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Nov 13, 2019 16:21
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prompt: depth Ocean shines like slate. Below, anglerfish lure shrimp up to the end
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Nov 16, 2019 17:11
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Nov 22, 2019 01:06
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An Elegy to a Supernova Down the Street There is no god, who has become a star, without a companion. "Shall I be your companion?" -Unas Pyramid Texts A star burns not for us. You burned while we sent you to that home that would be your pyramid. You were a star without a companion, but my father tried his best to be one as we shuffled you between beds like the one in your home, with the sheets still folded neat, the cloth you hadn't changed since you moved. And the bed in the home with the smell of rotting cherries, where my father forkfed you dry chicken. The home with the door the front desk had to open like it was a vault but you have been empty, burning, full of hydrogen gas but what happens when there is nothing to burn, when my uncle and aunt and father around your bed like teenagers pointing their telescopes like bows at a star that went supernova so long ago, where there was always the lingering of light, lingering of the question, how long ago did you die? Was it when I went to your house and you walked outside and went to mailbox for the third time that afternoon and you sat on the front porch in the summer heat and complained about how cold it was? Was that when you morphed into that red giant, when your death expanded so completely that it sucked in my father, who cried in the parking lot of the Wienerschnitzel five minutes from the assisted care facility? I did not see the moment you died, but, when you did, did my father breathe in the last of your helium body and know there was no way to burn with you?
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Nov 28, 2019 02:34
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Dec 5, 2019 20:44
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To Sheila (I Named Her When I was Four) The wait for your death was crueler than your death. The lady at the front desk smiled when we walked in, asked if the bundle of orange fur wrapped in the red blanket was her, as if you were an offering to some Mayan god. She sent me to a room with two chairs and I held you close and felt each tug of your breath, felt each struggling muscle pull your lungs up and down. It was a mercy, I had to tell myself, to craddle you deep into my chest, because you were four pounds, down from six, and that, if I wasn't here you would be curled in that dog bed next to the off fireplace, and it was summer so we couldn't turn it on, even though during the winters you would sit next to it for hours and bleed this heat when I touched you. It was hard to not cry when you dug your head deeper into the blanket, because I knew what this place was. I did manage for a time to hold my breath and not cry. It is winter now and you have been gone for months and it feels like I am not supposed to be here in this poem, writing of your death, as if the empty space where you sat between me and the pillows was supposed to be so easily filled. You are, after all, a dog. Can I tell you the truth? I cried when you died, when I placed you on that operating table, when the vet set that needle into your body, when I moved your body and saw how your eyelid struggled and resisted, how the blanket was wrapped underneath your belly, how your body was still warm but empty and the vet said, "she's gone," and I didn't want to but I kept crying and can I keep telling the truth? I didn't cry when I was told my grandfather died. You are gone and my mom threw out the beds you slept on and got another dog who is white not like you and barks not like you and shoves herself into my arms not like you. When I feed the new dog, I do not have to tear the meat because she has all her teeth not like you. It is winter and it will be spring and then it will be summer and there will be a divot in the grass where you used to sit to sink in the heat of the sun. There are still days where I cry, where I want to not cry, where I do not want to be this person, crying over a dog, but I am like a fireplace rolling smoke out of my eyes and there was a time when you sat there in front of me, soaked in all of that heat, and I miss those times where I could say to myself that when you died, I wouldn't have cried.
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Dec 12, 2019 06:08
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Saucy_Rodent posted:PROOOOOOOOOMPT
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Dec 20, 2019 08:42
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Jan 1, 2020 19:52
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i didnt want to know you were wrong You said, with your hand on my thigh, the sun will rise tomorrow. It is seven AM and dark and you are gone. Your indent stains my bed. The sun will rise tomorrow. Was the way you kissed me a lie too? Your indent stains my bed, still lingering like the hickey on my neck. Was the way you kissed me a lie too? Your tongue sticky like tequila, still lingering like the hickey on my neck. I didn’t know a boy could be so soft. Your tongue sticky like tequila, you said, with your hand on my thigh, I didn’t know a boy could be so soft. It is seven AM and dark and you are gone.
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Jan 8, 2020 21:01
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Week 8: How a Prompt is Chosen This week, I want you to write a poem in the style of Surrealism. Surrealism is a really cool movement, probably most famous for it's art, but it also has some super cool poetry! If you don't know Surrealism and haven't studied it in art history, I'll give a quick primer. It's basically a style focused on the unconscious and dreams and what they mean. They were very much influenced by Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysis and the like, and so things written in this style are generally written within a "dream logic" where things aren't following everyday, normal logic, but work like, well, dreams. They're very interested in the subconscious, how people's brain works, and how people understand and interpret the world using the hidden parts of their brain. There's a lot more to it than this short little introduction, and it is genuinely a fascinating set of history and art, so I would recommend researching a bit of it too. If you're looking for poetry, might I suggest basically anything written by James Tate. Or, better yet, you can read one of my favorite poems of his (and one of my favorites of all time), "How the Pope is Chosen". quote:How The Pope Is Chosen There's also some rumbling about people being frustrated with just being given a style or form and not having any other guiding inspiration, so the reason I gave the whole poem was also because when you sign up, you pick a line from this poem and use it as your inspiration (or you can be asked to be given a line by me/co-judge). You can use the line in any way you see fit, as long as your poem is clearly related to your line. Try to keep it one line per person. Form can be anything. Free-verse, sonnets, limerick, whatever the hell you feel like. It's the 21st century, do whatever the gently caress you feel like in poetry imo. Also, if you do prose poetry like James Tate has done, that would be super cool. Not saying you HAVE to. Just that, you know, it's really super duper cool. For length, since "How the Pope is Chosen" is 51 lines long, let's say your poem can't be over 51 lines long. (For clarity's purpose, I consider a line to have words, so a stanza break wouldn't count as one of your 51 lines). If you decide to do a prose poem, keep it under 500 words. Sign-ups close 1/20 11:59pm PST Submission close 1/22 11:59pm PST I highly recommend using this good amount of time to research a little bit about Surrealism. Judges me ??? ??? Entrants sephiRoth IRA "They drink Slurpies until one of them throws up" Saucy_Rodent “but the sky is full of them” cda "Almost always a toy is an imitation of something grown-ups use." crimea "What, we don't know, because we are not like them." Antivehicular "Once they are elected they are given a bowl of cream" Armack "The medium-sized ones are called miniature Popes" arbitraryfairy "Some of the full-bodied popes are a million times bigger than us." Anomalous Amalgam "He is then fully armed and rides through the wilderness alone" Thranguy "in search of a sheep." flerp fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Jan 15, 2020 |
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Jan 10, 2020 22:41
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sephiRoth IRA posted:Fuckin in. Gimme a line! They drink Slurpies until one of them throws up Antivehicular posted:In, line plz Once they are elected they are given a bowl of cream
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Jan 10, 2020 23:35
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Armack posted:In. Requesting a line. The medium-sized ones are called miniature Popes
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Jan 11, 2020 18:47
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arbitraryfairy posted:In. Chuck me a line please. Some of the full-bodied popes are a million times bigger than us.
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Jan 13, 2020 08:28
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Anomalous Amalgam posted:In, line please He is then fully armed and rides through the wilderness alone Thranguy posted:In, and line please. in search of a sheep. flerp fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Jan 13, 2020 |
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Jan 13, 2020 21:27
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rickiep00h posted:gently caress it I'm not doing anything with this MFA and I know just enough Lorca to be dangerous. I'm in. We think we are having a good time cutting cartoons out of the paper
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Jan 16, 2020 07:02
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forgot but sign ups closed
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Jan 22, 2020 07:26
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subs closed
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Jan 23, 2020 09:29
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week 8 judgement there were some neat ideas this week, but a lot of you got lost in the sauce, so to speak, and it was pretty tough to decipher some of what you guys were going for. thats, of course, the danger of surrealism, but alas, i must decide winner goes to rickiep00h for having the best surreal poem. i lost the trail of this piece near the end, but the imagery and rhyhtm were spot-on and despite some of it not making sense, it was still a good ride. hm goes to antivehicular who i think had the best poem, but ducked the surrealism part of this week for, oddly, making too much sense and being too cohesive loser goes to arbritaryfairy. i like the conceit of this poem (if im understanding it correctly), but it lacks as a poem. it's just a bit too direct, with a pretty boring flow and weak images.
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Jan 24, 2020 22:20
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grass coiled around hundred or so Coors Light cans just stay outside please
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Jan 24, 2020 23:44
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Feb 2, 2020 06:10
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but r u accepting the brawl
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Feb 9, 2020 18:50
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Feb 10, 2020 10:50
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hey actual real serious logistics post can we please have a consistent submission deadline? at least on the same day (timezones rnt too important unless someone's doing like AUS/EU time), ideally same # of weeks between prompt and submission (aka, it's always the sunday the week the prompt is posted or the sunday afterwards). its been annoying that it's been scattered so much and creating a pattern helps people realize "oh hey wednesday is poemdome day, time to write" vs. "oh god what day of the week was it and how many weeks after was it? i already looked at the prompt like 3 times to check but i cant remember because it always changes" <-- thats me btw im dumb as poo poo. ideally, id prefer not on sunday as that conflicts w/ thunderdome, but as long as its consistent, i really dont care, but having a standard "this day every time" would help me (and hopefully others) immensely. id also personally prefer if we kept it either every week or every other week consistently rather than sometimes longer, sometimes not
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Feb 11, 2020 03:36
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i dont think setting a strict "judgement this day" is good, just try to do ur best to get it in by 1-2 days after u close submissions (3 at the latest imo), and then winner can prompt up relatively quickly after that im basically suggesting emulating td but i mean td has been going strong for god knows how long so if it works dont fix it ig
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Feb 11, 2020 04:07
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| # ¿ Apr 16, 2024 13:09 |
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Surrealism crits also, general hint, this week a lot of people capitalized the start of every line for some reason. this made some of them read more awkwardly than necessary. you dont have to do that. you probably shouldnt Saucy_Rodent i think this is a decent attempt at surrealism, and i like the sinister tone this takes as a response to tate’s, but the larger issue with this poem is that the line breaks are just very, very bad. im all for short, abrupt lines and im all for experimentation with different formatting, but it doesnt work in this piece because it causes the poem to read very poorly. esp when u try to read it out loud, it feels very staggered and awkward. it’s almost there to actually work -- some of the interruptions help build up the darker vibe, but too many times it just feels annoying to read, especially out loud. Thranguy this is decently fine, but i found myself just thinking, eh. like, it hits surrealism fine, but i wanted more out of this poem. it has some neat lines and ideas, but it doesnt do much with those lines or ideas. it kinda just drops cool ideas but doesnt try to interrogate them in a way to come up with some unique or interesting perspective. it’s nice, but feels a little vacant. crimea i think i understood this better than when i first read it, which is fine, poems can be somewhat dense, but i still find myself confused on certain things. i get this is about war and it being bad (which feels somewhat trite, especially given that wading through the obfuscation only leads us towards war = bad which is meh), but i find myself confused on who the speaker is and what exactly he’s talking about. giving us a more clear of the speaker can help us get into their headspace more and make the poem feel more personal. sephiRoth IRA i liked “One hundred percent of my life has been filled with violence.” as a conceit to the poem, but i hate it as a line. it completely destroys the ability for the reader to craft their own meaning of the poem, and lays everything out too openly. i have two main issues: one is that i dont think you were able to make your images as sinister as they needed to be to really highlight that life is filled with violence, even if that violence is sanitized. its little too cutesy and silly to really hit right to make us think hey this is kinda bad. the other problem is that, while the images are cool, there’s not a lot of response to the idea. it kinda just plops the idea of a life being dominated by violence, but there isnt much examination of what that kind of life has a person. it just kinda says, yep, that sure is a thing also cool prose poem  rickiep00h this works the strongest as a poem, and i liked a lot of the individual images and ideas here, but it loses the trail near the middle. the skull is cool, but then it talks about three-point lines and something about investing and its like, everything here, independently, is pretty cool and well written, but taken as a whole, i cant quite fit everything together. yeah sure surrealism, but even then, nothing quite fits together, and i cant quite make out a complete understanding of what ur trying to say here. the pieces all here work on their own, but they dont quite fit together into something altogether. thanks for the prose poem tho Antivehicular there’s a lot of ideas in here i like. the never-cats are cool, and the idea of being haunted by cats that arent exactly sinister is great. a lot of the images are really nice too. i think the only thing is i wanted a little bit more pushing of the ideas, since it kinda felt like, while this is a piece full of good images, it doesnt quite do much else. it kinda just drops these cool images in these laps, and there’s some decent lines that pull at deeper meaning, i.e. “Cotton, you’re the first thing i ever mourned”, but i think u could push this concept a lil bit harder to pull at something larger than just “ghost cats” good prose poem arbitaryfairy i actually like the conceit of this poem, and even the title kinda made me go errr what? i actually think its not as tasteless as i thought it would be. i like it as a sort of metaphor of teaching something socially inept how to deal with social situations. the main problem is that it fails as a poem. there arent many images and the flow is kinda all over the place, and a poem, to me, is not just about the ideas, but also how the words fit together, and the words are kinda haphazardly thrown together in a way that it makes it difficult to read. i will say my biases lean towards very image-based poems, but even outside of those biases, i think the overall flow of the piece kills it for me, and there isnt much redeeming factors besides having a nice conceit. cda every time i tried to do crits i would hit a wall with this poem because i find myself at mostly a loss for what to say so let’s just start. i just dont rly get it -- i think there’s some linking between consumerism/products to childbirth, but i cant quite catch the line of logic here, and it sort of shifts settings very rapidly because there’s descriptions of malls, but then delivery rooms, so i find myself mostly confused with this. idk, i feel like im not quite sure what exactly is going on her, and there’s not enough cool images to keep me engrossed without understanding what’s going on that i feel like im mostly at a loss for what u were trying to go for, sorry Anomalous Amalgam i was quite a fan of your first stanza, but it fell apart in the second because u just stopped giving me things to latch onto. “Dress up the porcelain caricature of your best self. / Tell simple lies that snowball into permanent falsehoods. / Let those lies permeate the everchanging tides of our fragility.” are much too vague lines that feel like theyre trying to say a lot but end up not being effective since theyre so vague. the flow between lines is pretty awkward through the first and second stanzas -- theyre all one sentence, which makes each line feel very abrupt, while the two lines that are on sentence “Grime encrusted rayon tunics knit by well-wishing relatives / Can be found for a steal at your local thrift store.” still feels abrupt for some reason, my brain always wants to make a hard stop on after “relatives” which fucks with the flow. overall, i think there’s a good effort here, but some poetic flaws keep it from really working.
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Feb 11, 2020 07:20
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