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ME: I should probably write new stuff
ME: Why?
ME: To stay relevant
ME: How does that work then?
ME: I need to write new poems that people haven't read before so they know I'm paying attention to the world and giving them what they want.
ME: Right. How's that working out for you?
ME: It's pretty exhausting, to be honest. I've got quite a lot of old poems that more or less cover what I want to say, because frankly there's not a great deal that's new happening in the world.
ME: So what makes you think that writing something new will get people to read when they haven't read your old stuff?
ME: Well it's the internet, isn't it? Got to have fresh new content every day or people lose interest.
ME: Seems like most people have already lost interest in pretty much everything and are just clicking random shit to avoid actually thinking for themselves.
ME: Yeah. So I should give them more random shit, right?
ME: Ever seen anyone post a poem by Keats or Byron or Tennyson or Whitman or Ginsberg or Rimbaud or Wilde or Thomas or Yeats as a comment on something that's happening right now?
ME: Sure, all the time.
ME: And there's a good chance people have read those poems before, right?
ME: Of course. They're by famous poets.
ME: How much new content are they pumping out these days?
ME: Yeah, not a lot.
ME: So why do you have to when you've already got perfectly good poems that say what you want to say? Why try saying it again? Isn't that just repeating yourself?
ME: Sure, but nobody will notice if I repeat myself because they weren't listening the first time.
ME: So just use your old poems if they weren't paying attention to them before, and they'll either pay attention this time or ignore them completely. And if they ignore them, you haven't actually lost anything because they ignored them already.
ME: Right. Like those lazy dead poets. Do you think I should stage my own death?
ME: Couldn't hurt.
ME: But people read poems by dead famous dudes because they're important poems.
ME: What makes them important? Isn't it just that someone -- or probably a lot of someones -- in authority has decreed them important?
ME: They're the canon though.
ME: That's what I just said. And haven't you read poems that weren't in the canon that have still made a difference to the way you perceive the world?
ME: Sure. And not just limericks either.
ME: Limericks are life changing, no doubt about that. But I mean poems by people who aren't famous, or as famous -- maybe just because their PR people are rubbish?
ME: My PR people are rubbish.
ME: I am my PR people. And that's true.
ME: So you're saying I should think of my poems as just as important as Byron's?
ME: Sure, why not?
ME: Isn't that a bit arrogant?
ME: What's wrong with being arrogant if you can back it up?
ME: I don't know if I can back it up.
ME: Don't be such a whinger and get me a whisky.
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Well, Byron was pretty average by modern standards, just as Victor Trumper would struggle to make it to a club side today.
Your problem is not that your PR people are rubbish, but that poetry is an art that's had its day, like portrait painting and steam train oiling. A relic of appeal only to hobbyists.
~ I think I just quoted myself - Achebe
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bollocks
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YOU: So why do you have to when you've already got perfectly good poems that say what you want to say? Why try saying it again? Isn't that just repeating yourself?
Why not write poems that say things you don't want to say? Say things that a different narrator would say, maybe coloured with a bit of your own views, or irony.
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Meh, I'm always on some sort of art wave, I definitely haven't said all I have to say, I just go through times when just keeping up with life numbs the edge I art with. I don't worry, change of some sort always comes.
That vague enough?  Enjoy the whiskey.
billy wrote:welcome to the site. make it your own, wear it like a well loved slipper and wear it out. ella pleads:please click forum titles for posting guidelines, important threads. New poet? Try Poetic DevicesandWard's Tips
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Cheers guys. Not really looking for life advice or sympathy, just trying to start a conversation.
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just mercedes
Unregistered
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
“We turn in circles in the night
and we are consumed by fire.”
All flesh will fail and turn to ash;
with each heart beat, each neuron flash
we are diminished by the fire
that uses us as fuel.
Rimbaud thought he’d got it right
by choosing guns and silence.
He read the signs inscribed on sky
as stars and meteors passed by
and cleaned his page of writing;
understood that meaning hid
somewhere deep within his mind
where word and thought divided.
He turned his back on all he knew,
went searching for a kinder tribe
but Lacan’s letter still arrived
at each new destination;
Rimbaud’s rotting leg became
perfumed annihilation.
The title is the longest palindrome I know.
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Lovely. And you know what? I've already got an answer to that... Faunication... don't click though, it might make me think someone is paying attention.
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Importance about anything is always about frame of reference, so why wouldn't your poems be as important as one of byrons from your perspective. There aren't many poems that were ever important, only interesting or thought provoking, now they are mainly used to take up time, but not too much time, in some classroom where almost no one there wants to be, except for the fact it is required to graduate.
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Yep, or to reinforce a notion that it suits the establishment to have students think about, e.g. responsibility to the state, the importance of individuality as long as it's the same individuality as everyone else, or rebelling in a completely non-rebellious and state-affirming way.
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just mercedes
Unregistered
(11-24-2016, 10:05 AM)Leanne Wrote: Lovely. And you know what? I've already got an answer to that... Faunication... don't click though, it might make me think someone is paying attention.
Fucktastic! You grok him.
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BILLY: i think i know what you mean
Billy: with you you're just a lazy bastard.
Billy: that's what i said.
why? that's what i was like last year but know i just don't think about. it's like "out of sight out of mind" for me being an admin just took over and now all i do is fuckin' read; mainly tripe  you have genuine talent as well as craft so if you're having conversations with self, i'm really fucked aren't i.
do you actually try or bother to write poetry anymore? i found as i said above that i just don't think about writing anymore. i remember a few of your poems though i doubt any of mine would hold a thought of someone else. few poem do so for me but there's been a handful of poets on here who have a poem that sticks or resonated me.
(11-24-2016, 06:29 AM)Leanne Wrote: ME: I should probably write new stuff
ME: Why?
ME: To stay relevant
ME: How does that work then?
ME: I need to write new poems that people haven't read before so they know I'm paying attention to the world and giving them what they want.
ME: Right. How's that working out for you?
ME: It's pretty exhausting, to be honest. I've got quite a lot of old poems that more or less cover what I want to say, because frankly there's not a great deal that's new happening in the world.
ME: So what makes you think that writing something new will get people to read when they haven't read your old stuff?
ME: Well it's the internet, isn't it? Got to have fresh new content every day or people lose interest.
ME: Seems like most people have already lost interest in pretty much everything and are just clicking random shit to avoid actually thinking for themselves.
ME: Yeah. So I should give them more random shit, right?
ME: Ever seen anyone post a poem by Keats or Byron or Tennyson or Whitman or Ginsberg or Rimbaud or Wilde or Thomas or Yeats as a comment on something that's happening right now?
ME: Sure, all the time.
ME: And there's a good chance people have read those poems before, right?
ME: Of course. They're by famous poets.
ME: How much new content are they pumping out these days?
ME: Yeah, not a lot.
ME: So why do you have to when you've already got perfectly good poems that say what you want to say? Why try saying it again? Isn't that just repeating yourself?
ME: Sure, but nobody will notice if I repeat myself because they weren't listening the first time.
ME: So just use your old poems if they weren't paying attention to them before, and they'll either pay attention this time or ignore them completely. And if they ignore them, you haven't actually lost anything because they ignored them already.
ME: Right. Like those lazy dead poets. Do you think I should stage my own death?
ME: Couldn't hurt.
ME: But people read poems by dead famous dudes because they're important poems.
ME: What makes them important? Isn't it just that someone -- or probably a lot of someones -- in authority has decreed them important?
ME: They're the canon though.
ME: That's what I just said. And haven't you read poems that weren't in the canon that have still made a difference to the way you perceive the world?
ME: Sure. And not just limericks either.
ME: Limericks are life changing, no doubt about that. But I mean poems by people who aren't famous, or as famous -- maybe just because their PR people are rubbish?
ME: My PR people are rubbish.
ME: I am my PR people. And that's true.
ME: So you're saying I should think of my poems as just as important as Byron's?
ME: Sure, why not?
ME: Isn't that a bit arrogant?
ME: What's wrong with being arrogant if you can back it up?
ME: I don't know if I can back it up.
ME: Don't be such a whinger and get me a whisky.
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11-24-2016, 11:51 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-24-2016, 11:52 AM by Leanne.)
Your Furies of Anne Gray Harvey remains one of my all-time favourites, and you've turned out a few in the practise threads that are better than they've any right to be.
Sometimes I write. Mostly just limericks. The world doesn't have enough limericks.
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i'd forgot about that one
yeah limericks are great but not when everyone writes them wrong
did you or anyone here really, i mean really really try to make a living at poetry. again i think we have perhaps a handful who have some stuff i'd pay to read. does you're teaching help or hinder your writing. does anyone have a job that hinders they're writing, or a spouse that won't let you near a pen. i almost got a chap book done about 4 year ago but as i was putting the poems up for choice i realized they'd look better on the back of a bubble gum wrapper. i'm one of the most confident people i know and i do know how good/bad my poetry is. that said do we have to think or know how great we are in order to get published? sorry for the bad grammar but that's just me being myself.
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I thought once, when I made a couple of grand from poetry, that it might kick off... but once the initial excitement wears off from a new publication, both publisher and audience want a new toy. Unless it's 50 shades of gross. I have a limited audience since I rarely include bondage - I know that's a bad marketing decision, but there you go.
I love teaching poetry but I never use my own in the classroom, especially since one of my managers (who has since been sacked) insisted that not only was poetry pointless in real life, but using mine in class was just about having students stroke my ego.
Now I just don't have time to spare for creativity very often, and I have been treated so badly by publishers that I shall assuredly not go that route again. I am halfheartedly tossing around some collaboration ideas with video and audio producers but really it's just become a desperate need to feel like I haven't wasted my entire life in a field that doesn't want me.
Maybe I should have done what's expected of artists and just fucked myself up on drugs.
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(11-24-2016, 11:00 AM)Pdeathstar Wrote: Importance about anything is always about frame of reference, so why wouldn't your poems be as important as one of byrons from your perspective. There aren't many poems that were ever important, only interesting or thought provoking, now they are mainly used to take up time, but not too much time, in some classroom where almost no one there wants to be, except for the fact it is required to graduate.
(11-24-2016, 05:29 PM)billy Wrote: i'd forgot about that one
yeah limericks are great but not when everyone writes them wrong
did you or anyone here really, i mean really really try to make a living at poetry. again i think we have perhaps a handful who have some stuff i'd pay to read. does you're teaching help or hinder your writing. does anyone have a job that hinders they're writing, or a spouse that won't let you near a pen. i almost got a chap book done about 4 year ago but as i was putting the poems up for choice i realized they'd look better on the back of a bubble gum wrapper. i'm one of the most confident people i know and i do know how good/bad my poetry is. that said do we have to think or know how great we are in order to get published? sorry for the bad grammar but that's just me being myself.
I don't write to get published so I don't worry if my poetry is sub par from that POV. I would like to improve it nonetheless, because the act of writing poetry well gives pleasure.
When I was younger I wrote to impress girls until I realised that girls don't really fall for that kind of crap. By then it was too late, so I carried on until it became a sort of hobby.
I agree that after a point one repeats the same old things but surely the next thing to do is to attempt poetry on another language?
~ I think I just quoted myself - Achebe
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well, one time in high school one girl caught me giving poems I wrote for her to another girl, and, needlessly to say she wasn't happy about it... she wrote a four page break-up letter.
Sadly those poems have been lost to time, but they must have been some good shit to inspire jealousy like that. ^_^
The weren't good enough to get me laid though... guess the girls who are into poetry don't poke. Pfft.
I also won first place in a writing contest once, so unlike Billy, i'm a pretty fly poet... and i even got picked for publishing that poem but my stupid mom wouldn't give me the $79.99 plus 13.50s/h for the administrative fees. >_<
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Sometimes I write things to test my courage in public.
Proposed to my wife changing the words to the Hail Mary and adding a guitar part. She preferred my 'bullshit' song. Still worked though
Peanut butter honey banana sandwiches
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is poetry like everything else...we tire of it, okay tom's never going to tier from fungus but that aside. i'd love to be as good at this as leanne i but if i were i figure i'd get bored quicker than if i were me. do many poets progress to fictional prose as in "a book"
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(11-24-2016, 10:49 PM)Pdeathstar Wrote: well, one time in high school one girl caught me giving poems I wrote for her to another girl, and, needlessly to say she wasn't happy about it... she wrote a four page break-up letter.
That's called a misuse of the powers of poetry.  You're not quite dead to me, but getting pretty close. If you wish to redeem yourself, you need to start posting more poetry. It's been years....
I'm starting to think you hang out here just to harass noobs. And billy.
Writing poetry gives me an outlet for my sadistic impulses.
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