comic writer

I wonder if the evolution of print-capitalism and copyright has been the material basis, for writers thinking they're messiahs. Literature was much more of a social product, before then. It still is, really, with literary editors, publishers and readers involved in part-ownership of "meaning,"

FinsburyParkCarrots

Which begs the question: is internet poetry anywhere near interactive enough?

EvilToasterElf

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Which begs the question: is internet poetry anywhere near interactive enough?

Has it ever really been about the poetry here? Or about fulfilling the need of getting someone, anyone to read it and "comment." It seems like it's always been about the relationships you make with the people on the board than anything else. Maybe that's just me though.

FinsburyParkCarrots

EvilToasterElf wrote:

Has it ever really been about the poetry here? Or about fulfilling the need of getting someone, anyone to read it and "comment." It seems like it's always been about the relationships you make with the people on the board than anything else. Maybe that's just me though.

Good question. However, I couldn't question matters of authorial intention, unless they're apparent enough in the text itself.

olderman

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Good question. However, I couldn't question matters of authorial intention, unless they're apparent enough in the text itself.

no doubt that this forum has been a way for me to share my poetry and other writings. i like to play with words and their meanings. however, i have no delusions that anything i have ever writ, spit, split or otherwise shit has any literary value. if some have found my letters ok, i am pleased. if not, i am still pleased.

the best poetry, in my humble opinion, is that which grabs my attention and enables me to empathize with, or to understand, to some exent, the author's emotions, desires, and/or aspirations.

there are many great poems. i have read many good poems on this board.

this is a fun forum and i don't take it too seriously.

i have enjoyed reading this discussion.

thank you