I'm looking for technical guides to poetry. I'm interested in all techniques in existence.One thing I notice is that when you look at painting and drawing, you can very easily find technical guides on about any aspect of it (and I don't even mean modern day youtube guides, even in the past there were ateliers and schools who thought you everything). I don't mean to compare poetry to painting, but I simply wonder: is poetry not just as technical? My own conclusion is that it is not as technical as painting, where you can more or less objectively judge whether you portrayed something in the way you wanted to, which is less so possible with poetry. Nevertheless, when a retard write trash, you also recognize it as so, which proves there is some technicality, and it's not just pure style.So I guess what I'm looking for is a guide, resources, anything, as long as it talks about technique in poetry. I already have poetic form and poetic meter (which he himself says is not a guide for a writer, but you might as well use it like that), which is pretty good. I know about Valery's essays on poetry, will read them.
>>23316226what is hard about poetry is simply finding better metaphors. I don’t think reading a book can help you with this. Instead you just need to read a lot of poetry in order to know what is possible. If you know the extent of what is possible, your mind will be freed and you will be able to challenge yourself to come up with something better.When it comes to meter it really isn’t hard to get good at it, just practice scansion on a few poems, practice writing in different traditional forms, and try writing a random line and then copying its rhythm for the rest of the poem. It doesn’t really take that long until you can just feel what the right rhythm for a line is within the context of whatever you’re writing. The only thing else in english is repetition, alliteration, and rhyme and to be honest you don’t really need to practice those. If you have any talent you will just get good at them automatically. Poetry has the lowest barrier to entry of any art. It’s also the most subjective of any art. So all books about how to write good poetry are basically garbage and usually just the author ranting his own personal opinions that he learned through actually writing and reading poetry and not reading poetic theory. It is possible to write “good” poetry but to learn what that is you just have to find a poet who strikes you as somehow really good and then simply allow them to influence you.
>>23316252And yes I know there are other techniques you can use like parallel construction or fucking zeugma or whatever but if you waste your time trying to intentionally practice those instead of just trying to write something that fulfils whatever vision you have then you’re a retard. Poetry is all intuition and no great poet who ever used some obscure technique did it because he practiced it.
>>23316226The ode less travelled is pretty good
>>23316226For the mechanics of poetry:John Hollander - Rhyme's ReasonLewis Turco - The New Book of FormsAlfred Corn - The Poem's HeartbeatRobert Pinsky - The Sounds of PoetryFor the cultivation of style and the skilled use of rhetorical figures (they're called rhetorical figures, but I mean elements like repetition, alliteration, balanced clauses, etc., that can nonetheless be used in poetry), check out any of Ward Farnsworth's books on rhetoric, metaphor, and style.There's also older books from the late Hellenistic period and early Roman Imperium that discuss differences in register very well:Longinus - On the SublimeDemetrius - On StylePhilodemus - The Good Poem/On PoemsHorace - Ars Poetica
>>23316293And to add to this, for negative examples of what not to do, check out The Stuffed Owl by D.B. Wyndham Lewis, a collection of bad or mediocre poems.All this stuff can be found on libgen.
>>23316252>what is hard about poetry is simply finding better metaphors. I don’t think reading a book can help you with this.I'm actually finding that reading books on symbolism and some of the more in depth books on mythology and the occult are helping me come up with at least more original metaphors. I wont speak to the quality of them or sharing any because I don't really want to get shit on but at least they appear novel to me. Books like the hermetic tradition and the three books of occult philosophy really highlight how common the symbols in great works are to a very select few traditions and manners of seeing things (Agrippa really goes in depth on how things are generally symbolically related). If you use these guides as a kind of exclusionary frame work you can find novel avenues for conceptualizing new symbolic interpretation, which can then be applied to whole metaphors.
>>23316226Forms>Rhymes Reason by Hollander>The Making of a Poem by Strand>Princeton Handbook to Multicultural Poetics Actually writing poetry >read wide anthologies. Please don’t get sucked completely into “the only good poems are old ones” mindset >in terms of actually getting better at your craft, I can tell you from years as a student and professor of writing that you need to find what works for you in terms of creating. When I write, I tend to accumulate notes from weeks then stitch them together >in terms of technique, the most you can is learn how things work, see them applied in others works, then meditate on how they would work in your own.
>>23316226Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance may be a good place to start
i self taught myself poetry through using google and finding different websites. also many poets have written essays on the art of poetry
>>23316332>i self taught myself poetry through using googlethank you for warning me against doing this
For someone with no exposure to poetry, Mary Oliver’s Handbook. For someone with some exposure to poetry, Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason.
OP here. I've been thinking, and I realized that every (great) poet has his own unique style, even within the individual poem the style is recognizable. Now, this is true for basically any artform, style will always be recognizable whatever the medium. However, since poetry is just words, and a lot easier to analyse (try deconstructing a painting and you'll realize what I'm talking about, basically impossible unless you know the actual methods used or are very skilled yourself), you can also more easily learn to imitate style, and find the combinations that make it an unique style. In this sense, style becomes technique, instead of developing technique in a more traditional sense, you develop different forms of expression, which you can then use for your own poetry, going beyond simple imitation, borrowing and adapting to the needs of your poem.
OP here again, unrelated topic somewhat but don't really want to make a thread about it, I've also been thinking about what makes each general medium (music, visual (like painting), film,...) unique and what their strengths and weaknesses are. I've written a lot of things down on paper somewhere but I 1: don't have it with me right now 2: know that it probably won't be worth it to post it here.Nevertheless, I wonder if there are good resources on that too.
