Thanks for the kind words, Keeper.

Here's my terrible, too-clever-by-half confession: I wrote the poem so that it has twelve lines, with ten syllables in each of the first eleven lines, and nine syllables in the last line. If you treat each line as a thrown ball and each syllable as a pin, then the poem bowls a 299.

Oh my god I love weird games with syllables aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

That is very good. I feel badly about not noticing. However, it furthers the importance of those last four words!

I can't speak about poetry -- although, the more I think about writing poetry (I actually have two ideas floating around for poems, one about Phyrexia and one about immortality), the more I wish to learn about how it works. There's so much I don't understand and cannot see/hear, like iambs, that I would need to understand in order to give life to those thoughts I have.



Guys, the bigger this thread gets (to say nothing of how Szat's notes and the Most Common Mistakes of Writers has been buried by recent activity), the more I wonder where the best place to put a post gathering up links to all these useful posts would be. Maybe I could just make a resource thread where people could post all those things? That way theoretically it could keep getting bumped by people's contributions? Anybody have any thoughts on the matter?

Well, I'm certainly no expert on the subject. But, in my book, the essence of poetry is just a celebration of the sound and rhythm of language. Things like iambic pentameter and sonnet structures and all that are wonderful, and knowing about them can provide ideas or guidance. But I don't think you need to know any of that to write a poem. You just have to have language that sings to you. That's a poem right there. If the words sound right, then they're right.

We could always start just compiling information on the wiki...

Yeah, what OL said. Things like rhythm and meter work for some people and not for others. I, as you may know, love them. Others, not so much. For me, the rhythm of my poetry comes pretty naturally. Partly, I have a natural sense of rhythm anyway. But also, I've been writing formal poetry for a long time, so I'm just very, very used to it. Actually, one of the most difficult poems I've ever written from a rhythm standpoint was Thirteen, because it's in such an odd rhythm, one I created for that poem. It was much harder to get a feel for it than for iambic or anapestic.

One trick I've found that helps people, if they're interested in writing in a structured meter, is to speak the poem out loud and REALLY exaggerate the stresses. If I may illustrate with a few of my own verses:





Eventually, the rhythm just sort of comes. I illustrated this point to a friend of my once by having an entire conversation with him while speaking in the rhythm of Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha."

Anyway, if you ever want to talk more about poetry, you know where to find me!

Also, to your other question, I think a separate thread for tips is not a bad idea.

Yeah, I tend to really, really like rhythmic structures more than rhymes, and I think part of it is because of the music of the stresses. I've found that iambic pentameter, in particular, isn't too awful hard to write once you get into the rhythm of the thing, and I love love love odd syllable structures that are paired with a lot of alliteration, assonance, and consonance.

(In case, uh, anyone is curious, I do have one sort of halfway decent example of my poetry available... two years ago for my final project in my Milton course, I wrote a series of short pieces based on Blake's idea in Marriage of Heaven and Hell that true creativity, the possibility of something new, could only come from a merger of good and evil. The Children of Heaven and Hell is what came out the other end of that idea. Many of the pieces start with actual passages of Paradise Lost before sort of... veering off in another direction, so I had to try to match Milton's iambic pentameter closely enough that the transfer between his bits and my bits didn't feel too jarring. I think the most interesting idea is probably the third one, Satan's Repentance, but the most successful poetically, in my estimation, is the second to last one, Eve's Mercy. I'm actually really happy with the word choice in that one, to be honest.)

(Anyway that's why I want to do the fall of Sedris as a long form poem in Iambic Pentameter.)

EDIT:

Derp, I totally forgot the reason I came here! Yxoque just posted this article on his Tumblr, which is about grammar-as-art and why prescriptive grammar is silly and Hemingway is overrated

I'm definitely going to have to read your stuff, Keeper. It sounds really interesting.

I feel rather small now. I've only dipped a tentative toe into poetry despite getting my BA in english, and most of what I wrote for my courses in college is either embarrassing in theme, embarrassingly bad, or both. Oddly, despite me really disliking free verse (Meter+rhyme+form all the way! I've done villanelles and sestinas and a rather long pantoum that in its looping nature was... ah... loosely based on Millstone/Grindstone) my best work is probably a free verse sonnet. Still pretty dumb though. and none of it is magic related, except for the super tenuous pantoum.

My brain is sadly not structured to think in meter or verse. It is a con that I can only work in prose.

I have a BA in English and most of what I've read is Magic novels, fanfiction, and dumb comics.

YOU WANT TO GET INTO A SMALL-OFF SZAT WELL FINE I GOT YOUR INSIGNIFICANCE AND ILL-SPENT YOUTH RIGHT HERE

(You should also totally post that pantoum. If only because I don't think I've ever read a pantoum, and I had to actually look the form up because I didn't know it off the top of my head.)

(Check your PMs. Honestly, I'm surprised in retrospect the form was part of assignments)

You have nothing to feel bad about. In my graduate poetry class, the last class I took for my Master's program, I think I was the only one who had ever done poetry scansion before. Some didn't even know what it was, and these were people on the verge of an advanced English degree. It's just not that common of a thing anymore.

Okay, then. I'll be thinking more about making poetry, then, though I'm still not sure I'd be able to come up with a clear execution since I have almost zero experience in them. I think that Jokulhaups haiku is about the only poetry I've written, ever. If I've done more, they've all been here (or perhaps on the mothership if I ever did any there). Thanks for everyone's thoughts, though.

I can't do poetry. I just, I don't know, can't. Which reminds me, Raven, I have something I need to ask you about.

I thought The Pinch was quite poetic...

Agreed.


Go right ahead, or PM me if you want to.

I mean, the Pinch is emotional and all, but like, the stuff you guys are talking about, rhymes and stuff, I don't know.

Anyway, Raven, I'll send you something.

I think half the points in the last dozen-or-so posts have been how poetry doesn't need to rhyme or be constrained by a strict metric; though personally I would need some manner of label to differentiate poetry from any other story (though it is likely I could read a book written in iambic pentameter and not notice [actually, I know one of the Shakespear plays I have a book for <can't recall which play> is written in iambic pentameter and I really had to force the stresses in order to hear it <never have finished reading it yet>]).