Reddit mentions: The best european poetry books

>I would like to see a LOTR edition that includes Tolkien's illustrations, like they did with some of the latter editions of The Hobbit.

I haven't read The Art Of The Lord Of The Rings, but to the best of my knowledge it contains all of the LOTR related artwork and illustrations Tolkien did, little of which is really comparable to the full illustrations he did for T.H (with the LOTR I think most of the illustrations were maps/sketches/illustrations of buildings to help him plan out the geography, rather than designed specifically to accompany the text but I may be mistaken), his artwork in T.H has a definite charm to it but Tolkien recognized his own limitations as an artist and IIRC he talks about declining and offer to illustrate LOTR himself in one of his letters (frankly I'm surprised he even found the time to write it)

>The P.E. are expensive! I suppose a great deal of work goes into compiling these but I will probably shy away from them (for now, at least).

Like I said I don't read/have much interest in the linguistic material, though I'd imagine such journals have very small print runs and a limited amount of readers, pushing the cost up for everyone involved.

>It is amazing how vast the world of Middle-earth and Tolkien is.

It certainly is, and there is still apparently a huge amount of unpublished material (though whether any if merits publication is a different matter).

http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Index:Unpublished_material

http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letters_not_published_in_%22The_Letters_of_J.R.R._Tolkien%22

(In The Readers Companion is noted that as of 2006 Hammond and Scull had recorded some 1,500 unpublished letters, and more continue to come to light)


http://thehalloffire.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2250

>A further, but quite distinct, consideration in this connection lies in the relation of The History of Middle-earth to the original writings. In my Foreword to The Peoples of Middle-earth, pp.ix-x, I referred to the forerunner of the History as 'an entirely "private" study, without thought or purpose of publication: an exhaustive investigation and analysis of all the materials concerned with what came to be called the Elder Days, from the earliest beginnings, omitting no detail of name-form or textual variation.' This work, which I called The History of the Silmarillion, and which I began after the publication of my 'constructed' text, runs to more than 2600 very closely typed pages, and it does not even touch on the Second and Third Ages. When the possibility arose of publishing at least part of this work, in some form, it was obvious that it would have to be heavily reduced and curtailed, and the part of The History of Middle-earth dealing with the Elder Days is indeed a new presentation of The History of the Silmarillion, and a severe contraction of it, especially in respect of the sheer quantity of variant manuscript material reproduced in full.

And then you have the various annotated, illustrated or expanded editions of the books with even more material...

Worth noting 'The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun' is being re-released later this year:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lay-Aotrou-Itroun-J-Tolkien/dp/0008202133

>Now I see all the biographical and analysis works include exclusive previously-unpublished material; and collecting things with a similar suit outside the most popular books is simply impossible.

Yes that is unfortunately true, unless you are very very rich, the best you can do is pick and choose on what seems most interesting.

>One could argue whether these are part of the Legendarium, but surely a true collector would not want to miss any of Tolkien's writings.

Well, good luck trying to track down a copy of:

http://www.tolkienbooks.net/php/philologists.php

for a reasonable price!

>Also, would you recommend The Atlas of Middle-Earth?

Definitely, excellent book, here's the table of contents if you are interested:

http://imgur.com/a/FSME9

http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Atlas_of_Middle-earth

Though again make sure you buy the revised 2nd (not sure if there is a 3rd) edition.

>Regarding LOTR, I've heard the 60th Anniversary Edition from HarperCollins contains the most correct text. I think its worth getting.

I've been thinking about getting that myself, but I've heard mixed things about the binding, and the plastic slipcase looks a little flimsy but the Alan Lee illustrations are very tempting...I currently have a 2007 paperback edition based on the 50th Anniversary text and I think the 60th edition only has a couple of minor corrections from that (though I may be wrong).

(sorry, incoming long ass post)

Hahaha truuu. Hmm that's a good question, he's one of the original people that got me into poetry/French poets, he has a good amount of work even though he basically revolutionized French poetry by the time he was a teenager, then quit to go be an arms dealer in the middle East/Africa.

I still really don't know as much about French surrealism and all that as I should. Rimbaud's life and mystique is just as interesting as his work tbh.

His whole idea was to push himself to the limit through starvation, insomnia, and drugs, to reach his mental and spiritual limit, and create art out of the pure fiber of his soul, type thing. As a kid he was sort of a wandering vagabond on and off and would intentionally starve himself. He dreamed of creating a universal language, and his poem about synethesia was sort of a mini manifesto on his concepts about perception, color, language and art. He was all about self flaggellation for the good of his art basically, there's even this story that marked the beginning of his gun trafficking phase, where he had to travel through some Alps, instead of going around the mountain he went up through knee deep snow for hours, and was lucky enough to make it to a monastery somehow on the mountain, where his life was basically saved. He thought of himself as a seer who could wield the power of speaking or writing things into reality.

I can give as a quick summary as is possible, especially since it's important context for his work. Basically, he was a poor farm boy from provincial France, right during really tumultuous times in France, he grew up in war/very close to really active war zones. His father was an absent military man who abandoned his wife and three kids before Rimbaud was six. Rimbaud's mother was this really strict religious, abusive, insufferable woman. She'd make her kids recite Bible verses in the original Latin and not feed them dinner if they messed up a word. His nickname for her was "Mouth of Darkness". He was an academic prodigy growing up and won awards in his district for writing, and was surprisingly pious himself as a child. He first got a poem published when he was like 11 or something (The Orphans Christmas, I think?).

Right around the time he became a teenager he started getting really rebellious, skipping school/church, smoking weed/tobacco/drinking absinthe and hanging out in taverns everyday. He was also homosexual, and even unapologetically homosexual, at a time when that obviously was really taboo in ultra religious 19th century France. He was basically rebellious in every sense of the word, lots of people refer to him as the "original punk." He's what inspired a lot of people like Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Jim Carroll, Beat writers like Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, people in the punk scene. He toed the line really well between purity and the loss of purity/innocence. Lots of religious imagery and grandiose diction, but throwing a weird twist into it with really surreal, dark, and vivid imagery. He was also essentially a disciple of Charles Baudelaire at least in spirit and style/content.

As a teenager he ran away from home a couple times but got caught at the border by police since it was during wartime. He finally left home completely, and went to Paris. He had been corresponding with one of the biggest French poets of his time named Paul Verlaine. One way or another, Verlaine read Rimbaud's Drunken Boat, one of his most famous and influential poems he wrote when he was like 14, decided Rimbaud was a teenage genius, and invited him to live with Verlaine and Verlaines wife and child in Paris.

Verlaine and Rimbaud eventually developed a sexual relationship, basically just did drugs and wrote poetry from their drug induced visions, got kinda strung out on opium and absinthe. Verlaine eventually left his wife completely, moved into some flat with Rimbaud, and their relationship went downhill from there since they were just kinda poor drug addicts, feeding themselves through occasional translation commissions and tutoring.

Rimbaud started to realize Verlaine was basically just an insane, angry, violent alcoholic, and started making plans to leave Paris and the relationship. This period of his life is what A Season in Hell is about.

During an argument with Rimbaud trying to leave the flat and Verlaine refusing to let him, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist. The police got involved, and Rimbaud was eventually returned to his mother once again since he was still a minor. He left his hometown soon after, swore off poetry and refused to write creatively anymore by the time he was in his early 20s, and decided to be a gun trafficker and merchant-soldier throughout the Middle East and Africa for most of the rest of his life. He died in his early 30s from cancer.

I would either get a collection, ideally with some biographical background, I have this one with some really cool drawings in it. Or get his two biggest works A Season in Hell (I'd recommend the one with a red cover and preface by Patti Smith, it also includes the poem Drunken Boat which is one of his most famous pieces, there's even a wall in his home town that has the whole poem painted on it, def make sure you read that one), and then Illuminations, which was his surreal, divine visions experienced while high on hash and whatever else book. Both have excellent versions translated by John Ashbery. This latter book basically solidified his reputation as an extremely influential, surrealist writer, he'd write a lot of stuff that had a very visionary feel, or like youre reading a dream.

Also, if you're gonna read Rimbaud, I'd recommend reading Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire beforehand. It's a book of prose poetry. Baudelaire was this genius but completely spaced out alcoholic/absinthe/opium addict and writer who wrote a lot about vice and sex and the underworld of Paris. The idea of Paris Spleen was to write and highlight all the darkness and toxins of life in the city, and purge it through a sort of literary "spleen". He was basically one of the first poets to freely write about taking drugs, sleeping with/falling in love with prostitutes, hanging out with gamblers, and people who lived in poverty. Really gorgeous writing. Paris Spleen was as scandalous as it was influential at the time of its release, and basically changed everything in French poetry following it.

This book, as well as Baudelaire's more traditional book of poems called Flowers of Evil, were extremely influential on Rimbaud as a teenager and were essentially what he tried to copy. That whole era is super fascinating, I used to be really, really into all the history of it and the writing was hugely influential in shaping my own shit. I'll update with some actual titles/links to good starting points.

Edit: /u/ItsBigVanilla

Paris Spleen by Baudelaire
https://www.amazon.com/Paris-Spleen-New-Directions-Paperbook-ebook/dp/B00BNQRPGC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539065048&sr=8-1&keywords=paris+spleen

Complete Works
https://www.amazon.com/Arthur-Rimbaud-Complete-Works/dp/0061561770/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539064862&sr=8-1&keywords=rimbaud

Season in Hell
https://www.amazon.com/Season-Hell-Drunken-English-French/dp/0811219488/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1539064862&sr=8-4&keywords=rimbaud

Illuminations
https://www.amazon.com/Illuminations-Arthur-Rimbaud/dp/0393341828/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1539064862&sr=8-6&keywords=rimbaud



I'd actually recommend the Collection over anything, it's an awesome comprehensive collection with great, really interesting autobiographical info, and might even include all of the main two books plus other poems. Absolutely loved my copy I got, needa go find it. If you're gonna grab any, I'd grab that and Paris Spleen, those should be a great primer for that era/movement. Hope ye find something you dig, lmk if you got questions or what ya think.

I have given quite a few books as gifts in my time. Small poetry collections work very well, such as this lovely edition of Wordsworth's poems; or this facsimile edition of Yeats' the tower, as it came out on Valentine's Day in 1928; or this selection of Goethe's poems, with very cute illustrations. All of those are very small, but charming. I also own a beautiful, small, leather-bound edition of John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, which I got of eBay for less than 10 bucks. I think it would work well as a gift:

>Have you ever considered what a deep under meaning there lies, or at least may be read, if we choose, in our custom of strewing flowers before those whom we think most happy? Do you suppose it is merely to deceive them into the hope that happiness is always to fall thus in showers at their feet?—that wherever they pass they will tread on the herbs of sweet scent, and that the rough ground will be made smooth for them by depth of roses? So surely as they believe that, they will have, instead, to walk on bitter herbs and thorns; and the only softness to their feet will be of snow. But it is not thus intended they should believe; there is a better meaning in that old custom. The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers: but they rise behind her steps, not before them. “Her feet have touched the meadows, and left the daisies rosy.”

I also once gave a girl named Maud an edition of Tennyson's Maud, and other poems that even had 'Maud' engraved on the back in gold! Something small but intimate like that should work!

As for historical books, I recommend Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History and On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History; as well as Macaulay's History of England.

1. The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry 1 -
   
   This book is heavy, so it doubles as a brick for smashing in the windows of capitalist bourgeois pigs. Reading it is like taking a shot of tabasco sauce and injecting it into your eye with a hypodermic needle.
   
   
2. Surrealist Poetry in English 2 -
   
   I had to buy this one on ebay, but it's a damn fine collection. Makes me want to hand out LSD-laced lollypops to schoolkids, then piss on the grave of H.W. Longfellow.
   
   
3. Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry 3 -
   
   These two have all the good ones of the 20th century, a clean layout, and a fine selection. Good for reading beneath a tree in the autumn, in a graveyard.
   
   
4. Penguin Anthology 4 -
   
   It's edited by Rita Dove, so you know this collection has good taste. The poems are from a wide spread of poetry movements, but personally, I find a lot of the pieces in it to be a little too 'delicate'. But very good for reading naked in bed, while softly stroking the hair of your sleeping lover.
   
   
5. English Romantic Poetry 5 -
   
   Got all the biggies like Byron, Shelly and Keats. I fuckin love Keats. This book is a great introduction to 19th century poetry. This is good for reading on a bus while driving past a field of flowers on a humid summer evening with the windows open, reminiscing about your high school crush.

Thanks for your analysis. I definitely understand what you're saying about the subconscious/surreal element, and I guess I can see where you find a personal honesty in his films, but I don't know if I can agree that understanding Lynch's films can be a "very involving and rewarding process," simply because I haven't really enjoyed the physical process of watching his films.

Again, that's not to say they aren't good. I actually love works of art that are thematically similar. Sometimes shockingly so. If anyone here is a big fan of Eraserhead and is looking for something that's difficult to read, for example, check out the Comte de Lautréamont. There is one chapter in the Comte's most famous work where our (anti-)hero, Maldoror, while staying in a brothel, converses with an enormous hair follicle fallen from the scalp of God, which goes on to explain how its master enjoys coming down from on high to flay young male prostitutes alive. There is no discernible plot to the book, and the language is incredibly dense, but it is beautiful and dark and weird and grotesque. And, most importantly, so, so very difficult to understand. But worth it. As Lynch is, I'm sure.

I certainly plan on giving him more of his due down the road. Like I said, Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway are on my list of films I really ought to see. I would actually very much like to get David Lynch the way others do. To go back to a previous analogy, it's why I keep watching Steven Soderbergh films. I've wanted to catch that something that I've been missing in others' appreciations. With Soderbergh, I came to the conclusion that I simply do not like his filmmaking. (Please no one ask to explain that one.) I know I haven't given Lynch enough of a chance yet to say with finality that I won't some day "get it."

As it stands, though, I know Eraserhead is one of the more popular releases from Criterion this year, and I felt compelled to stand up for the few (Or is it just me? Just me? Okay. Just me.) who are not fans.

And on vikings - primary sources though not all of battles - here’s a quick overview of sources https://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/en/professions/education/viking-knowledge/archaeology-and-history/written-sources-for-the-viking-age/

They may be found around the web but here are links to a few to buy

I can recommend the
Icelandic sagas, personally I find them great fun lots of skull bashings - you may have to buy them.

at least some are here https://sagadb.org Or here https://archive.org/details/sagalibrarydonei01snoriala


Icelandic sagas
https://www.amazon.com/Sagas-Icelanders-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0141000031/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=icelandic+saga&qid=1559118780&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Saxo gramattucus or Saco’s saga (13th century danish ‘history’ of kings
https://www.amazon.com/Saxo-Grammaticus-History-English-Commentary/dp/0859915026


Snorris saga
https://www.amazon.com/Sagas-Norse-Kings-Snorri-Sturluson/dp/8209101730 - not sure if there is a newer more comprehensive translation as I read in original language

and the Eddas

Younger Edda
https://www.amazon.com/Edda-Illustrated-Snorri-Sturluson-ebook/dp/B00NCCEJ6O/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?keywords=edda+saga&qid=1559118593&s=gateway&sr=8-6

Elder Edda
https://www.amazon.com/Elder-Edda-Viking-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140435859/ref=mp_s_a_1_11?keywords=edda+saga&qid=1559118649&s=gateway&sr=8-11


And on vikings - primary sources though not all of battles

I can recommend the
Icelandic sagas, personally I find them great fun lots of skull bashings - you may have to buy them.

at least some are here https://sagadb.org Or here https://archive.org/details/sagalibrarydonei01snoriala


Icelandic sagas
https://www.amazon.com/Sagas-Icelanders-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0141000031/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=icelandic+saga&qid=1559118780&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Saxo gramattucus or Saco’s saga (13th century danish ‘history’ of kings
https://www.amazon.com/Saxo-Grammaticus-History-English-Commentary/dp/0859915026


Snorris saga
https://www.amazon.com/Sagas-Norse-Kings-Snorri-Sturluson/dp/8209101730 - not sure if there is a newer more comprehensive translation as I read in original language

and the Eddas

Younger Edda
https://www.amazon.com/Edda-Illustrated-Snorri-Sturluson-ebook/dp/B00NCCEJ6O/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?keywords=edda+saga&qid=1559118593&s=gateway&sr=8-6

Elder Edda
https://www.amazon.com/Elder-Edda-Viking-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140435859/ref=mp_s_a_1_11?keywords=edda+saga&qid=1559118649&s=gateway&sr=8-11

The Golden Transcendence Trilogy, starting with "The Golden Age". It's fantastic and it saddens me more people haven't read it. Here is the Amazon review:

> The Golden Age is Grand Space Opera, a large-scale SF adventure novel in the tradition of A. E. Van vogt and Roger Zelazny, with perhaps a bit of Cordwainer Smith enriching the style. It is an astounding story of super science, a thrilling wonder story that recaptures the excitements of SF's golden age writers.

> The Golden Age takes place 10,000 years in the future in our solar system, an interplanetary utopian society filled with immortal humans. Within the frame of a traditional tale-the one rebel who is unhappy in utopia-Wright spins an elaborate plot web filled with suspense and passion.

> Phaethon, of Radamanthus House, is attending a glorious party at his family mansion to celebrate the thousand-year anniversary of the High Transcendence. There he meets first an old man who accuses him of being an impostor and then a being from Neptune who claims to be an old friend. The Neptunian tells him that essential parts of his memory were removed and stored by the very government that Phaethon believes to be wholly honorable. It shakes his faith. He is an exile from himself.

> And so Phaethon embarks upon a quest across the transformed solar system--Jupiter is now a second sun, Mars and Venus terraformed, humanity immortal--among humans, intelligent machines, and bizarre life forms that are partly both, to recover his memory, and to learn what crime he planned that warranted such preemptive punishment. His quest is to regain his true identity.

> The Golden Age is one of the major, ambitious SF novels of the year and the international launch of an important new writer in the genre.

Here are my favourites:

Philip Larkin -- one of the greatest English poets, who uses the English language in its most elegant, plain and beautiful way. Often deals with death and love. A sample poem about the fear of death

Derek Walcott -- A poet of the Caribbean, known for epic poems. A sample poem about love

ee cummings -- a popular American poet who played with form. A sample poem

Emily Dickinson - maybe one of the most famous American poets, you can read a lot of her poetry online

Also online are the other big famous poets: Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, W.B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Keats, William Blake, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery. For each of these I'd just suggest googling and seeing what you like.

But I'm going to suggest to you some poetry by some new, rising poets, who are still alive and writing.

Sam Sax -- a young queer American poet who was the winner of the National Poetry Series. His work is incredible. Here is a video of him performing one of his earlier poems

Meg Freitag -- another young American poet who writes intimately about the self, heartache, etc, with gorgeous imagery. A sample poem

Kaveh Akbar -- an Iranian-American poet who has won a ton of awards.

Claudia Rankine is not young or up-and-coming given that she won a MacArthur and a Pulitzer prize but she is one of the most important poets writing today, and her work often revolves around blackness in America. She also writes prose poetry.

Maggie Nelson is also already famous -- Bluets is the most beautiful book, a meditation of grief and the colour blue.

I would honestly just go browse through https://www.poetryfoundation.org. It's so fun, and you can read poets by theme. That's a very good way to get into both classical and contemporary English language poetry.

I've read most of those and LOVED them. I'll just say you're looking for fictional "good books" and go from there. I recommend:

1. Lies of Locke Lamora and its sequels by Scott Lynch. My favorite books of all time--and that's saying something. It's about a gang of con-artist thieves caught between their biggest heist and a powerful mage and his employer, who wants to use them as a cat's paw.
   
   
2. Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Excellent fantasy with a witty, resourceful, extremely intelligent protagonist. Set in two timelines, the protagonist is the only survivor of a gypsy clan that was destroyed by a powerful enemy he vows to hunt down.
   
   
3. The Orphans of Chaos trilogy by John C. Wright. Amazingly original fantasy, with 4 paradigms of power and featuring a showdown between the Titans and Olympian gods.
   
   
4. The Golden Age Trilogy also by John C. Wright. This is faaaaar-future sci-fi (think 1+ million years), it's extremely creative, and if anyone else had attempted to write it, it would have turned into gobbledygook.
   
   
5. The Mary Russell series by Laurie R. King starting with The Beekeeper's Apprentice. This is a re-imagined Sherlock Holmes series done very well, set after his official retirement, when he meets a young woman who matches his intellect and observation skills and decides to take her on as protege.
   
   
6. The Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix. Pretty great YA fantasy in which trained practitioners can move beyond the gates of death...and have to battle things that come back from beyond those gates.
   
   
7. The Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathon Stroud. I had a ball with these books when they came out. Features a snarky demon and his master.
   
   
8. The Hungry City Chronicles by Phillip Reeve. Set in a post-apocalyptic type world where cities are mobile and move around, chasing smaller cities down across the landscape and cannibalizing them for resources.
   

Evan Currie's Odyssey One series is more military than pure space opera, but it is awesome.

The Golden Oecumene series by John C Wright is a Transhuman Space Opera of epic proportions. I highly recommend it.

Rachel Bach has a great series called Fortunes Pawn. Also a lil closer to military sci-fi but it has some nice Space Opera themes.

Joshua Dalzelle has a great series called the Black Fleet, again more military sci-fi than true space opera, but very good none the less.

The Reality Dysfunction series though, if you are looking for a meaty Space opera to lose yourself in is a must read series.

____

I almost forgot about the Manifold Series by Stephen Baxter and the Darwin's Radio series by Greg Bear. Both are phenomenal reads, and while technically they are set in the near future and aren't space opera per say, they are must reads for anyone into Sci-Fi.

There's probably a few ways you could go about expanding your knowledge base. The two that seem most fruitful are

1. Reading for a deeper understanding of the topics that you're already familiar with.
   
   
2. Ranging more broadly into other areas that may interest you.
   
   If (1), then I'd probably suggest one of two courses. Either, (a) read the stuff that influenced the existential thinkers that you've listed, or (b) read some literature dealing with issues related to the thinkers you've listed.
   
   For (a) I'd suggest the following:
   
   

• Anything by Kant
  
• (In the case of Kierkegaard) Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit or his Aesthetics
  
• (For Nietzsche) Emerson's essays, Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation, or Spinoza's Ethics
  
• Maybe some Freud for the later thinkers? Civilization and its Discontents is really good.
  
  For (b) it's really a mixed bag. I'd suggest going through the SEP articles on the thinkers you've listed and looking into some good secondary literature on them. If you're super interested in Nietzsche, I'd definitely suggest reading Leiter's Nietzsche on Morality. I really couldn't tell you more unless you told me something more specific about your interests.
  
  If (2), then I suppose I'd suggest one of the following:
  
  
• Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy for a good, broad introduction to Chinese Thought
  
• The Analects of Confucius. This translation is excellent
  
• A Short History of Chinese Philosophy
  
• Heidegger's Being and Time
  
• Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception
  
• Some of Rilke's work
  
• Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life
  
  Again, it's hard to give you better directions without more information on what you're actually interested in. I've just thrown a bunch of stuff at you, and you couldn't possibly be expected to read, say, Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation over break and be expected to really understand it.

Mine:

Somewhere a Raven is Dreaming, $10
free version

 

A Soul in Baker's Dozen Pieces, $5
free version

 


Kick and the Cheese Warehouse, $5
free version

 


Mine and others:
The Best of OCPoetry, Years 1-3
free version

 

I believe the role of the modern poet to be much the same as the modern comedian or comic artist, albeit in a different format - which is to say or write in a way that is societally relevant and/or essentially forces someone to use their brain.

Starting out, I imitated Robert Frost, Robert Browning, and William Blake.

I want to be more like James Elroy Flecker (when it comes to use of meter), Brenden Norwood (the guy keeps coming up with these brilliant images that I wish I thought of first), and LF Call (an unending wellspring of creativity. I mean those birdsong poems, mein Gott...). There's plenty more, including the rest of the team here, but those are who come to mind at the moment.

The most recent thing to inspire one of my poems was playing Taps at a military funeral - not just hearing it over a loudspeaker at night, or even hearing a bugler play it as I watch the casket get loaded on the plane, but being the one to play it - the cold metal, the shifting light, the family and me both trying to keep it together, the whole experience.

Not exactly what you asked for, but you did ask what you had to read and, well, that makes things easy. Philip Larkin and W.H Auden are often thought of as the finest poets of the 20;th century. The following two books have brought me tremendous pleasure. Auden was also one of the most skilled and versatile formal poets who has ever lived.

http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Poems-Philip-Larkin/dp/0374529205

http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Poems-Auden-W-H/dp/0679731970/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1404601714&sr=8-3&keywords=w.h.auden

Hope you enjoy.
/J

My favorite post-singularity fiction is the Golden Age trilogy by John C. Wright. Superintelligent AI, virtual reality, and mind uploading, and he still manages a deeply human tale of epic heroism. It's a little hard to get into for the first three or four chapters, but then it really takes off. I've read it three times.

Greg Egan's work is pretty interesting, eg. Permutation City, which is mainly about uploading etc.

For more of the near-future speculation side of Accelerando, Cory Doctorow writes a lot of good stuff. And there's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom which is post-singularity.

Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age is pretty much a classic, covering nanotech, AI-based education, and all sorts of craziness. One of my favorites.

The Golden Age by John C. Wright, and its two sequels, The Phoenix Exultant: and The Golden Transcendence.

It's not quite what I think you mean by transhumanism, but it's a great posthuman novel. The publisher says:

> The end of the Millennium is imminent, when all minds, human, posthuman, cybernetic, sophotechnic, will be temporarily merged into one solar-system-spanning supermind called the Transcendence. This is not only the fulfillment of a thousand years of dreams, it is a day of doom, when the universal mind will pass judgment on all the races of humanity and transhumanity.

The trilogy is written with style and humor, with a strong dash of the classics, and with an eye toward limits and implications of communication across different levels of computational capacity, mind architecture, and processing speed.

In fact I think I just talked myself into re-reading it :-)

There's húsabœr or staðr. Both can mean "farmstead" or "farm" but húsabœr gives the connotation of the buildings that make up the farm or the dwellings for people/animals while staðr is closer to the English "-stead", meaning more of the land/location. Its also used widely to mean "place" or "spot."

There's also bú which means "farming" (like the action or business of farming) or "household" but is used for a lot of other things as well.

If you wanted to be a bit dramatic with the river bluff feature, you could use nes, which is "headland". So, for example, in Landnámabók, there's a "Herjólfsnes", which is the land taken by a man named Herjolf. I've seen a lot of personal names incorporated into geographical terms to make place names. So if your name was Aaron, say, you could then have "Aaronsnes" or "Aaron's Headland."

Edit: You could also do the same with staðr, so: "Aaronsstaðr".

You can look at Zoëga's dictionary to see more details on the terms.

In modern Icelandic, I found býli or kot (for a small cottage farm). See here and here.

Good luck and congrats on getting a farm!

Hey man, sorry for not getting back to you yesterday. Here are some recommendations.

https://www.amazon.com/Maldoror-Complete-Works-Comte-Lautréamont/dp/187897212X/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2UG7IORZO7MOG&keywords=maldoror+english&qid=1563734129&s=gateway&sprefix=malodor%2Caps%2C132&sr=8-3

​

https://www.amazon.com/Exploits-Opinions-Dr-Faustroll-Pataphysician/dp/1878972073/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3FIN94ANSVCSJ&keywords=exploits+and+opinions+of+dr.+faustroll%2C+pataphysician&qid=1563734228&s=gateway&sprefix=dr+faustroll+%2Caps%2C125&sr=8-1

​

https://www.amazon.com/Valerie-Week-Wonders-Vitezslav-Nezval/dp/808626419X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MVWRWT2G7RYS&keywords=valerie+and+her+week+of+wonders+book&qid=1563734389&s=gateway&sprefix=valerie+and+her+wee%2Caps%2C126&sr=8-1

​

https://www.amazon.com/Mount-Analogue-Non-Euclidean-Symbolically-Mountaineering/dp/1585673420/ref=pd_rhf_dp_s_pd_crcd__20?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1585673420&pd_rd_r=885af56e-246c-4203-b69a-3ada3d549cad&pd_rd_w=nBgvG&pd_rd_wg=D0uLp&pf_rd_p=d17c2de0-cc1d-4b09-aad8-987099a21717&pf_rd_r=MPT3RGNB79T8MX0H41BF&psc=1&refRID=MPT3RGNB79T8MX0H41BF

​

the first two are not surrealism in the sense of the authors being part of the actual movement but they were precursors for it as well as being hugely influential to all who took part within the movement; the first one specifically, was said to be, by the surrealists themselves, their bible and holy grail. Surrealism can be quite difficult to read and hard to understand if one is not acquainted with the time period and the history of their epoch but if you stick with it it will pay off in time. You may have to do a little research into the back-stories of each author but this will only benefit you in the end: the last two will be much simpler to read on their own as they are more or less, linear straight-forward fictions. Good Luck!

I just happened to end up at a university that had a professor of Old Norse. Modern Icelandic and Faroese are pretty close and there is an Old Norse dictionary (Zoega's concise dictionary - it's concise because he was going to make a larger one but died before he could). My old norse professor has two textbooks you can get on amazon (textbook 1 and textbook 2) but I don't know how good those are because he was writing them while I was taking his courses. There's also this textbook which I've never used but has good reviews.

You can also learn modern Icelandic and then study Old Norse because they very similar. It may be easier to do it that way. We also read the sagas in the original Old Norse which was very interesting.

1. Maldoror and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont
   
2. 10/10
   
3. Classic French Literature, Misanthropic, Nihilism, Philosophic.
   
4. Anyone who recommends Journey to the End of the Night as an exemplar of misanthropic literature has obviously never read Maldoror, which isn't too much of a surprise considering this classic of French lit is criminally unknown to the majority of people. This poetic novel doesn't really have a plot, so it becomes a bit difficult to really summarize it by it's plot. If you want a character you who truly embodies amor fati, then I highly recommend this novel.
   
5. Amazon, Goodreads

I've used Hippocrene's Beginner's Icelandic as well as Complete Icelandic. I fell off the wagon and haven't devoted any time recently to learning, but both books were helpful when I was trying to learn. If I had to choose only one of them, I'd probably choose Complete Icelandic, but they were useful to me in tandem because each covered little things that the other didn't.

I've also heard that Icelandic Learning is very useful. IIRC, you have to pass the entire course before you can apply for citizenship/visas. I could be wrong on that, it's been a few years.

first replying to the topic of clarity & purple

didnt know they had a phrase for this:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose
  
  
• https://medium.com/@lucillemoncrief/what-is-purple-prose-beige-prose-and-blue-language-9cae7fd44ba9
  
  
• https://thewritepractice.com/purple-prose/
  
  
• https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=purple%20prose
  
  tho i understand it harms clarity tho:
  
  
• the context requires it
  
  
• & it's not meant for other minds so it wont be relevant to this context
  
  ---
  
  it seems overall that many dont like thes kinds of things,
  
  
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniara#Reception
  
  
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1138948.Aniara
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Aniara-Epic-Science-Fiction-Poem/dp/1885266634
  
  & overall culturally this has been the trend
  
  ---
  
  i also dont like these kinds of things tho i can understand some of the main reasons why others would think that this is the only and best that certain things could said
  
  tho i should add that i dont consider the scene/piece that poetic/purple cos it could be 1000x more so
  
  tho that's the thing with relative words like 'purple' and such, they're all just relative, and in that way, they do lose 1) clarity & 2) meaning
  
  ---
  
  

Why would you ask a question about taxes without asking what those taxes pay for? They pay for the shit everyone needs.

As for learning the language, there are two decent books I can recommend: Colloquial Icelandic and Beginner's Icelandic. But nothing is going to save you from the fuckton of grammar you have to learn within the first 40 pages or so. Spend the extra on the companion CDs.

It’s a fantastic read, by the way. The commentary is good if you’re into that sort of thing, but there’s also some other writing in their that’s a lot of fun.

Amazon link

I recommend Wendy Cope and Billy Collins.

Wendy Cope is a UK poet. Her first collection Maiking Cocoa for Kingsley Amis is perhaps her most famous.

Billy Collins was the US Poet Laurette. He has a wonderful way with words. Highly recommended.

I love Wendy Cope and she has some good collections - Family Values and Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis ae two of my favourites

Rainier Maria Rilke

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone

enough
to truly consecrate the hour.

I am much too small in this world, yet not small

enough

to be to you just object and thing,

dark and smart.

I want my free will and want it accompanying

the path which leads to action;

and want during times that beg questions,

where something is up,

to be among those in the know,

or else be alone.

My husband has a copy of this Penguin Anthology. It's a great collection of surrealist poetry.

I also recommend the Secret Life of Salvador Dali by Salvador Dali. I remember reading the chapter on intra-uterine memories in one of my Freshmen English classes in college.

Other works of fiction that contain the concept of a metaverse;

Books

• The Otherland series, by Tad Williams, beginning with City of Golden Shadow (sidenote, this series also has an MMORPG based on it, currently in closed beta, and recently (October of last year) brought back from the dead)
  
  
• The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons, beginning with Hyperion.
  
  
• The Golden Oecumene, by John C. Wright, beginning with The Golden Age.
  
  
• Accel World, by Reki Kawahara, beginning with Kuroyukihime's Return. (If you are familiar with the manganime Sword Art Online, this is by the same author, and shares the same universe)
  
  
• This Alien Shore, by Celia S. Friedman. (amazon link)
  
  
• The Sprawl Trilogy, by William Gibson, beginning with Neuromancer.
  
  
• Accelerando, by Charles Stross. (free e-book link)
  
  Anime and Manga
  
  
• The .hack series, specifically .hack//SIGN
  
  
• For a lighter feel, there's Summer Wars (available on CrunchyRoll) and the INCREDIBLY similar second Digimon movie, Our War Game!. Also I guess by extension, but not really explored as much, the entire Digimon series, as it takes place in an analogy for the internet.
  
  
• Serial Experiments Lain
  
  
• Okay fine, here's Sword Art Online (CrunchyRoll link)
  
  Film
  
  
• The Singularity is Near, a speculative documentary based on the Ray Kurzweil book of the same name.
  
  
• The Thirteenth Floor, a crime thriller about the owner of a VR simulation company getting murdered.
  
  ----
  
  I know I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the genre, because if there's one thing humans are good at, it's writing fucktons on what we like.
  
  So feel free to comment additions to this list, or opinions on what I've currently included. I have by no means read/watched all of these, so having someone with actual experience with each of these weigh in would be nice.

If you have not yet read it you might enjoy Will Self's Dorian, which updates the story to the era of pre-cocktail HIV/AIDS.

If it is fin de siecle libertinage that attracts you then you might be interested in the Decadent Movement. My personal favorite work is Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal which is just dripping with sickly sweet amorality, but it is Huysman's Against Nature that is considered the manifesto work.

...and it's available for pre-order on Amazon UK, at least. Thank you for reminding me of that! It will have a bunch of otherwise very hard-to-find poems that were early versions of much of the work in the book as well as, apparently, an unfinished prose story about Tom.

>The Poets of Reddit: The Best of OCPoetry Years 1-3 $5.14, 186 pgs, softcover




Do you take poems that users post in this subreddit and sell them in a book?

The item on my wishlist I want is this. It is the album that introduced me to punk when I was a little guy. It is just such an important album for me and the genre as a whole. It was and is revolutionary. Plus Johnny Rotten is probably your cousin or something!

The coolest thing on my wishlist is this. A little known sci-fi epic poem full of hoplessness and despair, what is cooler than that! Also, the only sci-fi book to win a nobel prize. Just all around cool-ness.

One of my sci-fi favs which is CRUNCHY in its sci-fi is The Golden Age by John Wright. The plot is twisty enough you won’t know where it will head, but the ideas in the book are so constant that many have trouble reading it. Not because it’s bad but rather it’s DENSE. The next two in the trilogy is easier though. Do please read some reviews first.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Golden-Age-Paperback-ebook/dp/B000FA5QJK/

Pretty recent stuff:

John Brown's Body

The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel

Aniara

Here is a link to the hardcover version on Amazon. :)

Poetry: Richard Howard translated The Flowers of Evil. The original text follows the English. It's a good thing, too, because Richard Howard once translated "les affaires hexagonales" as "hexagonal affairs".

In addition, you can read the poems at this website.

As for Rimbaud, here's Wallace Fowlie's bilingual edition of his poetry. Unfortunately, it sets the English beside the French. That said, it collects much of what Rimbaud wrote. It isn't bad.

I would recommend reading the book, it’s dope! here you can buy it on amazon I think. if I did it right

This translation by Alexis Lykiard is the one I have, it's very good.

https://www.amazon.com/Maldoror-Complete-Works-Comte-Lautr%C3%A9amont/dp/187897212X/ref=sr_1_11?keywords=le+chants+de+maldoror&qid=1562627249&s=gateway&sr=8-11

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0781811910/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1397625371&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40

Beginner's Icelandic by Helga Hilmisdóttir Is a good resource. It comes with discs with examples of pronunciation. The pronunciation guide is written for Brits which it's only evident in one example. It gives a simple overview of the language.

Other than that I would say that pretty much everyone you will meet will speak English. Almost to the point of frustration if you are trying to learn icelandic.

Hi,
I have been trying to learn a bit Icelandic myself, as a Norwegian, I do see some similiarities between the two languages, but belive me when I say that Icelandic is crazy difficult. It's not to put you off, but you have to be prepeared.

I bought a nice little book to get me started, I haven't read so many "learn-languages-yourself books" so I can't really comparere, but I found this to be helpful (looks like it's sold out :( )

Icelandic have, as you pointed out, grammatical genders, wich means that you will have to learn what "gender" a noun have. Icelandic have 3 genders, masculin, feminin and neuter. You will have to learn the genders with the nouns. The difficult thing with grammatical genders is that it does not seem to follow any rules. (In Norwegian for instance, "Pike", wich means "little girl" is a masculin noun)

Some nice websites

• English - Icelandic dictionary
  
• Verb-conjugator
  
• Free online course (highly recomended)
  
• Newspaper, also video clips

That was the first and only thing that came to mind when I tried to think of one. I was thinking only of Geir T. Zoëga, the apparently quite well-known guy who compiled my Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. (Spoiler alert: it's not very concise.)

I bought it at Barnes and Noble, but it is also available on Amazon here.

For anyone who's interested, there's a newly released translation by JRR Tolkien out. I've only read excerpts so far, but it seems more lyrical than Heaney's translation.

The Golden Age trilogy has a lot of future-law in it. The main character is essentially caught up in a legal battle which he can't remember due to his memories being erased. One of my favorites of the last 10 years or so.

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Icelandic-Two-Audio-CDs/dp/144410537X

https://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Icelandic-Audio-CDs-Hippocrene/dp/0781811910

https://www.amazon.com/Colloquial-Icelandic-Complete-Course-Beginners/dp/1138949736

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Icelandic-idiosyncrasies-delights/dp/993592985X/

• By John C. Wright: The Golden Age (first in a trilogy) and the upcoming Count to a Trillion (likewise).
  
• By Greg Egan: Permutation City (in its second half) (excerpt), Diaspora (excerpt), Border Guards, Schild's Ladder (excerpt), Riding the Crocodile/Incandescence (excerpt of the latter).
  
• Possibly Iain M. Banks' Culture series; they say you should start with The Player of Games.
  
• Riding the Crocodile and the elsewhere-mentioned Thousandth Night first appeared in the anthology One Million AD.
  
• Relevant TV Tropes pages: Human Subspecies, Time Abyss, Transhuman Aliens.
  
  In response to this comment, Egan's one example of someone who wrote near-future stories in the '90s that remain non-ridiculous.

A bit OT (you might already know this, other readers might not), but Tolkien was so into Beowulf he penned his own translation: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0544442784?pc_redir=1412081864&robot_redir=1

Collected writings of Rilke. Maybe this one.