What is poetry?

[Enragé]

poetry doesnt even need the technical shit.

The one thing distinguishing proze from poetry is the length of the verses. In proze you just write full lines, like im doing now.

In poetry
you dont and
write basicly like
I am doing
right now


not to mention the whole bold, not-bold thing is some sort of poetic current in and of its own, which works with different fonts, and lay out etc to bring accross a certain emotion. Just cant remember the name of it :P

:)

anyway i like it ^^

[R_P_A_S]

Originally posted by [email protected] 05, 2007 07:38 pm
poetry doesnt even need the technical shit.

The one thing distinguishing proze from poetry is the length of the verses. In proze you just write full lines, like im doing now.

In poetry
you dont and
write basicly like
I am doing
right now


not to mention the whole bold, not-bold thing is some sort of poetic current in and of its own, which works with different fonts, and lay out etc to bring accross a certain emotion. Just cant remember the name of it :P

:)

anyway i like it ^^
well fuck.. hahah is not a poem then. is just scribble!! there you go!

[Hate Is Art]

NKOS, you clearly don't have a fucking clue, because you can't even spell Prose. Poetry is based around, at it's basest element, patterns of ryhme, rythm and stanza. Things like Iambs, Trochees, the way the beat work that makes us enjoy poetry due to our expectation of this beat and the way a poet uses the beat to subvert our expectations.

How about a poem which uses long prose like lines? For example TS Eliot's Hysteria, are you saying this isn't a poem.

The way explained what poetry 'is' shows a complete lack of knowledge. Go back to school or something.

And RPAS, with a bit of work, that could be a really good poem, count the sylables in the lines, try and work out the beats of stressed and unstressed in the lines, try to work around that. The sloganing element, once removed of the cliches has some very good lines in it.


You can only run across the globe
Seeking your free trade exploitations
But hear the roar of the people, the workers and the poor.

Those are 3 very good lines, with a bit of work on the rest it, it'd become a good poem.

Don't think I'm being a dick, you just asked for honest criticism, so I tryed to offer it.

[black magick hustla]

Originally posted by Digital [email protected] 05, 2007 07:57 pm
NKOS, you clearly don't have a fucking clue, because you can't even spell Prose. Poetry is based around, at it's basest element, patterns of ryhme, rythm and stanza. Things like Iambs, Trochees, the way the beat work that makes us enjoy poetry due to our expectation of this beat and the way a poet uses the beat to subvert our expectations.

How about a poem which uses long prose like lines? For example TS Eliot's Hysteria, are you saying this isn't a poem.

The way explained what poetry 'is' shows a complete lack of knowledge. Go back to school or something.

And RPAS, with a bit of work, that could be a really good poem, count the sylables in the lines, try and work out the beats of stressed and unstressed in the lines, try to work around that. The sloganing element, once removed of the cliches has some very good lines in it.


You can only run across the globe
Seeking your free trade exploitations
But hear the roar of the people, the workers and the poor.

Those are 3 very good lines, with a bit of work on the rest it, it'd become a good poem.

Don't think I'm being a dick, you just asked for honest criticism, so I tryed to offer it.
no.

poetry doesnt needs to have "rythm" nor "beat"---have you been under a rock for the last one hundred years?

the only thing that makes poetry poetry is that it is written in verse.

arrogant fuck.

[Qwerty Dvorak]

I can't really honestly say I like it as a poem for the same reasons expressed by Digital Nirvana, but I most certainly agree with what you have to say!!

[Hate Is Art]

And what is verse? pray tell?

Writing arranged with metrical rhythm.

[Hate Is Art]

And what is verse? pray tell?

Writing arranged with metrical rhythm.

[BurnTheOliveTree]

Poetry is not just text with line breaks. It's you that's arrogant to think that you can just manipulate a medium so grotesquely to whatever it is you want it to be.

It can stand by itself of course, but poetry it ain't. :rolleyes:

-Alex

[black magick hustla]

Originally posted by [email protected]uary 07, 2007 09:16 pm
Poetry is not just text with line breaks. It's you that's arrogant to think that you can just manipulate a medium so grotesquely to whatever it is you want it to be.

It can stand by itself of course, but poetry it ain't. :rolleyes:

-Alex
well then again i guess all those avantgarde poems (dadaism) werent really poems!

hm

[Hate Is Art]

Originally posted by [email protected] 12, 2007 11:39 pm
well then again i guess all those avantgarde poems (dadaism) werent really poems!

hm
Of course they were, I'm a big fan of experimental forms of poetry, free verse, dadaist and surrealist poetry, but don't think because they aim to be 'anti-poetry' in the same way that Dadaism saw itself as the 'anti-art' through the destructions of the generic convetions which surround poetry they have created their own set of sub-generic convetions of the avant garde.

For example, e.e. cummings' poem 'the grasshopper':

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo) k
upnowgath
PPEGORHASS
eringint (o-
aThe) :l
eA
!p:
S a
(r
rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea (be) rran (com) gi (e) ngly
,grasshopper;

Nonsense? no. It is a finely crafted build up until the fine line of grasshopper which creates the full imagery of what the poem is trying to create. The form is never chosen arbitrarily, it always serves a purpose.

[BurnTheOliveTree]

It shouldn't call itself a poem. It blurs the lines of a medium so far as to become meaningless.

-Alex

[Hate Is Art]

Grasshopper isn't a poem?

[BurnTheOliveTree]

Grasshopper isn't a poem?

It certainly shouldn't be considered one.

It's pretty terrible anyway, to be fair. I don't know why you'd defend it. Why are you any richer for the experience of reading barely sensical shit, culminating in the word Grasshopper? It's not saying anything about anything, it's just idle fuckwittage with the letters of Grasshopper.

-Alex

[Hate Is Art]

Can you tell me why it isn't a poem?

[BurnTheOliveTree]

A. It's nonsensical. You'll probably disagree. The language of it is basically random.
B. It lacks any kind of structure, barring line breaks.
C. It has no rhythm or rhyme. A good poem at least should have rhythm.
D. It makes no point about anything, it's just wordplay with a word. There's no substance in it whatsoever.

-Alex

[Hate Is Art]

Read this about the grasshopper


The first, the famous grasshopper poem, visually and verbally scrambles the letters of the grasshopper's name in three different ways, turning a common insect into three exotic beasts. [end p. 111]

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
PPEGORHRASS
eringint(o-
aThe):l
eA
!p:
S a
(r
rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;

The first scrambled beast, the "rpophessagr," is in lower case with each letter separated by a hyphen. The second, a "PPEGORHRASS," is all in caps with no intervening punctuation. The third specimen, a ".gRrEaPsPhOs)" (grreaps-phos), begins with a period and thereafter alternates lower case with capital letters. In this third version, a mostly reversed, mostly upper-case "hOPPER" sticks out of the lower-case "grashs." The most obvious function of these rearrangements is signaled by the (not rearranged but estranged) text of the poem, which minus the three exotic beasts, reads, "who as we look up now gathering into a The leA!p:S arrIvIng to rearrangingly become ,grasshopper;". (Just like a grasshopper to split an infinitive.) The seemingly arbitrary use of spacing, capitalization, and punctuation shows, or better, re-enacts the seemingly arbitrary leap(s) of grasshopper. Far from using the pathetic fallacy, Cummings instead attempts to present the life-essence of "grasshopper" though a formal visual and verbal patterning of words and letters. Or perhaps he takes the pathetic fallacy to an extreme: instead of humanizing the grasshopper by writing something like "the grasshopper's erratic, willful, athletic leap," Cummings presents the otherness of the insect by deforming that most distinctive human invention, language.

We can see how arbitrary and yet how constructed and patterned this poem is if we look at the corrected proof sheets of the poem that Cummings sent to his Brazilian translator, Augusto de Campos (figure 1). At the top of the proof sheet Cummings notes that "this poem has a righthand margin as well as a left," but the system of elaborate spatial alignments exists only to be broken: the "S" of "leA!p:S" and the "a" of "arrIvIng" lie outside the left and right margins, respectively. The end of the grasshopper's leap and the beginning of its arrival cannot be contained within the formal boundaries of the poem. All the orthographic, syntactic, and visual rearrangements of the poem show the inability of arbitrary language to capture the essence and presence of a being.

http://www.gvsu.edu/english/cummings/issue9/decamp1.jpg

[BurnTheOliveTree]

All four points I made about it still stand, as far as I can see. I'm not quite sure why you'd put that in there. So I'd see that that it's called a poem by more than you and the author? I was arguing that it shouldn't be called one, not that it isn't called one. People have a tendency to call all manner of crap poetry, and it sucks.

-Alex

[Hate Is Art]

What? Did you read the thing I posted, it explains all the points you addressed.

A. It's nonsensical. You'll probably disagree. The language of it is basically random.

"The most obvious function of these rearrangements is signaled by the (not rearranged but estranged) text of the poem, which minus the three exotic beasts, reads, "who as we look up now gathering into a The leA!p:S arrIvIng to rearrangingly become ,grasshopper;"."

The language is anything but random.

B. It lacks any kind of structure, barring line breaks.

Again see above. And this "The seemingly arbitrary use of spacing, capitalization, and punctuation shows, or better, re-enacts the seemingly arbitrary leap(s) of grasshopper. Far from using the pathetic fallacy, Cummings instead attempts to present the life-essence of "grasshopper" though a formal visual and verbal patterning of words and letters."

C. It has no rhythm or rhyme. A good poem at least should have rhythm.

The rhythm comes from how you interpret the way cummings uses language, the jumps and leaps of the grasshopper.

D. It makes no point about anything, it's just wordplay with a word. There's no substance in it whatsoever.

"Cummings instead attempts to present the life-essence of "grasshopper" though a formal visual and verbal patterning of words and letters. Or perhaps he takes the pathetic fallacy to an extreme: instead of humanizing the grasshopper by writing something like "the grasshopper's erratic, willful, athletic leap," Cummings presents the otherness of the insect by deforming that most distinctive human invention, language."

[RedAnarchist]

No offence, but this is going off-topic. Maybe continue this argument in a new thread?

[RedAnarchist]

There are far too many forms of poetry for there to be a definition of what poetry actually is. I would say that it is up to the individual and their perceptions of someone's writing.

[The Grey Blur]

Poetry is anything that moves me.

[Marsella]

Poetry is anything that moves me.

What? Like a truck? ;)