how do I into poetry? I want to write but I'm afraid everything

Even if it is, who cares? You don't have to show anyone at first if you don't want to, and the more you write, the better you'll get, no matter how much natural talent/how good a starting place you're in.

Spend some time learning the history of Western poetry and what's out there, particularly English poetry since Shakespeare and particularly since the Romantics.

The more you know, the more you'll know to avoid pitfalls, the more you'll know of the possibilities for poetic expression (as well as what's considered old hat), etc.

Or just get started writing disjointed free verse like everyone else does. Remember, if it uses lazy Allusive Language 101 and it's stilted, it's poetry!

>>7665799
Poetry is very loosely defined these days so literally write anything and someone will pat you on the back for it.

>>7665804
but where do I even start?

>>7665814
I've only read about half of it but Flowers of Evil/Les Fleurs du Mal is a pretty great collection.

>>7665799
Start with the Greeks like Homer and Sappho and just work your way to the present.

>>7665799
Read 'The Ode Less Travelled' by Stephen Fry senpai.

>2016
>writing poetry

Stop with this meme already.

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>>7665833
>start with the greeks everything

>>7665814
http://swcta.net/orapello/files/2013/03/Poetry-Text-1.pdf

>>7665799
>twink boy pic
>insecure about his quality
>clearly has nothing to say/write about, otherwise wouldn't be asking this
just drop it. you clearly doing it for the wrong reasons

>>7665939
This the worst board meme by far.

>>7665799
It will be shit. Then the next time you do it, it'll be slightly less shit. Then slightly less the time after that. You have to practice to hone your craft, mate. Or you could just not do it. At least then you can't say you tried and failed, because you were to useless to try even though you wanted to.

>>7666535
Don't be so naive like 99% of the poets nowadays. If reading Blake or Keats can make your stomach feel the butterflies, there is no reason a modern author couldn't do that as well.
Except everybody fell for that 'modern' myth and value style over substance and its all really some empty cliche, not to mention women taking over the poetry and incorporating it into their movements.

>>7665814
Read at least Astrophel & Stella, a few of Donne's earlier and later poems, Shakespeare's sonnets, The Lyrical Ballads, some Keats, Eliot, Pound, Plath, Hughes, Duffy, Amis, and then just a load more contemporary verse. Make sure you're always reading contemporary poetry, the other stuff's just a basic grounding, if any of it clicks with you then read around them, poets within the same movement, etc.
When it comes to writing, just write. Write whatever you want, it may be a struggle at first, but once you get used to it, you'll find it comes naturally. Don't show anyone your earliest works, once you feel yourself starting to cross the threshold into 'alright', leave those poems and come back to them later to see if you still like them. You can post them in /lit/ threads or find someone who likes poetry and start a correspondence, but outside feedback is key.
This is by no means a bible, just imo a decent rough guide to finding your feet.
Also one thing that may help is taking a poem you like and trying to rewrite it, either same theme, same form, same style, etc. The hardest thing to do with writing poetry is starting, because you have no idea of your voice, and no idea what is expected of writing, it took me over a year to begin to feel even mildly confident in myself, so just keep at it!

I know I'm going to get A LOT of hate for this but try to look at some hip-hop OP. Not joking at all, there's some really decent stuff out there.

>>7666639
True, but hip-hop is hip-hop, not poetry. If OP doesn't know how to write poetry, then looking at hip-hop won't help, though is good once a poet finds their feet.

>>7666639
The fact that you even have to mention this makes me hate /lit/. You probably just read Paradise Lost because you had to in school and think Illmatic comes even close to that. Even the best verses on any rap album can't compete with works such as Lamia or Leaves of grass because unlike rap, true poetry hides more than one direct meaning mentioned in a verse.

Rap is about style and flow (as it should be, it is music) and only sometimes actual substance of any worth to any cultured person that spent more than 30 minutes figured some poetry out. Finally, rap is poetry's attempt to dumb itself down into infinity for uneducated and poor classes of citizens to be thrilled with, but in no way it should be mistaken for something of value without musical background. While poetry contains not only infinitely more feelings (that some rappers won't experience within their whole lifetimes) and images in it, it also evokes them more deeply. Just drop this and don't ever try to pull this shit again.

>rappers thinking they're poets
>dumb white people appreciateing rap music as some classic masterpieces looking for 'depth' of it where there's none
>movies and popular culture portray it as being popular among high class whites as some mystified oriental masterpiece from the ghettos

>>7666574
It's a great intro. Stop being a meme.

>>7666659

Quads of truth.


Also slam poetry is even worse, because it has the pretension of being actual poetry.


Here's a poem I like quite a bit

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/gretchen-la-p-le/

>>7666659
>>7666667

Lol, whatever. Keep circle jerking the same people over & over. You know nothing of hip-hop. You sound bitter as fuck btw.

here are a few principles

- choose a theme (try not to make it yourself)
- do your theme humble service, do it justice; do not exaggerate, use prudence
- make the poem pleasant to the ears
- simply avoid all vulgarity
- do not overly strain your voice trying to be "poetic", speak in your own best voice
- do not get lost trying to analyse your feelings or thoughts and trying to make them "profound", let your thoughts and feelings be natural and express them with ease
- you know you've been successful when it feels pleasurable to read aloud, and what you've written is right & honest

>>7666677
- do not get lost trying to analyse your feelings or thoughts and trying to make them "profound", let your thoughts and feelings be natural and express them with ease

Also, on this, remember that you are writing on your theme; your thoughts and feelings should not be the object of your poem unless you are writing about yourself; usually, they should be merely a vehicle to do justice to theme you are writing about. Try to be UNIVERSAL, not particular or weird or "genius". Try to express what men universally and naturally feel or think, not what someone peculiar or eccentric thinks or feels.

>>7666676
Dude, I myself listen to rap music and I know of it plenty. You'd think in my 24 years I'd learn to sense a difference in substance between the two works of art. This is not something we should be arguing about. This is no contest. I can only advise you to pick up some poetry if you already like rap for the lyrics and enjoy yourself tremendously and grow as a person.

>>7666682

If you can't see that at least some hip-hop is worthy of other poets then you're stupid. Either that or you're too white and feel guilty.

>>7666677
>simply avoid all vulgarity
What? Why would this be a guideline for writing poetry? This seems so arbitrary and caught up in the idea of poetry as some some super-high art which dare not concern itself with real life. Poetry has every right to be vulgar, emotions are vulgar. The key is not to avoid vulgarity but to treat vulgarity like any other facet of poetry; use it sparingly and honestly.

>>7666691
>at least some hip-hop is worthy of other poets
What does this mean? Not him, but trying to claim hip-hop is 'worthy' is a fucking pretentious thing to say. Hip-hop is its own art-form with its own merits, and doesn't need to be elevated by you through comparisons to poetry. That's like saying some films are 'worthy of playwrights'.

>>7666691
I'll be waiting for some recommendations then. But if I enjoy rap, I enjoy it for the lyrics+flow+music, simply reading it never does it for me, that's why I don't consider it being a part of literature.
>>7666697
All vulgar poetry tried to be realistic and down to earth, yet no good vulgar poems come to mind. Perhaps because they're pretentious pieces of crap and true art works like a gentle push towards the figuring out the meaning, intent and desire without describing a pussy as a pussy or a cunt or tits as tits. I will always think of poetry as a facade of words with the whole universe behind them and good authors always deliver it in such fashion. If a poet within the context writes he wants to hold her hand but the rest of the poem is put in such way that you just know he wants to rip her clothes and fuck her mercilessly and if 9/10 people say they agree on that interpretation, it worked without using cheap vulgarity and it came off as much stronger.

>>7666697
Art in general should avoid vulgarity because we don't need to waste our efforts bringing attention to and glorifying what is common and worthless. This is not a contempt for ordinary people or ordinary life, but a call to bring out what is true and beautiful in ordinary people and ordinary life. In fact, I think those who focus so much on vulgarity and claim to be "voices of the masses", are the ones who are TRULY contemptuous of ordinary people, because they are essentially saying that there is nothing beautiful about ordinary people.

>>7666705
>If a poet within the context writes he wants to hold her hand but the rest of the poem is put in such way that you just know he wants to rip her clothes and fuck her mercilessly and if 9/10 people say they agree on that interpretation, it worked without using cheap vulgarity and it came off as much stronger

But the opposite can't be true? A poet can't write about a woman's cunt, wanting to fuck her etc, but instead everyone interprets it as a sign of weakness or an anger that he can't achieve intimacy? Just because you can't think of good vulgar poems doesn't mean a good vulgar poem can't be written, limiting a poet's vocabulary seems to me a surefire way to limit their topics.

>>7666706
You seem tied up in an idea of poetry as a game of creating something beautiful rather than expressing whatever they want to express. No poet needs to be 'for the masses', they should only aim to express whatever it is they wish to express, banning vulgarity is banning a vulgar person, denying them emotional expression because you don't like the way it sounds.

>>7666706
And there's an analogy to this in the history of the Catholic Church over the last 60 years. The Catholic Church was used to celebrating its liturgy solely in Latin and in the Mass focusing totally upon God and the sacrifice of Christ. In the 60s there was a Council where the Catholic intellectuals decided that the Church needed to abandon Latin for vernacular language, and make the liturgy more focused on the people than on God. The result of this "trying to make the Mass more relevant to modern man" was that modern men abandoned the Church in droves, because there was no longer any of that ancient beauty there.

Ordinary people actually have fairly decent taste. They can tell when something is beautiful and when it is vulgar. It's the perverted intellectuals that go into raptures over modern art that the ordinary man, using his common sense and common taste, naturally finds repulsive.

>>7666713
Art is not for the ordinary man, art exists for the artist. Anyone who writes a poem has no obligation to write for an audience, if they did, slam poetry would be the greatest form currently active, look at any youtube video and you'll see people describing it as 'beautiful' and such. Art is not religion, and does not have any reason to draw people in by being pleasing to the ear, art is, fundamentally, expression, and if people don't like that, that's fine, not everything needs to be consumed on a mass scale.

>>7666712
>You seem tied up in an idea of poetry as a game of creating something beautiful rather than expressing whatever they want to express.

Art has beauty for its object, yes. The proper object of art is not self-expression; art is not soliloquy.

>banning vulgarity is banning a vulgar person, denying them emotional expression because you don't like the way it sounds.

Well banning murder is banning a murderous person, denying them emotioal expression. It's not because I don't like murder, it's because murder is contrary to the good of society. Poets publish their work in the public domain, and so in order to contribute to the public good they should avoid all vulgarity, because vulgarity in the public domain debases the morals & manners of the people. The rights of the individual to express himself does not trump the rights of the whole society. If a man wants to be vulgar he can go outside of civilisation and live with the vulgar animals.

>>7666713
Yes, this is a very good point. There is something in art that inspires us to look further beyond vulgarity of every day life and our mortal selves; we look for some ancient beauty, those ideals of mythic Hesiod's Golden Age that are ever lasting desire of human nature present in all myths and thoughts, as if we find our very nature as it is filthy. Art tries to elevate spirit instead of this physical world, and I notice how only such form of art is appreciated, even if it portrays murder, uglyness and sex it does so in some elevated manner where it makes every dirty action or thought a result of some more meaningful drama going on in this world or some mythical forces of good and bad whose purposes we serve do some ultimate, more meaningful, end.

>>7666715
>Art is not for the ordinary man, art exists for the artist.

If this is true, then artists should not publish their works. A man should execute a painting and then bury it in the ground. That is somewhat in line with the romantic ideal of self-expression. I have never understood why these artists who glorify art for art's sake and say that art has nothing to do with the public, go ahead and publish their work. They are hypocrties pure and simple. In ancient Japan they would write poems exclusively for themselves or for their friends, and not for anyone else. If artists want to do that, then fine. But if they want to be a force in the public domain, they should serve the public good.

>>7666580
99,99% of modern poetry is ridiculous and cringeworthy.

I've never found that 0,01%.

>>7666737
copy-paste the below, it's a link to poetry (had to split it up to get past spam filter)

alberto-caeiro
.
blogspot
.
com
.
br

>>7666717
>Art has beauty for its object, yes. The proper object of art is not self-expression; art is not soliloquy.

So anything that is not beautiful cannot be art? What about things that are sublime? What about things that are ugly? Are you discarding the majority of modernism? postmodernism? What benefit does an expression of the beautiful actually bring? In self-expression, a person can connect to an audience through words on a page and show a universality to the human experience, a striving for the beautiful seems to me to ignore all the negative in life and focus solely on one aspect. I enjoy beautiful art, but if that's all we're focusing on then we're losing so much of art's potential.

>Well banning murder is banning a murderous person, denying them emotioal expression.

That's a ridiculous analogy. Murder is a an act which directly affects another person, regardless of their wishes, writing a poem does not. Indeed, if that person were able to read or write a poem that expressed the vulgarity of their emotions maybe they may find it cathartic, but according to you they should instead only be allowed to read about how murder is beautiful.

> Poets publish their work in the public domain, and so in order to contribute to the public good they should avoid all vulgarity

Alright, calm down Plato. Poets are not the moral arbiters of society, and it is not their job to determine what is socially acceptable. Besides, who says you can't write a beautiful poem about something reprehensible? You seem to have your two values mixed up,on the one hand you crave beauty, yet on the other you demand social piety and adherence to the common good. The two are not interlinked.

>>7666726
Just because they artwork was created by the artist does not mean the artwork cannot be appreciated by others. If the artist is creating with an audience in mind, they are not an artist at all, they are a craftsman, plying their wares.

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>>7665799
http://4chanlit.wikia.com/wiki/Poetry

>>7666574
>meme
fry's a fuckhead but the book isn't a meme. it's fine. don't be stupid

>>7666639
not poetry

>>7666677
don't listen to this guy; poetry doesn't have "principles" unless you assign your own to your own work

>>7666737
it exists you just have to look and more importantly know where to look. knowing where to look is where most people fail


forgot how pretentious this board is

>>7666634
You're thinking about it way too hard. The first poem I wrote got published. Standards are extremely low these days.

>>7666981
lol this.

But whatever you do OP dont just take a random journal entry and give it line breaks. Too many jokers do that these days thinking its so deep and rythmic(tm)

Learn about meter. Read Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Whitman, etc. Read again.

Then you can start dabbling in poetry.

>>7666930

tone poem

What's the best collection of Blake's works? Preferably an "illuminated" edition.

>>7665799
Write anything, ANYTHING, that comes to mind.

Then read as much as you possibly can from as many different poets, from as many different periods as possible. You may find you like romantics, or beat poetry, or contemporary spoken word.

Then, once you've realised which style you like the most, look back at your early writing. Between the tears, try and work out what YOUR style was.

Then ignore me because poetry is a subjective art form that is entirely dependent on your tastes.

>>7665939
Yeah, this, but really only if you're interested in writing formal poetry. Free verse is despised by Fry, and he looks down on it through the whole book.

>>7667012
wow, dumb AND fascist

>>7667113
>fascist as a pejorative
>2016