/lit/ - Literature

>>12606001
Arrhythmia

in 1962, my grandparents left China.
they stood together on the bow of a ship and
watched the only shores they'd ever known
melt into darkness,
owning nothing but each other and
the clothes on their backs—

no, i'm sorry.
this story is a lie.

i mean, at least it might be.
i mean that i've
never asked how they got here,
or what it was like in those early days
raising three boys and a girl
in a shoebox house in a broken-glass city
in a country whose valleys were still haunted
by the driving of railways spikes,
one-two one-two for miles on end.

when i started school,
i stopped speaking Chinese.
i still know a little these days,
can manage phrases like
doh je
and
ho bao
that fall from my mouth
and shatter on the dinner table
while everyone pretends
not to notice.
i smile as i pick the shards out of my food,
hide them under a napkin,
breathe a sigh of relief
when the waiter takes my shame away.

sometimes i wonder if my children
will do the same—

i wonder if my popo feels each
stilted conversation like a
brick through a Chinatown window, like
a slur hurled from a moving car, like
one-two one-two for years,
for a lifetime, maybe

i miss hearing her call me
by my Chinese name.
Natalie, she says,
each syllable so carefully deliberate
as she passes me dishes piled high
with chow mein, hand-stuffed dumplings,
the best of intentions,
and i smile like always,
shake my head,
thank you
i'm full

here is a true story:
i was born in 1996
in a mid-sized house in a mid-sized city
in a country that proclaims diversity,
acceptance, yes i am from here,
yes i mean here, i mean how do you grieve
something you never really loved to begin with,
i mean my grandmother calls me Natalie now,
i mean i stopped speaking Chinese
when i started school so

all i know about China is my popo's hands
the distant echo of her pulse,
one-two like shattering, rebuilding,
like turning foreign soil
into survival, into homemade apple turnovers
and summer afternoons
in the back garden—

because of you, popo,
i have never gone hungry.
thank you for what you have given.
look at all you have made.

ho bao, popo,
ho bao.
doh je.

>>12606001
>>12606005
Keep in mind that the sponsorship was given out by a left-wing media corporation looking for words like "powerful" and "social justice" to headline in their latest story. The poem itself is just a sob story of a girl getting bullied because of her race.

>>12606012
That doesn't mean it's a bad poem though. Why don't you critisise it as poetry, explain why it's bad, instead of playing identity politics

>>12606005
>>12606012
I enjoyed it. Not a great poem but 1000x better than Rupi Kaur. You answered your own question though.

>>12606005
this was a really good poem, I loved the use of repetition

>>12606005
>in 1962, my grandparents left China.
Right here is the exact moment when I knew that 1) the poem would be shit 2) the poem would win grandiose prizes

>>12606001
move over

Daddy
BY SYLVIA PLATH
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

>>12606005
Boring unoriginal narcissist narrative poetry strikes again. America haunted in its ennui by ethnogosts. Finely written though.

>>12606046
>>12606049
>>12606054
Stop being retarded and think for one second. It is a bad poem because it is topical to the current age. Poetry is supposed to be insightful not merely pathological. This girl literally talks about why she stopped speaking Chinese because 1st graders her age were being "wacist" :(.

>>12606005
>Wade-Giles

>>12606077
The poem didn't mention bullying how the fuck can you not analyze a poem this simple

>>12606005
>Boo-hoo Chinese nationals haven't full bought out Vancouver yet

>>12606001

>Be a master poet
>Ignore by all because my age and ethic background is unfashionable

Will I find an audience in the centuries to come? Will my words weather the waves of temporal erosion?

>>12606001
m8 it's how poets build careers so they can continue to develop as a poet. she's like 20-something m8 chill out its a grant not the nobel prize

>>12606081
Nevermind, this is clearly Cantonese

>>12606087
Yes it did. You are supposed to infer that you dunce.
>When I started school, I stopped speaking Chinese
Why would a girl stop speaking a second language - especially if she loves communicating it with her family - if she's gonna get bullied for it? Her family obviously immigrated to Canada (some more SJW brownie points) and taught her Chinese but no, she didn't want to learn it anymore. Because little kids don't know any better and will call you a freak.

>>12606077
>Poetry is supposed to be insightful not merely pathological.

what edition of 12 rules for poetry are u reading from

>>12606096
It's called corruption and it's also called money is power and it's also called headline of the day.

>>12606093
Doubtful. Almost no one reads poetry

>>12606101
>Why would a girl stop speaking a second language

Hahahah you fucked up, you were too busy criticising what you assumed was the reason it won. Delete your post and end your life

>>12606105
and also how the country keeps poetry alive. if u dont like it write a better poem and post it here

>>12606112
Mediocrity is how poetry is kept alive? And the people of Canada should reward that?

>>12606119
do u propose poetry be kept alive by just not rewarding anyone for writing poetry? or just they cancel the award for the year if the crop isn't good enough? it's 4k bro

it's cbc and it's some shit about immigrants, of course theyre gonna give it an award

>>12606005
I know "doh je" means thank you, "popo" means grandmother. What does "ho bao" mean? Is it "a very full stomach"?

>>12606001
>>12606005
Really not that bad. I liked it enough.
Do you actually think this is bad poetry or are you just upset about the progressive liberal sjw boogeyman because its written by a minority?

>>12606001
Canadians need to leave this site.

>>12606153
Of course you do because you're a liberal. Funny how you have shit taste and also vote 'D', funny how that works out.

>>12606159
>You must be a liberal because you don't think some gook winning an award for a decent poem spells the end of poetry and possibly western culture as a whole
Why the fuck do you care anon? What do you really think this award means? What does this signify to you?

>>12606153
For one, it's thoroughly mediocre in style.

>i mean
>like
>maybe

Are we fucking simpletons now? Poetry is supposed to be concentrated, heightened linguistic expression, not a smattering of run-of-the-mill thoughts.

Moreover, it's the same old post-colonial drivel. If it's not Lim, it's Thien; if it's not Ping, it's Ding. We get it -- you aren't from here. Just shut the fuck up about it and write about something else.

>>12606129
much better to be little-read and a genuine attempt at art than "kept alive" and nothing more than a political screed

>>12606005
Doesn't even rhyme

>>12606001

wtf lol

>>12606189
>people shouldn't speak in the vernacular because it doesn't sound as cool as le epic ye Olde English
>People shouldn't write about their own experiences and problems because I don't think they're as interesting as the experiences and problems of others
You're a moron

>>12606005
>ho bao, popo,
>ho bao.
>doh je.
Powerful. This should be forced into the eyeballs and ears of all white children

>>12606001
Write something better, use an exotic pseudonym if you must.
It doesnt feel like poetry though

>>12606215
We're not speaking here, you fucking numbskull. Keep your vernacular to dialogue and comedic pieces.

I never said people couldn't write about their problems. The issue here is that because the market has become so flooded with the same sob stories, they all blend together.

>>12606222
I've been published nearly two dozen times in the past year, anon. Believe me -- I'm doing all that I can to counter this nonsense.

>>12606065
This is actually good, though. Why do we hate Sylvia Plath again?

>>12606077
Again, you don't explain why it's bad. Is the use of language poor? Are poems about racism automatically bad while poems about nightingales automatically good?

>>12606200
it is more than politics though. like i said, chance for poets to develop. keeps people engaged with poetry as well, so someone can come along and write some 'genuine' art once they see that hey i am able to get some recognition in the poetry world even though i'm chinese, etc. all art is metaphysical as is politics for the time being, it is really hard to separate the two

just because it would be little-read doesn't mean it would be people genuinely attempting it as a serious art by the way. this is real life where little is guaranteed

>>12606226
Well let's see an example anon so we can judge for ourselves

r8 one of the other considerations

Canadian Immigration Services Citizenship Exam
After Lucie Brock-Broido's The American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act

What is the capital of New Brunswick? What is the importance
of Confederation? Who is your favourite prime minister
and why — you may not use a Trudeau. What country
are you from? Is it a safe country? If it is, why
are you here? If it is not, why are you here?
How many gods do you worship? How many arms
would you say, on average, your gods have?
Do you like curry? Pronounce "Calgary."
What is a double-double? List
the components of a Bobby Orr hat-trick.
List the years in which Canada won gold
in hockey. List the ways in which
Louis Riel was a traitor. What colour
are the Prime Ministers socks? Would you describe him
as boyishly charming, or rakishly handsome?
We have no openings for physicists,
would you consider driving a cab?
We have a surfeit of engineers:
are you content to spend your nights
polishing the floors of our grandest
shopping malls? What does
"General Dynamics Land Systems Canada"
mean to you? You are from Yemen?
Have you ever seen snow? Can you handle
the cold? Define hypothermia.
Do you know what a toque is?
Do you know what wind-chill means?
Will your daughters ski
or snowboard? Will your parents
be a burden on the health system? Will
your sons join street gangs?
Who was Lester B. Pearson?
Describe the importance of Canada's commitment
to peace-keeping. You are from Rwanda?
You are from Bosnia? You are from Haiti?
Will you wear the poppy on Remembrance Day?
You are from Syria? Will you wear it.
You are from Afghanistan? Answer the question.
Will you wear the poppy on Remembrance Day?
Will you wear the poppy on Remembrance Day?

>>12606239
As if I would give the other autists on this website work directly connected to my name.

>>12606247
Use an unpublished one

>>12606243
Disgusting.

>>12606224
nah vernacular in poetry is something akin to immediacy of expression and such that follows the same trajectory of other arts. refinement of craft just doesn't get to where art tries to go nowadays, but granted confessional poetry and overly symbolic imagery doesn't either. but this poetry does what it does -- what it doesn't do is represent the state of poetry these days, nor its potential, etc. it's some girl in her early 20s who is just starting her career... it doesn't even represent what she is capable of

>>12606248
Here you go:

Niggas iffy, uh, blicky got the stiffy, uh
Got the blicky, uh, drum it holds fifty, uh

Plz don't steal.

>>12606252
Read more, anon. It most certainly does fit in with everything publishers want from poets these days. We're being funneled into a system bent on producing the same whiny, pathetic faggots you see lining the shelves at Chapters.

>>12606243
the absolute state of poetry in 2019

>>12606005
Mother love me, long time, long time
Sucky sucky fucky fucky
Wonton, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Wonton, Hong Kong, wonton
One time, one time, wonton
Love me long time
Feed on my long schlong
Go back to Hong Kong gong
I'll send you back to Hong Kong
Pair a wonton, wonton, love me long
Mother love me, long time, long time
Sucky sucky fucky fucky
Wonton, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Wonton, Hong Kong, wonton
One time, one time, wonton
Love me long time
Feed on my long schlong
Go back to Hong Kong gong
I'll send you back to Hong Kong
Pair a wonton, wonton, love me long
Mother love me, long time, long time
Sucky sucky fucky fucky
Wonton, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Wonton, Hong Kong, wonton
One time, one time

>>12606224
If we never included the vernacular in poetry it would sound as it did a thousands of years ago you fucking retard. Language changes over time and considering how a huge part of written communication is carried in the form the author took I see literally no problem with it.

Maybe these poems aren't for you. How many sad songs about the same shit will you listen to when you feel sad? Why even feel the need to comment on the material that doesn't relate to you? Why demand that it doesn't exist instead of simply ignoring it like everyone else does for the things that don't relate to them?

>>12606258
nah it doesn't work that way, the system isn't just made of what you don't like to use as an idiosyncratic scapegoat. maybe u should read more, read things you enjoy

>>12606268
>the system isn't just made of what you don't like to use as an idiosyncratic scapegoat

Did you even go to school, anon?

>>12606277
i see u have given up. no worries m8 im gonna get back to watching my videos :)

>>12606278
Come back to this forum after you learn how to write.

>>12606091
This.

>>12606217
kek

I hate my generation. I wish I was born in the late 1850s, so I could grow up with Tennyson, Robert Browning and Longfellow. Back when poetry was actually good.

>>12606321
This but unironically

>>12606321
Yeah everyone wishes you were dead

As time passes, and the new poets grow older, a critical discourse will develop, and we’ll begin to see a canon emerge. Spoken word is proper poetry. But poetry for the mouth has a different instinct than that for the pen; of equal value, but different. We must be judged on the terms of the chosen expression. Those who undermine the form often reveal an elitist, classist bias – as seen in their need to define and own poetry. You cannot own an art

>>12606346
Pure sophistry.

It is hilarious to me that /lit/ leftists, especially ones from literature undergrad programs, will unironically talk about Foucault and how discourse should be thought of in terms of strategy and tactics of the powerful, but nevertheless will give enthusiastic blowjobs to the financial puppets of globalist multiculturalism because it agrees with their social politics.

Good god I cannot wait for academia and the media to be smashed to bits.

>>12606391
>financial puppets of globalist multiculturalism

>>12606391
that really shouldnt surprise you

Hollywood makes glowing movies about marxist socialist revolutionaries, to think they are any sort of threat to the current power structure is fucking ludicrous. the Ivy leagues and the most prestigious press in America constantly suck Marx's dick, you'd have to be a literal fucking child to think it's subversive to wave your hammer and sickle flag at your antifa protest, while the police state arrests people for saying bad things about jews

>>12606001
Bitch, your grandparents emigrated from china and did their best to assimilate like dutiful citizens. They didn't teach you Chinese because that shit is pointless. Respect your elders and embrace the life they made for you.

Because it's the communist broadcasting corporation and the recipient fits the central committee mandate - not a white male.

>>12606217
Outstanding example of English prose.

I remember how leftists used to hate that Plato wrote that all art should have a moral purpose. They called him an authoritarian.
Now that they have cultural hegemony, they rate art by moral purpose (and by the identity of the author).
Meaning that they didn't disagree with "art for moral purposes", they disagreed with "art for Plato's morals".

>>12606243

This poem is decent. It’s true, it’s got good use of language and rhythm and it says a lot. You need to read more poetry if you think this is bad.

>>12606391
Did you know militaries are extremely interested in postmodernist philosophy; Israel famously utilize it to divide and conquer Palestine.

>>12606005
i'm not saying it's good, but it's better than /lit/'s /critique/ threads

>>12606005
"Popo" means butt in German.

>>12606231
> performative confusion

>>12606498
The American military have always been a sponsor of psychoanalysis, It's a core part of their PSYOP. They came up with the lie that "Isis is afraid of girls" to convince the Kurds to throw their women to the wolves.

>>12606511
>still doesn't explain why its a bad poem
Could it be that you don't actually like or understand poetry, and really you just want to complain about multiculturalism?

>>12606519
He already explained why it's bad: it's topical, specific to the present cultural moment, and does not get at anything transcendent. There's nothing else to say.

>>12606005
>they stood together on the bow of a ship and
watched the only shores they'd ever known
melt into darkness,
If they were in the bow, which is the front of the ship, they would have been facing away from the shore

>>12606535
Why are those things bad? Assuming for arguments sake they are true, which they aren't. How are family relations topical? Surely as timeless a theme as there can be

>>12606508
This. It means butt in Russian too.

>>12606005
I'm not of immigrant decent, so i can't relate to this. Disgusting that this non-inclusive shit won.

>>12606321
>1850
>Back when poetry was actually good.
fucking yikes

Actually gifted female poet coming through.

https://www.dispatchespoetrywars.com/poetry/absolute-sea-cecilia-meireles-rio-de-janeiro-1901-1964-translated-chris-daniels/

To those needing an "analysis" : lol

>>12606005

>and shatter on the dinner table
...
>i smile as i pick the shards out of my food,
>hide them under a napkin,
>breathe a sigh of relief
>when the waiter takes my shame away.

This and the later "dishes piled high / with chow mein, hand-stuffed dumplings" seem incongruous, sound like confused imagery to me. She's trying to emphasize her grandmother's hands as the through-line from Chinese heritage to her ("homemade apple turnovers") -- then why the appearance of the waiter? Exactly where is she when she's eating -- at home in their comfortable "mid-sized" house, or in a restaurant?

>sometimes i wonder if my children
>will do the same—

A very important sentiment that isn't repeated / gets left behind.

These kinds of oversights are why one might think this poem isn't that great. I prefer >>12606243 for raising questions about national knowledge in immigration.

Why do I see some poets not bother to use capitalization for shit like "i" huh?

>>12606001
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/16/rise-new-poets

>>12606005
I have been in literary circles, and they are fucking horrible. Honestly.

You have to understand the safe-space LGBT+ non-binary they/she/us crowd to understand where literature is going.

I'm not saying poetry is dead, or literature is dying. i'm saying the guys and gals writing the best poetry today are in the gutter, because no contemporary publishing house will touch them, and they dont give a fuck about instagram/social media clout/fame

>>12606266
Read this out loud to my dog and he pissed on the floor.

Will americans ever recover from confessional poetry?

>>12606076

>America
>CBC is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Not a bad poem. I agree with anon that it’s better than rupi Kaur. Is all the breaking glass language a meta-commentary on the fragility of people these days, both the people who can’t tolerate difference, and the people marked by difference?

>>12606189
Is "maybe" really that bad?
Non Anglo here

>>12606001

It's not a bad poem though. Like it's not great, but there are some nice images and the subject is interesting. Better than giving the prize to some millennial slut writing about how empty her life if shallow sex is

>>12606093
post it nigger

>>12606001
>vagina
>minority
>writes about being vaginic minority

10/10 would patronizingly approve of at a small new york reception over an adequate glass of pinot gris again

>>12606005
wow, the chinese are like n-words except actually smart. a terrifying combination.

>>12606001
they're minorities and women, which is basically like winning the lottery in the west, given you aren't absolutely retarded

At least if is an expression of real feeling (as far as I can tell), which is more than can be said of what the Institution usually acknowledges. And $6000 is not much lol, doesn’t signal that she will be making a career off this stuff by any means. It would be ultimately better if this sort of thing were not called “poetry.”

>>12606001
There is a simple equation in the world of literature in current year that anyone can use to determine the value of a piece of writing: brown woman = good / white man = bad
That should clear things up.

>>12606001
>>12606005
we unironically need the university system to collapse to get rid of (((foreign))) influence of the youth population. Right after we get rid of the media industrial complex.

>>12606046
It's bad because it's directed at the end goal of subverting and ultimately destroying western civilization.

>>12606005
non/lit/ fag here, in child hood almost all good poetry had rhymes and even if they weren't rhyming they had usage of heavy words and critical stories but here on /lit/ not just this poem but a lot of poetry that is mentioned here are weird kind of paragraphs written with big line breaks. what is this? is this specific kind of style or the only poetry i know is children rhymes i used to read a lot of poetry in our language and few english too but none of them sounded like it all had similar styles but poetry posted here is very very different.

>>12607555
The only poetry actually posted on /lit/ is trash used as bait. See; any thread about modern poetry, usually by women like Rupi Kaur or the one in the OP.

>>12607572
yesss i am talking about those, rupi kaur i have heard a lot, reading stuff like that made me curious what actually is poetry because for the longest time i thought pieces with heavy words and rhymes meant to say some big things in small compact and beautiful style were poetry but that certainly isn't the case.

No one actually reads poetry. Pol faggots keep trying to antagonize lit with their insecurities about how da colred peeples is taking da white mans poetry.
But its like, no one gives a shit about poetry, at all.

DFW had a great quote about poetry

"everyone writes it, no one reads it"

Pol keeps trying to ruin lit like they ruined tv and mu, but they are too stupid to into literature

>>12606101
maybe she stopped chinese because she was learning english and surrounded by english at school? not everything has to fit into your stupid worldview where minorities only cry because they get bullied, and only win awards when they cry. please, I'm begging you to neck yourself

>>12606290
you remind me of those sean hannity clips where he used to invite someone on to debate religion n shit, and at the end of the segment he would cut out the guest and say into the camera, with a smug, cock-lipped grin, "there is a god"

>>12607605
>Pol
poorly formulated bait, try harder next time

>>12606001
Thanks Capitalism that allow multiculturalism and victimization get paid

>>12606001
really ugly sentence from you at the end there

>>12607546

HAHAHAHHAHHA

>>12607479
I think niggers would be DESPLAZED by gooks
in ten years we gonna have some kinda HipHop boom alike but with Gook music
we gonna have our first Gook Panther and shit
A Gooky month a Gook Life Matters

>>12607605

this

>>12606101
because no one else at her school spoke Chinese. It's about a shift in culture, not mean six year olds.

Recipe For Prison Pruno, by Jarvis Masters

Take ten peeled oranges,
>Jarvis Masters, it is the judgment and sentence of this court,
one 8 oz. bowl of fruit cocktail,
>that the charged information was true,
squeeze the fruit into a small plastic bag,
>and the jury having previously, on said date,
and put the juice along with the mash inside,
>found that the penalty shall be death,
add 16 oz. of water and seal the bag tightly.
>and this Court having, on August 20, 1991,
Place the bag into your sink,
>denied your motion for a new trial,
and heat it with hot running water for 15 minutes.
>it is the order of this Court that you suffer death,
wrap towels around the bag to keep it warm for fermentation.
>said penalty to be inflicted within the walls of San Quentin,
Stash the bag in your cell undisturbed for 48 hours.
>at which place you shall be put to death,
When the time has elapsed,
>in the manner prescribed by law,
add 40 to 60 cubes of white sugar,
>the date later to be fixed by the Court in warrant of execution.
six teaspoons of ketchup,
>You are remanded to the custody of the warden of San Quentin,
then heat again for 30 minutes,
>to be held by him pending final
secure the bag as done before,
>determination of your appeal.
then stash the bag undisturbed again for 72 hours.
>It is so ordered.
Reheat daily for 15 minutes.
>In witness whereof,
After 72 hours,
>I have hereon set my hand as Judge of this Superior Court,
with a spoon, skim off the mash,
>and I have caused the seal of this Court to be affixed thereto.
pour the remaining portion into two 18 oz. cups.
>May God have mercy on your soul.

>>12607605
>DFW
>"no one reads poetry"

>"everyone is as much of a pleb as me"

>who is bruce lee?

50 years ago the biggest star in hollywood was asian. Your lack of historical awareness is shocking. The asian thing already happened before you were born. They've already assimilated everywhere in american culture except for the shit little nothing cracker town you still live in.

Not sure why people are so buttblasted about this. Yeah, the poem is complete garbage. Who cares? People make much more money writing much worse shit every day. Almost nobody cares about contemporary poetry, and that will be true whether it's spoken word SJW garbage or white dudes ripping off the poets they read in English class.

There's plenty of old, good poetry to read. And if you want to write poetry, you should do it for yourself, not to get published.

>>12606005
here is a true story:
millennial "poets" who don't capitalize things properly
are not e.e. cummings
they're not making a statement about language
it's just that
they only ever write on their phones
and can't be arsed to tap that extra button

>>12608213
I once won a contest for my school by drawing a sausage. They displayed it to my entire school and gave me a medal.
OP's just jealous he never put any hard work and effort into making the bare minimum of a prize-winning piece of "art" so he puts his anger out on kids who actually do.

>>12608473
Lol

>>12606046
Poetry, like all literature, is fundamentally assessed by the strength of its message, and only brainless read “for prose” - everything but the message is a means for delivery of that message. The only message here is “I am special because I am not white”. More than that, it is clumsily and poorly delivered with meandering stories, poor metaphors, and boring prose. But you know this and are only defending this piece of shit because you support its message, idiotic though it is.

>>12608679
>Poetry, like all literature, is fundamentally assessed by the strength of its message, and only brainless read “for prose”
meanwhile, in bizarro /lit/

>>12608679
I don't think you even read the poem anon. Where in it does she imply she's special because she's not white?

>>12608213
Four thousand fuckaroos for mediocrity?

>>12606005
this is pretty fucking bad but it's good that she is trying

>>12606005
rather dull poem desu

>>12608679
>>12608697
prose>message and message>prose are both brainlet positions that fail to recognise the medium is the message. if you say something in another way you're saying something different. they're inseparable.

>>12606148
very full

>>12608808
What type of Chinese is it? I don't recognize anything she says.

post that poem of the guy that killed and raped someone and then he felt alive.

seems like more a short story but what do i know

>>12606001
Why does she capitalize her name and origin and language but not the first person singular or the beginning of sentences? I honestly do like it when poetry departs from common capitalization rules, especially in English, but her use here just doesn't make sense to me. Any tho(ugh)ts?

>>12606005
>i still know a little these days,
>can manage phrases like
>doh je
>and
>ho bao
>that fall from my mouth
>and shatter on the dinner table
>while everyone pretends
>not to notice.
>i smile as i pick the shards out of my food,
>hide them under a napkin,
>breathe a sigh of relief
>when the waiter takes my shame away.
unironically better than anything I've read in the poetry critique threads here. you all need to start larping as an 18th century poet and write something with some impact

>>12608836
stop larping*

>>12608836
posts like these are the signifier for how far this board has fallen

>>12606005
i though that;
poems should rhyme.

>>12608853
the true signifier is the fact we have a whole thread sperging over a poem with criticism that amounts to
>thots bad
>other races bad
>we must defend white people from poems about chinese people

>>12608865
these kinds of brainlet assumptions are why you should always start with the Greeks

>>12606266

>>12608817
Considering she's Canadian probably Cantonese

>>12606005
Laziness on behalf of her parents and herself. My parents were provincial East Euros and they pounded the language into my head until I became obsessed with it. It also helps that they sent me overseas to my grandparents house every summer in the countryside.

Boo hoo I don't have an identity. It's because you never made the attempt.

>>12606965
> i'm saying the guys and gals writing the best poetry today are in the gutter

well who are they then?

>>12608941
>Boo hoo I don't have an identity. It's because you never made the attempt.
yes, she's sad she never made the attempt to stay connected with her heritage. she's not proud of this, it's why she talks about feeling shame speaking chinese in front of her grandmother. is /lit/ genuinely having trouble reading this poem or is this the true power of bias?

>>12606321
what is it with you faggots and the 19th century

I'm past the point of giving a fuck, I just want the system to be torn down and left in shambles. That's why I love shit like this and rupi kaur, let's just go all in and fuck it all up. Praise this hackwork to high heaven and let the debris pile up until it can't bear the weight of it any longer. Do you really think a system where wealthy immigrants who take their boot off the peasant's throat to come to america are seen as "underprivileged outsiders" deserves to exist?

>>12608879
cringe

>>12608969
>underprivileged
nothing in this poem has anything to do with privilege

>>12608991
I wonder why this is promoted and not anything by an Irish immigrant hmmm

>>12609009
>t. never been to Vancouver

>>12608969
who mentioned privilege?

>>12606543

both the entries are decent if not good poems, read the whole thing not just to get mad at any supposed political statement

>>12609071
>both the entries are decent if not good poems
is this bait or are /lit/ posters actually this retarded in 2019?

>>12607555
>weird kind of paragraphs written with big line breaks. what is this?
It's called enjambment. What's your native language?

>>12608889
Have you even SWTG? Half their fucking language rhymes, hoi kaloi oligoi and all that.

>>12609026
I did, brainlet

>>12606189
>Waaah, people shouldn't write about experiences that don't directly relate to my own!

It's time to grow up sweetie.

>>12606093
post some of your stuff then, oh wise and oppressed poet

PEACE! peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,—
He hath awakened from the dream of life;
’T is we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance strike with our spirit’s knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

He lives, he wakes,—’t is Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais. Thou young dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendor, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;
Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan!
Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou air,
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O’er the abandoned earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where’er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

>>12606243
This is actually pretty good

>>12606243
Is this supposed to make the reader question the legitimacy of non-white immigration? Or is it supposed to be a good thing that they won't wear a poppy on remembrance day or speak English

For all the people who lament what SJWs are doing to poetry, I present to you John Ashbery. He is an ivy-league educated white male, and he has been praised by Harold Bloom as the greatest poet of the last half of the 20th century. This is, said Bloom, the "age of Ashbery."

He writes gibberish. That's what he's known for. His poems make no sense. He even admits that he doesn't know what they mean and that he'll put into his poems random things that happen during their writing: phone conversations, overheard dialogue, noises he hearts, etc.

What had you been thinking about
the face studiously bloodied
heaven blotted region
I go on loving you like water but
there is a terrible breath in the way all of this
You were not elected president, yet won the race
All the way through fog and drizzle
When you read it was sincere the coasts
stammered with unintentional villages the
horse strains fatigued I guess . . . the calls . . .
I worry

the water beetle head
why of course reflecting all
then you redid you were breathing
I thought going down to mail this
of the kettle you jabbered as easily in the yard
you come through but
are incomparable the lovely tent
mystery you don’t want surrounded the real
you dance
in the spring there was clouds

>>12607830
>>12607633
>>12606107
wow a /pol/tard being btfo for not understanding something he feels a pathological hatred towards
who would have guessed...

>>12607659
Holy fuck, are you twelve? Go back to /mu/ or wherever the fuck you crawled out from.

>>12608704
The entire point is that she’s experienced a cultural shift to a pluralistic “melting pot” culture, and dislikes the culture that she has not experienced. Ironically an anti-pluralistic statement but supported because she’s attacking the melting pot from a position of non-whiteness.

>>12609721
>He writes gibberish. That's what he's known for. His poems make no sense.
A poem can be more than its sense you clown. The very idea that art is "sense" is what we're pulling back from itt

>>12607279
It's not. He's just a faggot with a stick up his ass who hasn't read poetry after romanticism. He wants poetry to be some grandiose crap about Greek gods or something.

>>12609721
That's a beautiful poem. It might be gibberish, but it certainly is pure language and images.

>>12606189
Seeing you attempting to discuss books rather than digging ditches is, I concede, one point in favor of feudalism.

>>12609721
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who doesn't get Ashbery. Bloom emphasizes that he is a successor to Wallace Stevens, but the difference seems to be that Stevens, as elliptical as he sometimes is, always writes about something. I also do not really hear the verbal music; it doesn't rise to the level of Finnegans Wake, which can please even when you have only the dimmest idea of what a passage might be about.

>>12606153
this bcos young alt-right/conservatives are in denial of the fact that they are just as fucking boring and redundant as libs mayb worse

>>12610454
I didn't get this sort of poetry either at first. I noticed that to understand it you really need to be maximally attentive to the images, to really soak in each line. You can't let your eyes just glaze over it like prose. There is indeed no exact thing that this poem is about, but as the images go by an overall effect arises, something that is implied rather than stated. Imagine it as a filmic work of radical montage and experimentation, such as Vertov's "Man with a Movie Camera". The verbal music here is something that I've seen one poet/critic call "the dance of signifiers".

>>12606001
>be minority
>be one of the main targeted minorities currently due to President(hispanic)
>get most of my poems and stories posted on my campuses newspaper just because of my rare ethnic background even though there's one kid in my art history class that is definitely more talented than me
>Get accepted into a liberal arts graduate school cause of my bullshit poetry
>lmao
I don't even want to be a poet I majored in Journalism

>>12610633
If I were you I'd take the retards in the arts department for all they're worth

>>12606965
We're eagerly awaiting some recommendations

>>12611124
>implying that's how this works
rube detected

>>12611166
>implying that's not how this works
jew detected

>>12610327
you know, it's funny because you say "the only message here is 'i am special for being non-white'" as if that were a bad thing. it's clear you come at the poem with your own biases, and want poetry to be clean / whitewashed so you don't have to think about race at all, because poetry is your safe space from the essjays, right?

>>12606005
Poor form, but I think it's evocative, sublime in some parts but weak in most. I'm not all that contrary, desu.

>>12608853
Keep masturbating to your perceived intellect, friendo, or please refer to reddit.

I enjoyed the poem and i'm racist

stop crying

>>12606012
>The poem itself is just a sob story of a girl getting bullied because of her race.
uh wut??
what did you read that I didn't?
which bit is about bullying?

>>12611693
not that guy, but it's understandable that people might be tired of this over-trodden subject, no?

>>12611843
it's pointless to engage. they're inflexible ideologues who will defend all this phoney tedious mediocrity to the grave.

>>12608473
>they only ever write on their phones
>hating the ability to quickly take notes as inspiration hits
>hating the full benefits of a dictionary, thesaurus and factual library combined
Man, I sure as shit don't write faggy pottery, but I fucking love being able to write on my phone. Moleskins are gay as fuck.

>>12611793
I hope you can outgrow your racism one day and we can grow to love one another.

Sincerely,
Asexual black male

>>12611843
what 'subject'? most people have been getting the subject of the poem wrong, or have been trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. whatever your politics you need to have some sense about you and some reading comprehension before you make claims about a poem

yes it's a mediocre poem but the criticism is also mediocre

>>12609937
i bet you're ugly and smell bad due to keeping bad hygiene

>>12609090
English, what language is enjambment related to?

>>12612307
Your fucking closeted bipolar father. Go fuck yourself, honkie.

>>12606005
It's better than anything anyone on /lit/ has written, that's for sure.

>>12606005
yes
YES

>>12606101
Because no one speaks Chinese in school and so she doesn’t? Have you ever been bilingual before?

>>12606391
>pivoting a thread about how terrible someone’s poem to imagined Marxist behaviour
Someone lost the original arguement hard. Chinese immigration into Canada was a thing way before globalism kicked off

>>12607279
Not really, commonplace phrases is something even Ashbery employs. The poem has its problems but a bunch of autists buttmad no one writes Horatian odes anymore are not best equipped discuss them.

>>12607555
You do realize blankverse exists and that it's a form not exclusive to Elizabethean drama?

>>12611843
But he is obviously not expressing dismay of over-saturation but about aggressive race relations. Even if you really dislike too many poems being about racism, that still shouldn’t undermine the quality nor contents of the poems which almost no one ITT has criticize instead used this poem as leverage to preach about racism.

>>12612451
>many poems being about racism
many poems being about race

>>12612435
>>12612428
>>12612451
>>12612112

The university system has spent the last few decades pumping out critique after critique that takes texts to be contingently embedded in some socio-political or historical events. A large amount of this is built on the hermeneutics of suspicion where surface events aren't what they seem. The award given in the OP is by the notoriously left leaning CBC, and also takes place in a time where events like these aren't just a one-off, but are taking place all over and in places that aren't even politics. This stuff is everywhere now, as much you gaslight that it isn't (or blame "neoliberalism," while simultaneously supporting its social program). So you all sit there crying, "waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah you're only allowed to criticize the poem at the level of poetic technique," rhetorically shifting stasis while saying no one can dare mention the state-sponsored propaganda or the event being part of a larger political shift. Go fuck yourselves. You people are gaslighting pravda-tier faggots, and no one believes your lies anymore.

>>12606005
Had this been in prose it could have said something actually meaningful. It even reads like prose with line breaks inserted. But when it's forced into a form it does not belong to and made to appear more profound and transcendent it just loses all meaning and becomes topical drivel.

>>12606568
i don't get it

>>12612307
>i used to read a lot of poetry in our language and few english too
>in our language
>and ... english too
???

>>12612551
>rhetorically shifting stasis
OP literally began the thread about the quality of poem being bad and that is what is being discussed. If you want to use it to pivot to talk about the politics of the poem then sure, but lets settle the issue of the former before immediately leaping to the latter you disingenuous dumbass

>>12606005
On a technical level, it’s not bad, and honestly better than the clumsy stuff you often see in /lit/ critique threads. She knows how to use rhetoric without making it overdone and pretentiously baroque like a lot of amateurs do.It’s also definitely not Shakespeare. On the level of content, however, as many ITT have pointed out, it continues the general mainstream globalist/multicultural shilling of our elites, which I’m actually not totally against in theory because I’m not a racist, but which I’m against as it’s being practiced because it’s obviously an attempted move towards a homogeneous uncultured NWO slave state/one-world government.

>>12609721
nobody actually likes Ashbery except homosexuals and dumb americans

>>12613134
the quality of the poem is dogshit
>>12613470
nah you see better poems on /lit/ fairly often

pic related. Would like feedback please.

>>12606077
>It is a bad poem because it is topical to the current age

I guess Ezra Pound it a bad poet then. You sound like someone who's so consumed by the idea of literary canon and a hierarchical view of literature that you have never stopped to consider the fact that new work could ever be of any value, or that all classics were new at some point

>>12607101
>Canada
>Not in America

>>12610599
So then it is really more a “music” of images than strictly verbal music (which I tend to think of as having to do with pure sound, and with pleasurable syntactic/rhetorical structures). I guess I can see what you’re saying, but how this forms a coherent (or even incoherent) work of art still escapes me. I also know next to nothing about film, although I assume the connection you’re drawing there is more metaphorical than literal. Is there any particular place in Ashbery’s oeuvre you would recommend “starting with”?

>>12606001
A white person would have won
But it's unfair to niggers who can't write anything good and so they had to let a shitty nigger poem win instead.

>>12613522
>nah you see better poems on /lit/ fairly often
Really? Maybe they’ve gotten better recently but when I used to check them out they were dogshit, with some occasional good poems, admittedly. My major critiques of /lit/ poetry are mostly that they’re either somewhere between:

>overly stilted and baroque imitations of Romantic poetry. These people could learn to alternate simplicity with complexity better, learn how to be effective with few words, and without piling on needless adjectives, adverbs, and archaic diction.
>lazy free-verse, instead of being carefully polished or at least indicative of a very good ear like the master poets who wrote in free verse had, instead just seems like they want to lazily split up pretty sounding prose into different lines

>>12612551
>state-sponsored propaganda
>the notoriously left leaning CBC is trying to guilt Chinese people to go back to China
big if true

>>12613723
yeah I read it and assumed it was discouraging immigration because it involves killing some part of your culture, but somehow almost everyone ITT thinks its pro-immigration? I think the intersection of women and not-white is just too much and /pol9k/ literally don't have the intellectual capabilities to read past those biases. It's not the best poem I've read, but it's certainly not worse than the tripe I see posted in poetry threads

>>12606568
great poem. Better than anything from this century.

>>12608774
That is absolutely not what Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Message means.

>>12606189
Don't mind the brainlets, you are correct

>>12613774
>calling everyone who doesn’t agree with leftist propaganda “/pol9k/“
>missing the fundamental point this badly with your mental acrobatics
Return to Reddit.

>>12613774
the end goal of globohomo propaganda is not a world in which a plurality of cultures coexist peacefully with each other,that's what they want you to think, when really they want a a world inhabited exlusively by neurotic blue haired queers with no literary culture, no religion, and no sense of identity, a raceless, genderless mass of patient-consumers in thrall to the tit of bureaucracy, easy quarry for corporate social engineering. Christianity, being a slave morality cuck religion, stopped being a threat to the machine a long time ago, on the other hand Confucian chinese and devout muslims haven't been completely grounded into bluehaired mush yet.

>>12606005
It feels like she is blaming the country for her lost relationship with her ethnicity. As if it was completely broken by the racism her popo went through. No doubt, it was probably tough for popo, but popo did not lose his connection with the old country. He chose to take what he wanted from it and move to somewhere new. The country was not likely what he expected and I am sure he had to make accommodations, but I fail to see how this relates to her inability to connect with her culture.

You're a twenty-three year old poet who got awarded a major prize for well written work. I am not big on the form, but I thought the imagery was excellent. For the most part, this is not my taste, but I do recognize the talent of the author. Then I wonder why this clearly intelligent individual cannot research into her own cultural history? Why can't she try to learn popo's language? Is it too late for her? She just chalks up this loss as society's fault. Popo had some grievances with society, but she has every opportunity to connect with her ethnicity.

>>12606005
>be postmodern, self-centered kiddo
>invent history
>invent identity
>lash synthetic emotions onto a past that never happened and events that werent as sentimental as i make them out to be
>collect victimhood by feeling oppressed for a history that never happened to a person that i invented in a tragedy thats entirely artificial
>entirely because society told me i should feel bad about it
>irony misses my head by intergalactic scale
I'm done, man.

You know, I got fucked as a kid by other kids, and I don't really ever feeling too torn up about it until I hit my teens and people started telling me I was abused and that I should feel certain ways about it. I went to therapy to learn to cope with the social expectations of having been abused, not with the abuse itself. When do we end the delusion?

>>12606093
joyce made stephen to explain how this works. go reread a portrait and ulysses
>>12606321
you would be one of the groundlings. your hand outstretched as high as you could make it go wouldn't even reach their ankles
>>12606535
>>12612945
what does transcendence describe? serious question. the feeling of divinity? the appreciation of craft? something else? what is contained in that definition of "transcendence"?
>>12614580
I have a very similar experience as this girl. It's really, really hard to learn a language by the time you're old enough to regret not learning it, and you'll never learn it as well as you could. It's painful even after you learn it

Has anyone noticed or read through the finalists for this competition? If you want to deny that there’s some serious identity politics involved in this, just read them.

(M)other by Sanita Fejzić
Canadian Immigration Services Citizenship Exam by Neil Griffin
Phone Sex with a One Time Lover on the West Coast by Julie Mannell
The Autobiography of Water by Bola Opaleke

The first one is about a lesbian mother (kid by anonymous sperm donor) complaining about what some might call some “microaggressions”. The second is an imaginary racist Canadian immigration services exam, being a list of bigoted questions asked of a hypothetical immigrant. The third is a self-pitying lament by a woman (not even pointing this out arbitrarily, the fact that the speaker is a woman is pretty quickly brought up and repeated in the poem) with the inevitable toss-in line of “on the news the police are pulling gay men's bodies
from the bottoms of rich people's flower pots.” The last one is actually alright, better than all the poems so far, including the winner’s, but continues the theme of oppressed minorities by talking about the sorrowful history of Africa. All these poems (except, to some extent, the last one) are tremendously plain, lacking beauty and complexity of language, being written in sloppy, un-imaginative free-verse, with hardly any use of imagery, metaphor, simile, etc.

>>12606005
i've seen shitposts better than this i guess after all shitposting is a real art

>>12607479
>chinese
>smart
there are millions of those chinks ofc there has to be smart one but statically there are far more stupid chinks.

>>12609082
have you read any poetry written in the last ten years? if you compare these to great canoical poets, yeah, it's not transcendent, but these aren't bad by any means

by published in a semi-successful literary magazine standards these are about average

>>12614627
I know this anecdotal, but I did know one white person who learned Chinese in his early twenties. It took him three years and he has a noticeable accent, but he learned the language. I think she can manage.

>>12614530
I'm saying the poem itself doesn't agree with leftist propaganda you fucking illiterate

>>12613674
That guy is lying to you. Every poem I see here is, without fail, bottom of the barrel scum. I have unironically written better poems in my sleep.

t. fully funded mfa

>>12614720
I'll prove you wrong
With this great song

>>12614720
>fully funded mfa
Is this supposed to be impressive?

>>12606005
/pol/ racebaiting aside, no one else just finds it boring? I dont see anything special about it. Its not written particularly well or in an interesting way, and the message is something I feel like ive read 50x over

>>12615063
obviously

>>12611843
We should've forbidden writing love poetry altogether at this point then.

>>12612551
>critique after critique that takes texts to be contingently embedded in some socio-political or historical events
I'm not the biggest fan of historicism and such stuff either, but you cannot act like the decontextualizing approach should or could be the only way of treating literature.

>>12613587
Yeah, the sound is in this case certainly not that important.
>but how this forms a coherent (or even incoherent) work of art still escapes me.
I don't get what you're saying here. How is it not a work of art? It's created deliberately, it's not functional, it's intended to provoke an aesthetic reaction...
>I assume the connection you’re drawing there is more metaphorical than literal
It's quite literal. In my country there was a whole movement, though short-lived, called "the poetic of the music video", where a poem would work like an abstract montage of disconnected moments and scenes. I do recommend you see Vertov's film, because it works in a very similar way to the poem above, though a bit less subtle (which is a plus if you're just trying to get a hang of this style).
I haven't read enough of Ashbery (or English poetry in general) to have any specific recs, but I'm pretty sure a "selected poems" should be useful enough.

>>12606129
Yes, it is better not to give a prize, when every submission is trash

>>12606189
This, as a whitu pigu undergoing an immigrant experience it is tempting to write about, but it is a genre for sad-sacks and self-pitying minorities to exploit. They are pathetic intellectuals, and have little creativity. But that goes for all Chinese really.

>>12606243
Lol the arrogance of the world's trash complaining because a first world nation decides to look out for its people, but hey, it's just another white cuck boy doing it.

>>12615794
what are you even saying?

>>12606012
I thought she was bullied by her parents for assimilating.

>>12615821
It's poetry

Can /lit/ write a piece of poetry that would win this award?

>Orange Man Bad
All the white
people
Worshiping their mammon and gold
Look up to
The orange man
They mock the poor
They chain the black
They rape the women
They pee on queers
Orange man bad.

>>12615926
stop

>>12606049
>Not a great poem but 1000x better than Rupi Kaur
this is true

>>12615940
I wont stop until there is justice in this world. Quit repressing me

>>12606005
It wouldn't be too bad if she didn't include the diversity line. Fun seeing people being uproarious about it though.

>>12610581
Twitter leftism is just sour grapes about failing to achieve lucrative urban core professional employment ("libs") and consequently needing to differentiate themselves from the caricature "white working class alt-right petit bourgeois etc. etc." grouping that they sense the urbanites indifferently lumping them together with. I may only be making $50k/yr and living with my parents but I'm trying to start a UNION at my job and antagonize my dad by loudly playing rap music I don't even really like

>>12606562
underrated

>>12616055
Fuck dude 50k/yr makes you one of the richest people in the world. Especially if you're not supporting a family.

>>12614691
>I know this anecdotal, but I did know one white person who learned Chinese in his early twenties. It took him three years and he has a noticeable accent, but he learned the language. I think she can manage.
I've learned it. It's possible to learn. But it's not the same. There's an irrevocable loss there.

>>12616420
There is of course nothing wrong with making a lot of money, it's just something that bothers the targeted demographic

*not making

>they stood together on the bow of a ship and
>watched the only shores they'd ever known
>melt into darkness,
The bow of a ship is the front part (ie facing away from those shores). Also "melt into darkness" doesn't quite seem appropriate; there will be lights on shore, there's nothing really establishing that they're leaving at night, etc.

>owning nothing but each other
Oddly stilted.

>the clothes on their backs—
Rather stereotypical.

>no, i'm sorry.
>this story is a lie.
I see what she's trying to do here (throw a bit of confusion into the reader by appearing to reject the first stanza), but it doesn't quite work. My initial assumption was that she was going to talk about her faking the story for diversity points. What we got instead was just banal.

>in a country whose valleys were still haunted
>by the driving of railways spikes,
Trying way too hard for grievance points there. Did they end up in California? "a country whose valleys" would be wildly out of scale if she's referring to the entire USA.

>that fall from my mouth
>and shatter on the dinner table
...
>i smile as i pick the shards out of my food,
What are they, Prince Rupert's drops? The words are supposed to be clumsy, not glass baubles.

>hide them under a napkin,
>breathe a sigh of relief
>when the waiter takes my shame away.
Why do you hide shards of glass under a napkin? Shouldn't you wrap them up instead? Wouldn't the waiter end up with a fistful of glass if he tries to gather them all up under the napkin? Unfortunately, she's badly mixed two different sets of actions.

>i wonder if my popo feels each
>stilted conversation like a
>brick through a Chinatown window, like
>a slur hurled from a moving car,
She's wondering whether her grandmother thinks that her speaking bad Cantonese is equivalent to physical and verbal acts of racism against Chinese immigrants.

>and i smile like always,
>shake my head,
>thank you
>i'm full
You've switched to using english for those phrases you previously wrote in Cantonese (that awkwardly fall like glass objects out of your mouth and remind your grandmother of that time racists broke her shopfront window).


> yes i am from here,
>yes i mean here
So she gets offended when a white person doesn't automatically assume that a non-white was born in North America.

>how do you grieve
>something you never really loved to begin with
Except you're not really grieving anything from what I can tell.

>all i know about China is my popo's hands
You've killed off your grandfather without much ceremony.

>one-two like shattering, rebuilding,
You used "shatter" previously to refer to those words falling out of your mouth.

>like turning foreign soil
>into survival, into homemade apple turnovers
Homemade apple turnovers are native to that "foreign soil".

>and summer afternoons
>in the back garden—
These lines seem completely pointless.

>thank you for what you have given.
>look at all you have made.
But you don't know what she's given. It's a meaningless thanks. You're worried that she thinks you not speaking Cantonese properly is as bad as white racism. These lines might have been better adapted to refer to her grandmother offering her food.

>>12616055
That is such a bold and precise statement to make. Do you have a single fact to back that up?

@12616836
@12616843
cinema sins-tier "critique"

>>12606001
>>but who was diversity

if you're a half savage or a full on minority, get your writing / art out there, there's lots of demand.

>>12616932
Stop making fun of that anon, it was the best he could do.

My go-to criticism for this kind of poetry is this:
There is no acknowledgement of the great tradition of English verse. It's just random, and you can almost always rewrite these poems as prose and nothing changes.
The images and metaphors are never continual, they are singular and quick and they contribute very little to the thematic value of the poem.
These poems are Almost always explicitly about the author's experiences and surface level understanding of their related pathos. It's boring and narcissistic. I believe that the role of the poet (and probably every artist) is to extract the general from the specific and share what truth they find that could be communicated to an audience. This poetry is for no one, for nothing but the author.

>>12616836
>>12616843
yikes

>>12617982
you should read more Donne

>>12613134
>OP literally began the thread about the quality of poem being bad and that is what is being discussed.

lulz
the anon you are responding to is right. the op talks about the state of poetry in general, the money given to it, and a link to who gave the prize. so those topics were up for grabs. you are the one being disingenuous here.

>>12606204
underrated review

>>12609064
this hurt me, anon

how did you know who i was?

>>12614620
>I went to therapy to learn to cope with the social expectations of having been abused, not with the abuse itself

Man I feel sorry for people like you. It's weird how society treats victims of abuse. It seems to be less that they care about the people themselves as individuals and more that that want to feel that they are virtuous people for doing the right, socially approved thing, and so they treat you all as basket cases and expect you to be traumatized.

>>12606005
>when i started school,
i stopped speaking Chinese.
i still know a little these days,
can manage phrases like
doh je
and
ho bao
that fall from my mouth
and shatter on the dinner table
while everyone pretends
not to notice.
i smile as i pick the shards out of my food,
hide them under a napkin,
breathe a sigh of relief
when the waiter takes my shame away

I don't get it. Is she ashamed because she uses chinese expression sometime? That's retarded. Or am I missing something?

>>12618533
She's ashamed that she can barely speak the language of her birth that her grandma - who she's obviously dedicating this poem to - called her tongue. Are you dense?

>>12618603
>giving a shit about what an old coot think

Even more pathetic desu

>>12618603
Its not like she's not smart enough to learn. Why is she blaming her country for that? Why does she equate it to a racist smashing her popo's windows? I don't think her grandmother is that upset about it

>>12617982
Best critique. The amount of ego in the poem is astounding

>>12606204
based

>>12609229
Pearls before swine, anon.

>>12619184
she doesn't equate it, she wonders if the loss of her culture hurts her grandmother in the same way racism has. her grandmother might not be upset, it's about the guilt of the authour. she obviously blames herself, not the country -- in fact she actually denies the idea that Canada is a racist country. I would be amazed if you passed high school english

>>12606189
I'm ok with simple language entering poetry, though heightened language should not be forgotten.

>We get it -- you aren't from here. Just shut the fuck up about it and write about something else.

Did you even read the poem? She clearly states that she is not from China, she is and feels Canadian.

Overall it's a nice poem, with a weak finale that kills the mood. Not something worth studying in school.

>>12606001
A descendent of NPCs writes a poem about an NPC experience. Lapped up by other NPCs. And ironically defended here on 4channel

>>12620225
>he actually denies the idea that Canada is a racist country
No she doesn't:

>in a country that proclaims diversity,
>acceptance, yes i am from here,
>yes i mean here

The "yes i am from here, / yes i mean here" bit is a reference to a white person asking her where she's from, and then asking where she's "really" from when she answers "Canada" because it's assumed that she's an immigrant. It's a standard racial microaggression, and also a good reason why if you're white you should never ask a nonwhite where he/she is from because there's a nonzero change you'll be accused of racism.

>>12606508
It means crap in italian

>>12606046
Because the poet is also playing identity politics

>>12606005
>raising three boys and a girl
>in a shoebox house in a broken-glass city
>in a country whose valleys were still haunted
>by the driving of railways spikes,

This is a good poem. And I think the experience of losing a native language so your children can assimilate will resonate with a wide audience.

Jokes aside.. what is the point of writing poetry? I don't hate poetry and I actually write some from time to time but when I am done writing it, I feel like I wasted my time. Its ironic because I play like 8 hours of video games a day and don't feel like I wasted my time.

>>12606005
I got bored halfway through reading this and stopped. It sucks but it's better than Rupi. Poetry is dead and whatever "popularity" so-called poets enjoy now is fueled by social media memery.

>>12622394
Songs I guess

>>12622394
I have a theory that poetry used to serve a role closer to what music does for us today. Music has become much more accessible than it used to be (to listen to). Now music has almost completely supplanted poetry. Poetry has also become less musical in recent years, with "poets" abandoning rhyme and meter.

https://youtu.be/tkSNnR0aZTw

>>12622403
Here is a poem I wrote while in a depressed but determined stupor. Is it ass? I wrote it in maybe 5 minutes.

Beyond Burning Eyes:
"Out there beyond burning eyes lies the answer I seek. Would my will be enough to set my heart free? Crooked spirit and shattered mind, seeking the will to rebind from behind those burning eyes."

When I look at my poems and then look at poems in this thread.. I feel disconnect. I feel like what I write isn't correct which makes no sense.

>>12622394
hurr what is the point of art
>when I am done writing it, I feel like I wasted my time. Its ironic because I play like 8 hours of video games a day and don't feel like I wasted my time.
Your video game addiction and "feeling" that time is wasted are not arguments.

>>12622403
>I have a theory that poetry used to serve a role closer to what music does for us today. Music has become much more accessible than it used to be (to listen to). Now music has almost completely supplanted poetry
This is a truly horrifyingly low level of historical knowledge.

>>12622603

is everyone on /lit/ this fucking snooty/snobby?

>>12622441
You need to learn proper form, meter, and other elements of poetry before you can understand the rest. What you wrote is the equivalent of someone going up to a piano and banging their hands against it until they they music pops out.

>>12622603
Go shove a pineapple up your ass

>>12622614
>>12622639
>but I *feel* that the time is wasted, and don't insult my vidya!!!!
>also here's a pants-on-head retarded theory of the history and purpose of music and poetry, and you're a bad person if you dare to point out how retarded it is
how about you eat shit and die, newfaggots?

>>12622633

Jesus... then what the fuck am I doing!? Writing poetry is ASS. I don't understand form or meter. Like what the fuck even is all that?! Not saying I wouldn't try to have good form or meter but damn.. wouldn't that somehow restrict you?

>>12606005
What's so bad about this? I think it's powerful.

>>12622725
If you want to learn how to write poetry, go through the sticky. Its what i did when I realized I sucked ass at poetry. There are several recommended books that are great for learning. I chose The Ode Less Traveled and it has been excellent in teaching the basic structure of poetry. It answers all your questions in the first chapter.

>>12622639
Go to hell you cunt. Fuck you.

>>12606001
This thread is proof that white people are the whiniest motherfuckers on the planet.

http://www.cosmoetica.com/Sonnets.htm

>>12606001
I know her, we're in the same Uni program!

>>12622926
Good maybe you'll fuck off and decide to leave back to once you came after your balls or ovaries drop. We don't like you talentless sponging asses either and we're better off without you.

>>12622977
Go fuck yourself, cunt.

>>12622986
>am in Africa

Your insipid fucking ancestors decided to come here and they loved us so much they didn't want to leave. Please tell them to FUCK OFF and everything will be fine. We're much happier without you. Christ, stop whining you limp wristed white boy.

Also
>decide to leave back to once you came

You're a stupid honky, aren't you?

>>12622999
70 IQ nigger speaking our language instead of clicks and plops. Catch Ebola, monkey fucker.

>>12623012
You're more likely to speak in plops because your mouth is incessantly spilling with shit.

>>12623012
I'm trilingual motherfucker, your pussy language is just an accessory to my linguistic arsenal. Stupid piece of shit.

>>12623062
Sounds like you're not very proud of your vibrant native language and lip plate culture. Flappy nigger.

>>12623069
>being multilingual means you don't have pride in your native language

Only an idiotic Amerifat honky would think this. Got anything else to add? Your retardation is hilarious.

>>12623088
It's laughable how your kind thinks they are better than westernized blacks while your women shit out 15 kids to feed the vultures. If they make it past that point you force them to work the mines and cut off their hands for your jew masters. Nasty ass african scum.

should i sneak out for another slot of scotch? i might need it.

>>12623112
You should be worrying about your women shitting out hapas and mulattos at an alarming rate. Keep celebrating your low reproductive rates. It's one of the reason white people are going to be extinct soon. Dirty, fat, dumb white boy.

>>12623132
best poem itt

>>12623112
Shut up you dumb ofay. Pale-skinned, long-nosed, small-dicked, god-fearing, fat white cracker bitch.

why can't the author buy 10 private lessons of Cantonese? With maybe $500 or $1000 she should be at least A2 or B1 level

AHEM

>>12620533
or maybe she's literally saying she's not from China, because she no longer feels Chinese, or maybe it's a double entendre, because it's poetry, and not meant to be read at a tenth grade level

>>12606243
that was very inspiring.

if this retard can get published we all can

>>12606012
>just a sob story of a girl getting bullied
Bullied?

>>12606217
>poo poo
>pee pee
>ching chong
>ping pong

>>12606266

>>12606266
>>12606992
>>12608926
>>12624075
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JODQ7FlAaXg

>>12606230
Who hates Sylvia Plath?