Poetry Forum

I'm divided so I'll quote Robert Frost: "Free verse is like playing tennis without a net." and Ezra Pound: "Breaking the pentameter, that is the first step." Robert's right, Ezra's wrong. Making the pentameter is the first step: you have to make it before you can break it. And w...

Friedrich Hölderlin
T.S. Eliot mostly pre-1925
Ol' Ezra: amazed at both his talent and what a moron he was, unless he wrote some of that stuff to help with his insanity defense.
Dante
and I keep coming across translations by W.S. Merwin that I like.

Ah, but he was an American (and irreverent) when he wrote it. He was British (and reverent) when he recorded it. I couldn't listen to it. Destroyed.
I expect to hear that voice in "Four quartets".

I didn't say it did nothing :o) Spending more time with it I am getting an increasingly vertiginous sense of falling from the positive (if slightly foreboding) first stanza to the bleakness of the second. The coming/going of the stars is simple, insidious and rhythmic - I find it increases the horr...

1.) back yes, a little, thank you. 2.) Globus and Dave, thank you for the comments and accept my humble apology for the delay A few words regarding. I had a few lines (the top) sitting around for over a year with nowhere to go. I changed the title to Repose and it was in the back of my head when I w...

Oysters - we have these pre-pay travel passes for buses and tube trains. As you get on the bus there is a machine: ............you hold the card up to it and it beeps to show you it has deducted the fare. I'm glad you cleared that one up for me, I was wonderin' why the cap. It sounded great, halfwa...

Hi I've only had a quick read, so forgive any foolishness on my part. I think that if you are intending reference to the treatment of syphillis with mercury, you should develop that more explicitly. It's an orrible thing and one surely full of wordplay? Does it offer an angle on the characters rela...

Agree with Lubesh on "swollen and pregnant" 2 observations: Spin like a planet and stamp like a bull. Try inverting so "planet" is at the end of the line, I think it would give a near rhyme to naked. "And feel logic in the raindrop" sounds awful god damn poetic, that ma...

Thank you, barrie, Poe? Re-poe-s? Love Poe. Thank you, Lubesh. The lines, hoped it would be a total break between the nice and rosey, a wishful state of bliss (I copped a bit of cliche with the "black waves" could also be a metaphor for depression)and say gruesome reality. A horror. savour...

In spent fields the ravens glean; we walk and the black waves pull apart. "The sunset is coming soon, what I had I gave to you" I softly laugh. "And when the stars come out?" she laughs, softer still. _______________________________________________________________________________...

a comment on a comment, I agree with this statement "The first part of it is like living in a junk store of old and outdated clichés; it is a nightmare. The thing that is missing is life." , but by the nature of it's title, it should be "missing in life", and judging by the comme...

it did, found the examples excellent, argument reasoned. Thank You

Aye

Why force the words? you have the beginning of something here: for there the world does press the spirit - give it form in tight, compacted categories: tidy there, and definite except for "does press" The rest starts out badly, and ends badly, overwrought and cliched. "For dark and lo...

I had trouble reading it, I'm sure it would have been better spread across
rather
than
just
down

legalistically—a ritual I birth out
of naturalistic responsibility.

That part bothers me too, why the sudden shift? Or why not start the shift earlier?

just needs a few pointers
complex is good, "clever" can be be OK
deceptively simple is best
just a trim please

Thank you.
it is so wonderful, just a tiny bit more pointers, a tiny taking away

you have been writing for a long time? I ask because so much is in it, and it misses (at least to me) by so very little.

My pleasure to read.

this while being fantastic, confuses me, "hedged in its unpredicted pattern by growth unnaturally shaped, mechanically, evenly beheaded." bear with me I'm American, so I may be missing something British, this looks like a hedge to me "unnaturally shaped", "evenly beheaded&qu...

at the risk of sounding retro or a heretic
"The Waste Land" -T.S. Eliot
I can't think of anything that comes close, except some of his later stuff.
Damn, I must escape from the shadow

Anybody know of any examples of this written in English? I found one. Looking for more.

ah, never mind, it was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, I should have known.
From time to time, I wade through Pinsky or Durling

subject matter not approbo for a total rip
agree with the two Brits

would agree if I saw more of a change in tone

Object!
end rhyme in first two couplets, sets up a pattern, broken for no reason.
Suggest moving one the rhyming couplets to the middle.