I’m sorry. What were you trying to be convinced of? You said “Ozymandias” doesn’t rhyme. It rhymes. I have no issue with anything else you said, nor do I have any desire to convince you of anything regarding poetry or poets. I am trying observe the thread more than participate in it, since my connection to poetry makes me a very biased person indeed.
I have a question for the poet.
(or anyone really)
Why o why when poetry is read aloud, is it more invoked than spoken?
Did we all do the same drugs at one point? Or were exposed to the same pompous delivery method of this art form?
People lower their voices, assume an air of gravitas and emote away.
It’s obnoxious.
Just a thought.
Now I’m in the mood for some poetry!
jsgoddess --what say you to the anthologies and the collections out there?
Good, bad or indifferent? Do collections of female poets marginalize them in some way or does lumping the Romantics together do them a disservice or is the best way to appreciate them?
These are just examples. Just wondering.
I love to read. I don’t even have a favorite genre; I’ll read anything you put in front of me . . . except for poetry.
The only reason I can come up with is that I just don’t get it. Oh, I know there’s something there, but I just can’t identify with it. It’s sort of like looking at an advanced quantum physics problem that involves using stuff learned in Calculus XXIV picked up at some MIT doctoral course. I can tell there’s something there. I can even say that it looks elegant and pretty. Just don’t ask me to indentify with it or even understand it.
I always wondered if there was any way to make money by writing poetry. I’ve written close to 300 poems but mostly for myself and for people I know because who else would want to read them? But unlike much of the modern poetry out there, my poems are very structured, most of them rhyme, there is always a payoff in the end, and there is very little room for interpretation. If I could, I would write poems for a living. But for the most part I’m not very interested in reading anyone else’s poetry, so I can see why most people have no interest in poetry in general.
You made me laugh. I was asked to do a couple of experimental recordings a number of years ago, testing out a new feature on a poetry website. My reading is a little stilted I think, but I couldn’t manage pompous. The stilted is more from discomfort than anything! I felt like a fool. I was listening to them the other day for another project, and I sound fairly bored. It doesn’t help I have a rather flat voice to start with.
So, I’d say that if you hear people reading in person they probably feel a little silly and they overcompensate. And then someone praises them and then the next time they go a little more over the top.
I think every poet’s worst nightmare is boring people, especially at a reading.
I think any way of collecting is fine. I’m not hung up on any distinction any editor wants to make that she or he thinks is interesting or makes sense. Some people would like to read a host of Romantics together, to better compare. Others would like some LangPos in there to better contrast. I tend to like contrast and extremes if I’m reading a lot at one sitting. Too many similar poems can make me intellectually drowsy, even if the poems are good and distinct. If I’m just reading for pleasure, I’d probably rather have poems that all evoke a specific mood.
True, but that’s certainly not how we appreciate them. Virgil may have jumped up on stage, wiggled his tongue at the empress, and belted out The Aeneid over 1-3-5 on the lyre*. They came to us in a different form.
*Although of course it wouldn’t have rhymed.
Heh, funny you mention that. The Aeneid, of all poems, was meant to be read, not performed. 
There is more of an artificiality reading the lyric poets or the oral epics in one’s bedroom rather than hearing them performed. I have heard substantial parts of the Odyssey performed. I even had to knock off twenty or thirty lines of it, myself. My ancient greek is fine, but I can’t sing for shit. It was a humbling experience.
It does very little for me. Sure, there are great poems. The aforementioned Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The Raven. The Road Not Taken. Stuff like that. The modern stuff just does nothing for me, so why bother?
Oh, and is it just me, or do poems that don’t rhyme reflect a fundamental lack of effort?
I think it’s just you. Poetry in nearly every other language that I can read rhymes very rarely. There are many other ways of imposing structure on a poem aside from rhyme.
I am saddened that some of you had bad experiences with poetry in school. Teachers who arbitrarily decide the meaning of a poem are doing no one any good.
My favorites are Emily Dickinson, Poe, and this poem by Thomas Hardy.
Poetry probably has to be regarded as an archaic art form, losing its apeall as people lose their sesitivity to language. Once a poet such as Milton could understand he may be not only read but heard by a very large general audience, by no means all of them even literate, around firesides and as nightly entertainment. This was for the most part a relished and anticipated escape from the tough day to day of the lives of most people, very few of them elites. So though Milton would understand the complex rhythyms and subtle nuances of his usage would not be analytically understood by the vast majority of his audience, the effect of his artistry would yet be felt and, at an intuitive level, generally understood due to their heightened sensitivity to the language. This sensitivity belongs to the past, I’m afraid-for better and worse-which I think is decisive in modern poetry’s reliance on intellectual puzzles rather than more traditional poetic techniques-we just don’t have ears for them anymore without a lot of onerous immersion. The causes of this decline in sensitivity are many, overwhelming , and irreversible, which is why I think archaic is an apt thought to begin and end my post with.
Crappy Coffeehouse Poetry
by JThunder
Just another afternoon
Sitting in Starbucks
Some guy is reading poetry
And his poetry sucks
Bizarre, disjointed, disconnected
Stream of consciousness rantings
Weird verse constructions
He doesn’t even have any meter and his lines don’t rhyme, for pity’s sake. Hey, fella, buy yourself a friggin’ dictionary!
Ditto what a lot of people have said. But I’d like to add that maybe poetry isn’t as big anymore because of the way it’s taught. Rote memorization and recitation of poems from a very young age used to be big in schools, but became unfashionable in the latter half of the past century. There’s an argument that rote memorization of something with a strict rhyme and meter is valuable and leads to a greater appreciation of poetry, and the language as a whole. I think there’s some validity in that argument. When I was in 9th grade I had to memorize and recite the “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech from “Julius Caesar;” at the time it was just an annoying exercise that I had to suffer through in order to get a good grade. But somehow the thing got lodged in my brain, and I appreciate it far more now. That’s the only piece of verse I’ve ever had to memorize, but I wish I had to memorize more.
I’ve mentioned this before on these boards, but if you want to know what kind of poetry-reading mother-fuckers we used to be, listen to some episodes of the old 1940’s radio quiz show Information, Please. People all over the country would send in questions to a panel of experts, and it was clear from both the questions asked and the ease in which they were answered that these people had been studying their McDuffy readers – and their Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, and Poe. Poetry figured into the questions to a degree unimaginable today. And these were questions sent in by ordinary people – and the panel wasn’t made up of elitist fops either; John Kieran, a Shakespeare expert, was a sports writer by trade.
I wish I knew more poetry than I do. As it is, the best I’ll do is occassionally reading a bit of Kipling, Poe, or Coleridge (“Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is my favorite).
My favorite poem I found written on the wall of a stall in the mem’s room of an auto parts warehouse where I worked in my teens. It went thusly:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Some poems rhyme,
and others don’t.
I like Hardy (in small doses) and I mean no offense, but you have displayed something else “wrong” with poetry today.
What’s with the purple “ink” and flowery shit? It’s so twee–but alot of poetry collections have this type of thing. It detracts greatly from the actual poems. Hardy is describing a painful, wrenching sadness–but look at the purty flowers! What illustrates the ancient Greek page? Cyclamen? :rolleyes:
IMO, the anti-intellectualism that is prevalent plus the whole beatnik thing in the 50’s and 60’s dealt a mortal blow to poetry. Somehow poetry has become the stuff for un-manly men, sentimental ladies and academia.
And that is not poetry at all. It’s sad. I think we DO need poetry of some sort in our lives. It can convey emotions and experience so succinctly.
Again, that’s certainly true, but it’s not how the opems come to us. Where did you get the melody for The Odyssey? It’s almost guaranteed not to be the melody Homer used. It’s nice that someon made up a melody to go with the poem, but that doesn’t mean we understand how they were meant to be understood. What we have, that we can rely on, is words on a page.
The Odyssey is chanted, not sung. There is no melody, per se. The diacritica tell you how to pitch your voice and the vowels give you information about quantity. There is substantial antique commentary on these subjects.
This is all of the information that you need. The rest is up to the performer.
To me the biggest drawback when it comes to modern poetry is that more people with poor writing skills write it and force it upon the world, than people with poor writing skills write in longer formats.
Less people are willing to publish bad writing that is longer than a bad short poem.
And all we have to do is look at the dearth of bad poetry written by gloomy high school students, who unfettered, grow up to continue to write bad poety and get it published and read it aloud in public.
Another dilemma with modern poetry in general is that because it’s typically shorter in format and a quicker read, it’s easier to get sucked into a bad poem before you realize it and by then it’s too late. No eye-wash for bad poetry.
Thanks for the insights, everyone.
If any of the people who say they would be interested in reading some poetry if they could find good stuff want to drop me an email, I can probably help point them toward publications that might be up their alleys, including neoformalism for those who like their poetry in received forms (often rhymed or metered).
Other comments are still welcome in the thread, I just wanted not to bump this after too long.
I read poetry regularly, as in, every couple of months I read a poem. Usually this is because someone in a blog links to it. That’s how I discovered Zbigniew Herbert and John M. Ford.
I like poetry that evokes a mood or makes me think in new ways. Some of my favorite poets are Emily Dickenson, Robert Frost, Rudyard Kipling and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I also seem to be obsessed with sestinas. How do people manage to follow such strict rules and still make their writing interesting?
I don’t read lots poetry because it takes so much effort. I have to read once to catch the poet’s drift, then at least once more to pick up nuances.
I’ve never been able to willingly read epic poetry; the Oddessy and Iliad bored me silly, and I read the whole thing and discussed it with the rest of my class. If I’m going to read a story I like to know what the characters are thinking, not puzzle it out from their speech. I like descriptions of everything, not just Zeus’ symbolic shield or whatever.