/lit/ - Literature

>>14341813
Why are you engaging with moth? The guy is disgraced on the this board. Ignore

>>14339259
I disagree.

>>14337664
WTF is the thing he's doing at 6PM???

>>14337366
Based

>>14338312
>comes to the board asking for advice, only to write off every bit of advice given, ‘im already a done deal’ he says - and so it is

That's not true. There's lots of great advice and criticism I've received that I will take to heart. Just because I've subjectively disagreed with some of it doesn't mean I'm 'writing every bit of advice off'

>is this really what writing is about, style?
that's a huge part of it, yeah

>you’ve never even hinted at a theme you are interested in, except your own progression as an artist

Also not true. I'm interested in a wide array of various themes. Lots of things interest me and I don't want to be pinned down to just a few topics or themes. I'd like to be able to tackle several different themes and genres and topics and ideas. But I've already mentioned a handful I've approached here:
>>14334307
> Some are about nature, some are about the city, some are about love, some are about loss, some are about animals, some are about people, some are autobiographical, some are fantastical, some are about art, some are science, etc.

In particular, I'd like to write about day in the life stuff, stuff about my local town, and Bob Dylan/Kinks type stuff, weaving literary references with topical issues with politics with history with intimate moments with narrative with nature with love with pain, the whole shabang. It'd like to challenge myself to write about anything and everything. A flag, a dog, the French Revolution, french fries, birds flying south for the winter, general relativity, a bicycle, the Fall of Constantinople, a truck, the Battle of Troy, vampires, the Jazz Age, a cup of coffee, anything.

By the way, I actually didn't open the thread asking about advice on how to improve my writing, but how to take my already completed manuscript and find a literary agent or press who can turn it into a published reality, although I also appreciate the advice on improving my craft.

>>14338144
lol, then I shudder to think what you would rate the hottest selling young poets out right now. In the decimals?

>>14338144
lol, then I shutter to think what you would rate the hottest selling young poets out right now. In the decimals?

>>14338019
>you embody everything that has gone wrong with art forms in the last several decades.

Because I have a respect for past culture and history and technique and mastery and I want to bring glory and dignity back to poetry by doing my little part through mastering rhyme and meter and theme and diction and feeling and take it away from the shitbird clowns who have turned it into a joke, as a form of self-absorbed venting? I'M the problem?
>200 years they’ll discover you

I'm just kidding around. I'm not saying I'll be fucking van Gogh, just the it might be seen as decent within enough time, but probably not.

>it just reeks of “artist as an image”

definitely not. Notice that none of my poetry goes into my personal life beyond my position as a writer. I do have autobiographical poems but, even then, they speak on universal themes and concepts and aren't attached to only my personal psyche and experience.
>what I mean by this is you see being a poet as a quality.

No, I see being a good poet or better as a quality.
>One you possess as surely as your eye colour or your food preferences. It’s a trait I often ever see in people from families that coddle their kids a lot, you just strike me as having the spirit of a real estate agent.

I don't fit any of this bullshit.
>I don’t think you perceive art as an immanent plane, I don’t believe you even LIKE any poets

I absolutely do. I don't just like them, I love my favorite poets. They open portals to transcendence that few other artists can achieve. Through being exposed to these writers, I have felt my life enriched and improved and I owe a debt of gratitude and my own workings to these masters. I feel a certain connection and wavelength that is indescribable and that I so rarely feel with most other pieces of media, let alone other people. I feel like my soul is being understood and returning home when I read the best poetic works.
>but throughout this whole thread your entire attitude has been like a kid trying to get better grades on his essays.

You misunderstand me, sir.
>has been consumed by passion for the greats.

It is because of my such passion that I wish to bring poetry back to the caliber that it used to hold, out of the hands of these degenerate philistines around me.
>Good artists treat art like a religion

That's exactly how I feel.
>Oh yeah I don’t want to read too much poetry

I meant more contemporary stuff from the past 30 or 40 years vs. the hundreds of years of work before it.
>but it’ll be due to your borderline sociopathic disposition towards criticism and self assertion.

I suppose a little sociopathy is healthy for the artist's vision, but I don't believe I'm that far out.
>>14338050
If you honestly think the work is worth 2/5, then go right ahead, but don't do it just because you're salty and want to bring me down out of malice.

>>14337903
>That's an extremely low bar, just like all the other goals you've set for yourself.
Well, I'm trying to set myself realistic goals to start. Like I said, getting this first book published period and selling 5,000 copies of it. Any future fame or accolades or money or whatever will come in time with each new book and as I refine my craft.

>I don't expect to see your work published anytime soon, if ever.
Well, I ain't gonna stop pushing until it happens. If still after a year or two I hear nothing, I'll resort to self-publishing.
>What's really going to kill you is your unearned and layman-ish overconfidence
What's wrong with confidence? It's just enough to keep me going and to reinforce me to keep studying, keep reading, keep improving, and keep writing better poetry. i don't see why that's a bad thing.
>you don't seem very well-read
I supposed not as much as I could be or should be, fair enough.
>but rather pseudish, and your lexicon and prosody are shallow.
I don't think that's fair to assess after only 5 poems out of the 66, but whatever.
>Good luck
Thanks.

>>14337930
>how would you know that your writing style is "unique"?

I've studied some classics and fundamentals, as I've pointed out here:
>>14337049

Well, I know that whatever I write, outside of the fundamentals, would've been independently discovered whether or not it sounds like so-and-so, because I couldn't have copied so-and-so if I'd never read them before. It's a lot like how certain bands or other musical artists might not have listened to each other but listened to the same older acts that influenced them and end up sounding similar.
>We're all standing on the shoulders of giants and you cannot hope to stand higher if you at least dont know the heights you have to reach.

I get all that, and that's all well and good, but I still think there's merit in not overloading oneself with influences so that innovative new angles and perspectives and experiments may emerge which hadn't been explored before.

>>14337890
How is this bait? Are you implying I didn't write these?

>>14331328


You're saying I went to the trouble of writing 5 poems just to troll that I've written a total 66 poems and want my manuscript published? Yeah, wow, keen eye. You sure found me out.

>>14337849
I'll listen to advice I think worthwhile and won't to advice I think isn't. Call me arrogant all you want, I'm really not. I'm confident in the work I've done and I think it's better than a lot of the junk that gets published and passed for poetry nowadays, no more, no less.

>>14337794
>Your works are in the bottom 0%.

No such thing.

>Do you understand?

I understand that you're butthurt that you could never write anything as good as I could do and that you're jealous that I might have some success with my writing in the future.

>>14337452
>What do you expect to achieve by writing poetry?

Art, self-satisfaction, and maybe, just maybe, a buck in the tide.
>the entire industry probably sells less than 10,000 books per year,
lol, that's definitely not true. It's not much, but I'm sure it reaches at least 1million per year.
>how "good" your works are is determined by their market share
>and you're definitely lacking in literary skill to sell that much in the first place.

you just contradicted yourself.

>Maybe after you grow old and die, some people will realise you weren't such a retard after all.

I already quipped this same sentiment earlier in the thread.

>>14337346
How are you speaking to us from beyond the grave, Mr. Frost?

>>14337324
I'm just saying I'd rather my technique be sloppy around the edges but voice recognizable vs. having advanced technique but using the same tricks and stylings as others.

If you leave me a throwaway email I could send you the full manuscript. Otherwise, you'll have to take my word for it.

>>14337127
>And study them! Don't just read them casually--or rather, do that the first time, and then--make fuckloads of annotations on what makes them so good. Reread them over and over, learn from then, hopefully you can use what you learn in new poems and revising old ones.

I'd love to, but I'm so afraid of having my unique voice washed out into somebody else's. Wouldn't it be better advised to simply learn from myself and rough it out through a book or two or three and then, only after finalizing my personal style, branch out to learn from others? One of my personal prides in my writing is that (besides the fundamental classics) I've avoided being a carbon copy of other poets.

>>14337053
The contemporary ones who I've read and I think are worth a damn, who come to mind anyway, would be:

Annabelle Fuller
Savannah Brown
Rudy Francisco
Sarah Kay
Nick McRae

>>14337057
I'm not familiar with them. I'll add them if you think they're worthy and belong. I also forgot Ted Hughes. I shall revise for future postings, thank you.

>>14337024
No, mostly dead.

I'll list what I consider 'The Great Canon' and I'll add an asterisk next to those I've read:

*Homer (810 B.C.)
Sappho (580 B.C.)
Pindar (522 B.C.)
Virgil (70 B.C.)
Horace (65 B.C.)
Ovid (43 B.C.)
Kālidāsa (360)
Yamabe no Akahito (700)
Li Bai (701)
Du Fu (712)
Rudaki (858)
Ferdowsi (940)
Omar Khayyam (1048)
Peter Abelard & Héloïse (1079),(1095)
Nizami Ganjavi (1141)
Shota Rustaveli (1172)
*Rumi (1207)
Saadi (1210)
*Giacomo da Lentini (1210)
Guido Guinizelli (1230)
Dante Alighieri (1265)
Petrarch (1304)
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313)
*Hafez (1315)
Geoffrey Chaucer (1343)
Kabir (1440)
*Suleiman the Magnificent (1494)
Meera (1498)
Torquato Tasso (1544)
*William Shakespeare (1564)
John Milton (1608)
*Basho (1644)
Alexander Pope (1688)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749)
*Thomas Chatterton (1752)
*Phillis Wheatley (1753)
*William Blake (1757)
*Robert Burns (1759)
Friedrich Schiller (1759)
*William Wordsworth (1770)
*Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772)
Lord Byron (1788)
*Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792)
*John Keats (1795)
Alexander Pushkin (1799)
*Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806)
*Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807)
*Edgar Allan Poe (1809)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809)
Henry David Thoreau (1817)
Walt Whitman (1819)
Charles Baudelaire (1821)
*Emily Dickinson (1830)
Paul Verlaine (1844)
*Oscar Wilde (1854)
*Arthur Rimbaud (1854)
Rabindranath Tagore (1861)
W. B. Yeats (1865)
Rudyard Kipling (1865)
*Robert Frost (1874)
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875)
Kahil Gibran (1883)
William Carlos Williams (1883)
Ezra Pound (1885)
Siegfried Sassoon (1886)
*T. S. Eliot (1888)
Wilfred Owen (1893)
E. E. Cummings (1894)
*Langston Hughes (1902)
*Dr. Seuss (1904)
Pablo Neruda (1904)
W. H. Auden (1907)
Dylan Thomas (1914)
*Charles Bukowski (1920)
*Allen Ginsberg (1926)
Maya Angelou (1928)
Derek Walcott (1930)
*Shel Silverstein (1930)
*Sylvia Plath (1932)
Seamus Heaney (1939)
*Jack Prelutsky (1940)
*Billy Collins (1941)

>>14336944
Your opinion on this matter means very much to me. Thanks for your user engagement. You must be an expert in faggotry.

>>14336928
Not bad, not bad. Oh, sorry, don't mean to be redundant.
>>14336933
If nothing gives after a year or two of stumping, I suppose I'll have no other option, but I really want to try to be traditionally published by a press, big or tiny, somehow.

>>14336885
I don't disagree with the crux of the critique, at least not most of it, just that these sins are egregious enough to take away from the overall quality of the work. I would disagree with that.
>You have none.
I disagree.

>>14336740
If you want to shoot me a throwaway email, I'd be happy to send you the full manuscript so you can tear me apart more thoroughly and see the full gamut of what I have to offer.

>>14336740
>How can you know what's out there if you only read 12 books a year?

I meant 'book' books. I've read about 30 poetry books this year.

Poetry is filled with so-called tautologies, redundancies, inelegant phrasing, or 'unnecessary' phrasing. It's to emphasize a certain mood or a natural way of thinking or speaking. I appreciate the feedback, but you're being a bit too anal about it, in my opinion.
>While you may...what?
While you're alive and able. Before you're dead to not do things anymore. To SEIZE the DAY and go after opportunities you won't be able to in old age or in death.
>"all" is a redundant. (The phrase "my hopes" already implies all of them.)

Again, it's emphasizing the strong desire within in a commitment to the totality of the wish.

>"bonding charm" is tautological
No it's not. There are charms that are without a direct personal bond to others.
>"bonding charm to keep us close" is also tautological
It's a follow-through of the sentiment. I don't care if it's a tautology in this context.
>Ends on a contextless preposition.
"fight" isn't a preposition.
>"maintain" is redundant
No it's not.

"hope and soak up moonlight for me."

Does that make sense to you?
>I like this.
Oh, thank goodness.


Again, I'd rather critique be overly critical rather than not critical enough. Still, I believe you're being overly pedantic, and not giving enough credit to the imagery, the flow, the word choice, the rhyme, etc.

>I guarantee if you read more you would not make the above poshlostisms.

>Aim for a book a week.

I'd love to read more, but I've been intentionally quite selective and self-limiting in terms of what established and quality poetry books to read from, as to not be overly influenced with my own style and to stay as original as possible.

>>14336760
If I'm coming off as arrogant in this thread, I can assure you I'm definitely not overall, and it's only because of the flood of mediocrity I've been exposed to in ways of contemporary published poetry works that has pushed me to feel confident in saying I'm better than a large number of these 'poets'.


>>14336819
This is 4chan. I'd be disappointed if nobody said I sucked and tore me to shreds.
>>14336827
I disagree.

>>14336711
You're implying I'll ever reach heaven? Doubt it.