Hot answers tagged poetry
14
A bad metaphor is like your 81-year-old Portuguese grandfather. Really, only close family members and people from that region can even understand him at all, and even then he's talking nonsense half the time, and he talks for far too long about things most people are unfamiliar with.
A good metaphor is a lot like a mime - it neatly conveys the essence of ...
8
The answer, like most things in writing, is that it depends.
In my own poetry writing I've found that I am greatly helped by first learning and strictly following all stylistic guidelines. I have often been drawn towards formal verse structures such as the villanelle, Shakespearian-style sonnet, or sestina. By forcing myself to follow these guidelines, I ...
8
Because a poem is more compact than prose, indentation (and line breaks, spacing, leading, and anything else you can think of) can add additional meaning to the poem. So unlike prose, go ahead and indent however you like... as long as there's a reason for it.
In your second example, if the poet likes the idea of pairing the couplets visually, that's the ...
8
There's a saying I heard in a writing workshop:
If you don't know what you want to
say or how you want to say it, write
a novel.
If you know what you want to say, but
not how you want to say it, write a
short story.
If you know what you want to say, and
exactly how you want to say it, write
a poem.
This means that whatever your subject, you should find ...
8
A special method? No. There surely are guides, but I doubt their value.
Poetic translation is one of the most difficult tasks of the writer craft (and probably the most difficult of the more common ones) often topping writing original poetry in means of difficulty. A guide or resource may help, but you need very, very much talent and perform a painstakingly ...
7
You mentioned that German is not your first language, In this case, I suspect that you're modifying the syntax of the sentence in ways that native speakers would not, and thereby violating the rules of German poetics.
All languages have different registers, and it is extremely common for a language to allow constructions in poetry which aren't allowed in ...
6
Sure, what are you waiting for?
Go to http://kdp.amazon.com/ and publish it right now. Log in, paste it into the form, fill out the book details and click submit.
Amazon deletes you? Try Barnes and Noble. Go to http://pubit.barnesandnoble.com/. Follow the three simple steps.
Barnes and Noble deletes you? Try Feedbooks. Go to ...
6
A short answer: The rule is there is no rule.
Now, saying some useful stuff:
Unless you want to fit some "standard", the indentation, as most of the punctuation, is yours. Emily Dickinson was heavily criticized for her use of punctuation in her time, although she's widely appreciated nowadays.
So, a bit on the standards: every now and then a group of ...
6
A good metaphor will parallel or easily invoke the idea you're trying to convey, without extraneous or irrelevant details. It resonates with the audience and may add to the core idea.
A poor metaphor has baggage of its own, doesn't track with the original concept, is too clunky, too esoteric, needs too much explanation, or becomes absurd.
6
Abuse grammar all you wish! Leave it dead in a ditch if you must to get the rhythm right. Right now the nice imagery is being let down with by the dragging artificiality of the metre.
To see why, just separate all the syllables, and annotate them to show the stresses. There is a formal way to show this, but for the purposes of clarity, I'll just bold-face ...
5
It's writing where the concept of the piece is more important than the form of it.
This interview with Kenneth Goldsmith might be enlightening. Or you can read some of his own writing on the subject.
This quote, I think, sums the movement up quite well:
The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn't need to be read. You don't have to read ...
5
Well, first off, it should be a metaphor, not a simile. :) Ahem...
A great metaphor recasts the familiar or mundane as something strikingly different yet truly parallel. It gives a startlingly vivid picture or brings a surprising insight. A bad metaphor fails to achieve the parallel, or the fresh insight, or both. The element of surprise is an important ...
4
Are you trying to make the women look good, or bad? Like, are they deliberately hurting the men who fall for them, or have they been honest about their intentions and just can't help it if men don't believe them?
If you're looking for a negative metaphor, I think the Greeks could probably help. Helen of Troy springs to mind, but maybe also Pandora, the ...
4
Writer's Market publishes a few different books, including one for poets, which include listings of publishers, agents, magazines, contests, anthologies, etc.
You can find them in most major bookstores. They come out once a year, but there are also listings available on their paid-subscription website: http://www.writersmarket.com/ . It's worthwhile noting ...
4
I would suggest that this is a hybrid form of refrain, which is a "phrase, line, or group of lines repeated at intervals throughout a poem, generally at the end of the stanza". The usage you demonstrate isn't your typical refrain, since your example repeats a phrase from the previous sentence, and does not repeat it again. A repetend, which is a type of ...
4
I'm not a poet by any stretch of the imagination, but for what it's worth ...
Perhaps what you need to do is impose more limits on your poetry to force clearer thinking.
For example, I find the limiting syllabic structures of haiku to be paradoxically freeing by forcing me to choose words very carefully to express what I have to say. As a starting point, ...
3
The problem here is that the current assortment of e-readers do not have the horizontal scrollbar, so the width of your e-book is always going to be fixed. To further complicate things, there are several different sizes of e-readers, especially considering that Kindle and Nook both have software apps that allow people to read e-books on their smart phones. ...
3
You might want to check out Poets & Writers
http://www.pw.org/
It is a bi-monthly Magazine.
And as it says on their home page:
"If you’re looking for writing competitions, or literary magazines and small presses that welcome both new and established writers, begin here."
3
I would suggest going to Amazon.com and do a search for Poetry under their Books category. I did this and then sorted by Publication Date. This will give you a list of poetry books that have recently been published. I selected six and found three that are currently taking submissions, although you have just missed the deadline for one of them. Even so, you ...
3
I would check on duotrope.com. They list a large number of publishers looking to publish individual poems, chapbooks, as well as full collections. You will be able to sort by genre, pay scales, and acceptance rates. Once you find a few possible publishers, find out what else they're publishing and if you think you'd fit with them.
3
1) Stop fixing everything at once.
Write your first round to get it on paper.
On your second round, pick one thing to fix: sharpen your rhymes, for example.
Next round, work on the meter.
Let it sit for a day. Come back with fresher eyes and work on word choice.
2) Kill your darlings.
Editing oneself is one of the hardest parts of writing. What this ...
3
To quickly generate metaphors I grab my thesaurus and I find words that mean the same thing as the concept I'm trying to metaphorize. I tend to pick out words that do not sound at all similar despite having the same meaning. After I have a collection of words as a baseline, I write a sentence each to describe each of them. I pick the most illustrative ...
3
Haiku don't have to have 17 syllables. That "rule" is based on something that makes sense in Japanese, not so much in English.
The "syllables" (onji) in Japanese are in a 5 - 7- 5 pattern, but Japanese is primarily polysyllabic...so creating Haiku in English based on the same pattern is likely to result in a poem that is often too long.
Haiku is less a ...
3
Line three has a nice ring to it. The line that tripped me up is four, because the verbs temporarily confused me. "Scars" could be either a verb or noun, so my brain was kind of expecting one thing and got another.
The line is also ambiguous (maybe your intention?). I'm not 100% sure whether you mean that the stone face has scarred some other, unnamed ...
3
Several song-writers here in Egypt write lyrics in both English and Arabic, Maher Zain and Cat Stevens also do this. Their ability to do so is because they are just about as skilled with English as they are with Arabic. If a poet wants to translate their own poems I would suggest they locate a poet who adequately understands both the source language and the ...
3
If you're writing this as a pastiche - an original work which closely resembles some specific author's style - something that "they could have written", you're clean: style is not copyrightable. Of course this must be entirely original work, which may use similar construction - similar metaphors, same meter, the same stylistic tools but entirely original ...
2
The best advice I can give you on this can be summed up in one word: practice. The more poetry you write, the easier it becomes. Of course, "easy" is a relative term, because it really never is truly easy. In spite of that, you will start to find that some of it starts to become more natural. I have written almost 1000 poems, published six volumes of poetry ...
2
The obvious is that there is no rule, apart the ones set by the poet.
Let us generalise what you call 'indenting' as 'positioning text' in a poem.
Some observations:
A visual 'movement' of the text can be a hint to the specific meter of the poem, hence strengthening what could be not so blatant to the reader.
Moreover, while most of ...
2
ePub (the broad standard used by Google Books, the iBook Store, etc.) and .mobi (used by Kindle and some others) are both HTML and CSS under the hood, with all the strengths and frailties that implies. Worse, the current standards (ePub 2 and the current Kindle) are based on a subset of late-90s HTML and CSS. You can take a look at what's inside an ePub by ...
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