(Part 2) Best products from r/OCPoetry

I just self published a book. It's about relationships. I'm very interested in Sternberg's theory on love...that the three components of consummate love are passion, intimacy, and commitment. My poems deal with these subjects. I'd love for anyone interested to check out my book! :)

www.amazon.com/dp/1977994814/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_4zr4zbW6018MK

Mechanics of Reincarnation is on Gumroad and Kindle and Smashwords. Check out the physical book on Gumroad because it's actually quite nice imo -- we went with a Risograph printing process, and with a sleeve like an album. Also -- you don't have to buy my book, I performed and edited a film of it in a psychedelic style, and I'm putting it up in twenty parts on YouTube one part a week. I'm on part six coming up tomorrow.

>What do you believe is the role of the modern poet?

I think it's to expand poetry to a revelance. If you buy we're in a Closed-Mind Crisis, which I truly believe we are, then I think it's poetry's role to forge an approach to meaning-making without the propagandic assumption. The modern poet's role is to fix the world. To skate out onto Kierkegaard's thin ice for the real thing.

>What poet(s) did you imitate, starting out? Alternatively, what poet(s) do you hope to be like in the future?

Octavio Paz, Tranströmer and Ben Lerner. Little bit of Anne Carson and Tracy K Smith. A lot of Emily Nelson. I want to be Mac Vogt. I want to research neurophilosophy much more deeply. And I want a deeper romanticism.

>What's the most recent thing to inspire one of your poems?

Breaking up with my girlfriend after watching Call Me By Your Name + struggling with declining viewership of my YouTube series and no sales outside of close family, even as I still believe I'm making one of the best things in the world.

I have two books but everyone’s favorite seems to be Supermarket Diaries. It’s a book of poems/vignettes about my customers that I’ve had over the years basically giving everyone a backstory so I could regain empathy for the masses. There are a few random ones in there also, one about bottle deposits, an open letter to the pope asking for a saint for customer service reps, a love poem for a boy who worked in produce and an open letter to Nabisco about Oreos.

Anyway if it sounds interesting here’s the link.supermarket diaries

Welcome to OCPoetry (as commenter)! That didn't come off as ranty at all. I think we need longer (considered, earnest) comments on the internet.

Anyway, I'm not an expert by any means, just a friendly loner/devotee with a spending problem and a massive library. I've read a lot of poetry and writing about poetry -- I think that's probably the key to understanding the stuff on a deeper level as both a reader and a writer.

I'm going to be brief with this comment cause I'm at work, BUT with the addition of read, read, read, my advice to /u/grandmasterlane above stands: Spend more time with your poems. Find ways to make the poem you're working on the only thing you think about.

Additionally, buy a copy of Roget's and a good dictionary and spend lots of time in those places and on etymonline.com exploring the meaning and origin of words. I think loving words is super important. Every time you choose one word over another it has to be an act of determination, calculation, holistic consideration. Every word collides with every other word in a poem. It's a weird thing to see a masterful poet make that work. I'll try and think of a particular great example and get back to you. (Immediately I think of Wallace Stevens' "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself" a poem in which the poet uses EVERY. SINGLE. WORD. to alchemically evoke the image/experience of a sun actively rising in the reader's mind. That short poem appears in my mind because I've spent hours with it. Reading. Rereading. Defining every word that I thought I knew. Memorizing. Reciting.)

OK. That's it for now.

STOP WRITING THINGS I WANT TO TATTOO ON MY BODY.

First two stanzas are really cool, the first being the richer in metaphor. We has this line:

>No butterfly

which establishes the dead world this is written in, while conjuring up the flourishing images it is necessarily contrasted to immediately.

>emerged from the dirt,

here we have genesis, here we have genesis sterilized

>but we knelt in it—

O dear lord, this is the best 'invoking sacarlity' I've seen in a long, long time. We're talking since I've read Trilogy quality. Not much to say, except its pure, direct, and perfect.

>the black plains

I'll start by saying this is the weakest stanza in the piece (and still p damn good). This is a damn good enjambment and forces so many images to crowd on top of one another.

>of the sea, an oscillating

as I'm writing this i'm getting less comfortable calling this the weakest stanza. This enjambment allows a direct nod to the
imagery sublimated and buried throughout the piece.

>saw up to his knee,

This image is functional, but feels the taddest bit awkward compared to the embarrassing mastery the rest of the work displays. I understand the re-occurrence of the kneeling here, but the rhyme is a bit strong and it doesn't feel the same as the kneeling.

>but why does lightning

my favorite stanza but I don't like this enjambment. Consider:

>but why does lightning kneel,
as we do, before a kiln,

>kneel, as we do,

I see that you enjambed that way to afford this line, which allows an instructional voice to seep through, so I'm torn. God damn this is a good piece.

>before a kiln,

yep, I came. This is perfect, if you want me to write an essay about this i will.

>and keep winging

just realized this is could be modified slightly (personifying the waters) and become a chiastic structure. Not sure you want that, but I thought I'd put it out there.

>black into the earth,
as a keepsake?

don't have much to say about these, but they work. Pls, pls sign me a first edition of your first book so my children can't sell it for money.

If you believe your words are gospel, then just accept the feedback and move on with your life. If you want to start down the road of legitimately writing poetry that someone who actually reads poetry can appreciate, it's time to get to fucking work.

Of course, you think your "words" are special, but they aren't. This is the same thing every beginner churns out. It's cliché abstraction and it's not worth sharing with anyone. You can call it "poetry" and say it's your "art" and that poetry can't be "defined" -- whatever.

But anyone who actually reads poetry will recognize your "words" immediately for what they are and turn the page.

Read some poetry, man. Read some books about writing poetry and the tools poets use to craft their poems. If you need recommendations, I can give you some, but you'll have to do some fucking work. You might have missed the memo, but writing poetry is hard work.

***

Edit: Here some recommendations to get you started.

• A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver
  
• The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser
  
• In the Palm of Your Hand by Steve Kowit
  
• The Poet's Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux
  
  And if you insist on trying to use end rhymes:
  
  
• Rules for the Dance by Mary Oliver
  
  And please, please pick up a good book of poems from multiple authors so you can get some exposure, such as the Norton Anthology of Poetry or the compilation Good Poems by Garrison Keillor. One of my favorites is A Book of Luminous Things by Czeslaw Milosz.

In real life my name is Ernest Whitman Piper IV, and I am a writer and editor. Most of my published writing has been travel-related. My first book was an "adventure guide" which teaches young uni graduates and gap year types how and where to travel long-term, and why it is worth doing. It's I think available still on amazon and smashwords still though it's wildly out of date at this point. My second book was a brief memoir about producing a musical in Istanbul, and it is available nowhere, because I wrote it for my friends. (Though I recently talked to my mom and she suggested stripmining the both of them for material and making one ur-memoir about all my time spent in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it's not a bad idea.) I am currently working on a novel about a murder mystery, also set in Istanbul, and that's all you're getting from me on that.

My travel writing has also appeared in the Stranger in Seattle, as well as in the Daily Sabah, an unabashed propaganda outlet for the curent government of Turkey. And while I really cannot stand the current government in Turkey, there was a brief window where they paid me to travel all around the Balkans and Turkey and write whatever I wanted, which was pretty cool.

In terms of poetry I've got...not much? I'm very shy about my poetry. I have not been published anywhere for a long long time, other than like...my uni's lit journal ages ago. I've published here on the sub mostly. I credit this community for getting me back into it.

I started out trying to write like slash have been deeply influenced by:
Mairead Byrne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rumi, Nazim Hikmet, Shakespeare, Ocean Vuong, John Ashbery, Shel Silverstein, Derek Mahon, Catullus, Allen Ginsberg, Mary Oliver...I have to stop now or this list is going to get very long indeed

The modern poet's in a strange boat on a foreign sea. I think the mission of any poet should be to map the connections between islands and currents we didn't know were nearby. Poets celebrate useless things and magnify the unseen. I agree with /u/gwrgwir in that a poem should ask that its readers use their brains -- like basically a poet's task these days phrased in practical terms is "why read or write a poem when I could just scroll through the internet for hours unreflectively?"

The most recent thing that inspired a poem was a particularly brutal hangover.

Hi guys! Here’s a poem from my newest poetry book. There’s no title so... it’s just me expressing 😊

skin like the night that felt

smooth like honey;

she was a treasure, one that was rare and one that

was imperfectly beautiful


she often forgot that part.


her eyes matched the pupils that

made lies to pull her ankles down

she was never pretty enough

never skinny enough

She

always had to be better.


tears stained the mattress,

the one that barely supported her

heaving, thick body

why couldn’t she look the way she

Wanted

she just wanted to be

Love

She

lost her home when she lost her soul.

digging for happiness she is trying to

pry the doors open for success so desperately

she wants out. why did it seem like it wouldn’t, it

Couldn’t

seem to work. nothing seemed to go the way she

wanted and all she asked for were for two things

and she never stopped

to think what was missing was inside because

she was broken and needed help but

where you’re not looking you will never

Find.

SWLSCF

Really well done. I like the attention to detail you put in, e.g. when discussing Judaism, using G-d instead of God. I'm not sure devotion is a worldly possession, as that implies devotion is a physical object that can be manipulated as such. Otherwise, solid concepts. Keep writing. A book that may be of interest: http://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Prayers-Healing-Alden-Solovy/dp/1940353157

I just published a book of poems available here https://www.amazon.com/Shattered-Mind-Kylan-Rain/dp/1539149560/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1478487676&sr=8-1&keywords=kylan+rain

I was wondering if you guys could give me feedback on any of these. Is visual poetry something that I should stay away from or is it tasteful. I just want to know if any of these are of merit or how long I have to go before people REALLY like it.

I just bought this crossword book and I thought you. If you need some new inspiration. :)

Rhyming dictionaries are effing brilliant. The online resources like rhymezone don't come close to a proper rhyming dictionary. This one is my favorite.

Also, if you want to learn more about form and poetic tools (rhyme, meter, assonance, alliteration, repeated lines, etc) you should pick up Lewis Turco's Book Of Forms. It's an excellent resource for someone delving into the world of poetry. I know that free-form poetry is all the rage but learning to write in rigid forms is not only beautiful but it's going to make you a better writer in general.

I apologize in advance if this is not an acceptable place to share a link, so if a mod wants me to remove this comment, I'll be more than happy too.

I just wanted to share that I will be releasing my first book of poetry early next year. Pre-orders for the Kindle version went live today. (Print edition and Nook will be available in February.)

It's a collection of 80+ poems pulled from 100s that I had written between 2005 and 2017. The focus is on how the recession and technology (among other things) have changed the way young adults interact with each other.

The link to the Amazon pre-order is here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07777BQBK