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Nov 13, 2019 23:04
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 02:11 |
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[redacted for submissions]
Armack fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Dec 23, 2019 |
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Nov 19, 2019 06:42
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Thanks for the crit, sephiRoth IRA. New prompt will be up within four hours of this posting. 
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Nov 21, 2019 20:35
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Poem Dome, Week II: Ancient Epigraphs The prompt: 1) Your poem this week needs to be prefaced with an epigraph. For your epigraph, you must use between 1-4 lines written by any specific, named, ancient poet. “Ancient” for the purposes of this prompt will mean the poet was born prior to 800 CE (a.k.a 800 AD). These lines must come from an English translation of some poem of theirs. Make sure to cite (or better yet link to if possible) your epigraph’s poem of origin. 2) Write a poem that lives up to the epigraph. The poem should stand on its own as a well-crafted work, but it should also be enhanced by its relation to the epigraph. You may write in any poetic form, including free verse. However, prose-poetry is excluded. Line Limit: 40 (not including the epigraph) Normal rules apply (see the OP). Signup Deadline: Monday, Nov 25th @ 11:59PM PT Submission Deadline: Wednesday, Nov 27th @ 11:59 PT Q&A: Does the ancient poem have to be complete? - No, you could select 1-4 lines from an ancient fragment, as long as we know the poet’s name and all other prompt criteria are met. What if it’s unknown exactly when the poet was born? - That’s fine as long as you can show that its generally estimated that the poet was born prior to 800 CE. Can we do our own original translation of the ancient poem from which we will quote our epigraph? - Sure, if you’re competent to do that. So for our epigraph, we can’t use lines from ancient poems in which the poet is anonymous? - That is correct, yes, you may not. Does ancient graffiti count as an ancient poem? - Yes, but it would need to have been signed in order to use for your epigraph this week. Judges: Armack sephiRoth IRA Poets: SlipUp Saucy_Rodent Thranguy Weltlich Antivehicular flerp GenJoe sebmojo Djeser Jon Joe Elentor lofi Meinberg Armack fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Nov 22, 2019 |
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Nov 22, 2019 00:12
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lofi posted:In. Any advice for where to start looking for ancient poems? Sure, one way to do it would be to winnow the search down by region, then by poet, then by poem. Do you want to explore ancient Chinese poetry? Roman, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Egyptian, Phoenician...? Having picked a general area, you can then search for "ancient poets of [country/region/language group]." You'll come across some names. Check their supposed dates of birth to make sure they qualify as ancient. Then you can pick among the names, do a search for their poetry, find some 1-4 line tract in their work that speaks to you, and use that as your epigraph. Armack fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Nov 22, 2019 |
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Nov 22, 2019 16:34
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Less than 24 hours before signups close. Get in there if you aren't already, folks.
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Nov 25, 2019 15:09
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Signups closed. Good luck, poets.
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Nov 26, 2019 13:19
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Reminder: less than two hours remaining to submit.
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Nov 28, 2019 07:04
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Submissions closed. Expect judgement today.
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Nov 28, 2019 15:15
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Poem Dome Week II: Results I was very happy we got a large cultural and geographical range of selection for the epigraphs, nice work. Also, some of y’all are an angsty bunch. SlipUp, true to your name, you have failed this week. Djeser, don’t you have an interest in the ancient world? Why would you fail to acknowledge its poetry this week? I look upon your failure, and my throat stops up with phlegm. flerp, contrary to the prompt’s thrice-mentioned requirement to quote from named poets only, your epigraph was composed anonymously. For this, you are Disqualified. Meinberg, you reimagined Nothing Matters: the post as Nothing Matters: the poem. Alas, you have lost. lofi, your piece suffered from flatness, excessive imprecision, and clunky verse. Receive this Dishonorable Mention; may it spur you to compose better work. Weltlich, you fop. You have been demoted from contention for the win for misciting your epigraph. I chastise your lack of awareness by quoting you the real Tao Te Ching #71: Knowing ignorance is strength. Ignoring knowledge is sickness. If one is sick of sickness, then one is not sick. The sage is not sick because he is sick of sickness. Therefore he is not sick. – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching #71 (tr. Gia-fu Feng & Jane English) Oh, and you earn an Honorable Mention, I guess, for an otherwise strong piece. sebmojo, your poem properly lives up to its epigraph. Its sharp language, clever line breaks, and balanced tone merit Honorable Mention. Your piece was in contention for the win. Saucy_Rodent, you have won. Congrats on the tight relationship between your poem and its epigraph, both structurally and thematically. Fast prompting, good prompting. Crits will be up prior to Monday.
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Nov 28, 2019 19:46
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Poem Dome Week II: Crits 1. Lofi – Bath Bomb My interpretation: A self-described “addict” is taking a bath, complete with a bath bomb. The addict reflects on how much worse the future will be than the present, wondering what they’d say to the future’s suffering people. The addict expresses remorse for “all the fire” in the future (and perhaps in the present as well), and they note that their bath experience is ruined by it. The strengths: - “double glazing” is an economical way to depict sliding bath doors. - You were subtle enough to imply but not state exactly “what we’ve done to the world.” Nice touch. - The poem is enhanced by its relation to the epigraph. Both Sappho’s piece and yours give consideration to thoughts future people will have towards those in the present. Interestingly, I notice your piece is far bleaker than Sappho’s. That’s a welcome spin on the epigraph. The weaknesses: - There is an issue with tone. The emotional heft of the poem, “About what we've done to the world / And what I'd say to the future,” gets undercut by the glib terseness of its ending. - Though I complimented your subtlety, some parts of the language are too imprecise. Nothing wrong with vagueness in poetry if it’s in service to the piece, but I’m afraid some of the imprecision here doesn’t work well. For example, it’s unclear to me what makes the present evening “filthy.” I assume it’s not the narrator since they are already bathing and with a bath bomb no less. Perhaps the filth comes from smoke rising from the present-day fires which have already started? If so, there’s rather little in the poem to suggest that. In a similar vein, I don’t know what “addict” means here. Is the narrator an actual drug addict? If so, that seems very out-of-the-blue. Is the addiction instead to fossil fuels or the wars they encourage (bombs of a different sort)? Again, it’s great not to spell everything out in poetry, but latent meaning should encourage readers to search the piece more deeply. Yours sometimes threw me off. - There’s some clunky verse here. If you read the piece out loud, you may get what I mean. I realize of course that being free verse, the piece will have inconsistent meter, and that’s perfectly okay. But nevertheless there’s something off-kilter about the musicality of the piece. It seems as though the meter and actual number of syllables per line is just consistent enough across enough lines to make the brain start to expect patterns. And then whenever the piece significantly deviates from those expected patterns, it’s too jarring. - It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’m curious to know what made you decide to capitalize the first word in each line. 2. Weltlich – The Reality of Hunting Dogs My interpretation: Seems straightforward. Grandchild recalls searching for a lost hunting dog with grandfather. They ended up finding the dog where they'd started: by their truck. But the dog had been bitten by a venomous snake. The strengths: - The poem is rhythmically and sonically well-crafted. - Some details in the poem’s structure support its meaning, e.g. “save one” being isolated by dashes. - It’s good that the poem feels done right where it ends. Too often I’ve read poetry that looks like the poet just sort of gave up instead of working a piece to completion. - Good enjambment in line 12, with “chill” completing the previous line but also priming the reader to imagine a “chill” dog acting like nothing was amiss. - I think you already know that rhyming poetry can be risky sometimes, in that if done poorly it can sound like a bad imitation of Mother Goose. Yet yours worked well. At no point did I think you forced a rhymed word into place merely because it rhymed rather than because it was the best word to use. - Despite the incorrect citation, the epigraph does enhance your poem, and your poem does live up to these verses of Lao Tzu. I note that the idea of ‘casting a wide net’ does imply the collection of something, and can also refer to conducting a broad search. But on my reading, your epigraph relates to your poem in deeper ways as well. Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching #73 highlights the benefits of wu wei, “inaction” or “inexertion”. The dog’s hunt here is an example of exertion gone wrong. Likewise, the grandfather and grandchild exert themselves searching for the dog, only to find her by their truck. One wonders if the snakebite might’ve been prevented or at least more quickly attended to had the poem’s humans just waited at the truck, trusting the dog to come back. Well done. The weaknesses: - Oof, you miscited Lao Tzu. You’ve quoted from Tao Te Ching #73, not 71. Since this week is about testing your facility with epigraphs, that’s a significant problem. - It looks like there’s a typo at the end of line 12, a hyphen where an em dash would be more appropriate. 3. Meinberg – Time Sucks My interpretation: An angst-plagued narrator laments their personal woes, then despairs of a dying world gripped by oligarchy. The strengths: - Strong choice of epigraph. - The poem reads like a stereotypical millenial’s lament and although that will irk some people, I personally feel some degree of connection to its message. One can understand where the narrator is coming from, even if one disagrees with their approach to dealing with what’s wrong in the world. It can be painful getting older in a bleaker world. The weaknesses: - Though the poem emphasizes that the rich olds cling to life, the epigraph holds that everyone will die (i.e. including oligarchs). Rather than explore any possible meaning or significance, even as a pyrrhic victory, in the oligarchs’ inevitable deaths, the narrator descends into ‘nothing-matters.’ - Despite being “older than [they] should be,” the narrator’s voice comes across as immature. The title reflects this immaturity, but so does the almost adolescent tone struck by the narrator’s angst. The voice isn’t likable, and that’s because of its passivity. I do realize Bhartrhari’s poem highlights our helplessness to escape the ravages of time. But it’s one thing to be passive with respect to aging, and another to be passive with respect to all of life. None of that is to say the narrator is devoid of good reason to lament, but their approach to suffering is not much more sophisticated than “I’m taking my ball and going home.” - It’s rather on-the-nose. The poem would be more artful if it had some subtlety, some sense of invitation for the reader to make interpretations. Otherwise, it could use a “volta,” a poetic turn which would help its progression. The piece is scarcely more than a list of complaints. It really needs to develop, to go somewhere. - Also, wouldn’t a question mark at the end of the last line work better? 4. Antivehicular – Lament, With Fantasies My interpretation: A woman who survived being raped by her male partner candidly details her fantasies about what should’ve happened to him. She also reflects on her own experience of pain in that toxic relationship. The strengths: - The characterization works well. I get a pretty strong sense of who the narrator is, and the differences between her past and present self. I empathize with her, and I experience lots of vicarious anger reading this piece. I also get a clear glimpse at just how awful her ex is. - You took a risk writing such intense content up to and including detailing some violent fantasy. I feel like in nearly all cases in which a poem would be this favorable to violent fantasy, the judges would rebuke it. But I think the risk pays off for you here; your piece makes it all work in a way that would be difficult for most similar poems to accomplish. Partly it works because of how much empathy the reader has for the narrator. I also like that it challenges the traditionally gendered expectation that violent fantasies are an essentially male experience. BTW that subversion kind of reminds me of the Innuendo Studios review of Fury Road, and that’s a good thing, but I digress. -The language is reasonably good; the final two lines are especially strong. - The poem benefits from its connection to the epigraph. One can see how depicting Aphrodite (love) as bloodied and disheveled primes the reader to examine a romantic relationship gone horribly wrong. And since Bion’s poem is a lament, it sets an appropriate tone for your lament. The weaknesses: - Although the poem shows readers how the narrator feels about her ex, I wish the poem detailed with more precision how the narrator feels about having these fantasies. What is a fantasy to her? Are the fantasies cordoned off in the recesses of her head such that she can explore intense, justifiably vengeful feelings on her own terms and in that relative mental safety? Or does she go through life actively burning at the forefront of her mind with the (understandable) wish for her ex to suffer? I know what her specific fantasies consist of, but I don’t know how the narrator tends to experience fantasy itself. - For all its strengths, the poem nevertheless resides very much on the surface. That is, it doesn’t call for the reader’s discovery, exploration, or subjective interpretation. The meaning and significance is all just there. As such, the reader is less able to engage more deeply with the piece. 5. Elentor – The Last Ennui My interpretation: Narrator waxes about wishing for non-existence. The strengths: - Strong thematic relationship between poem and epigraph. - The last line works fairly well for me. The weaknesses: - The first stanza is cliché, echoes of too well-trodden Hamlet language. - Third stanza is weak. The slant rhyme entropy/misery is awkward. As for the meaning, I do understand where you’re coming from using “entropy” here since it denotes decay or disorganization. However, without a smoother segue, it’s a rough transition to move from old-fashioned language discussing “the sleep of death” to the relatively modern physics concept of “entropy.” That is to say that, while thematically justified, the language of “entropy” still feels too out-of-the-blue, and disconnected from the rest of the poem’s lexicon. - Using archaic language is often a great choice, but its use has to be much smoother than this. - Since the choice of epigraph is the strongest part of the poem, the poem is eclipsed by it rather than enhanced by it. 6. sebmojo – it made me think of steve My interpretation: Seems straightforward. The narrator lost a loved one, Steve. Now the narrator sees things that remind them of Steve even in the clouds. The strengths: - Thank you for having courteously linked to a translation of your epigraph’s poem of origin. - This piece excels at striking a balanced tone. Your use of all-lowercase helps to bring about an informal, almost spur-of-the-moment feel. Your use of “marble rear end” makes the piece just irreverent enough to offset the harder hitting revelation of Steve’s passing. It is touching that Steve is still very much on the narrator’s mind, but your slight glibness keeps that from being overly sentimental. - The mid-hyphenated-word line breaks in line 1 and 4 simulate equine hoof clomps well, although I’m unclear on why you didn’t continue the pattern after the first two instances of it. The weaknesses: - I would be interested to know what others think, but for me you don’t actually need the parentheses. You do need the text inside them, of course, but the poem would be stronger, more poignant, if the last stanza was not relegated to being a mere parenthetical. 7. Saucy_Rodent – Olivia Something My interpretation: The narrator introduces a cemetery tucked away amidst an otherwise commercial space, then reflects on how a dead girl there has been all-but-ripped from memory. The strengths: - More than any other this week, yours was the poem which both lived up to its epigraph and was enhanced by it. - Everything about your poem exists in tight relation to its epigraph. After having quoted a Sappho fragment, you’ve laid out a piece that itself has a fragmentary feel. You’ve got short lines; the stanzas are narrow. The stanzas are justified on one side but jagged on the other (as if torn). Most of the individual lines, while sensible in the poem as-is, also feel like they could hint at some hypothetical additional words just beyond the text’s edge. - I like how your lack of commas between “a circle two dots a line,” evokes a sense of incompleteness. - All those details above reinforce the poem’s theme that remembrance is fragmentary. Like an ancient text, memory can be scant, incomplete, neglected, or lost. Even the poem’s title redacts the late subject’s last name. Then add the bonus that Sappho’s text suggests that she actually knew fragments of who she was would survive, and it just all comes together so well. - The poem does succeed as a response to Sappho. Her piece emphasizes what survives after fragmentation. Yours, while acknowledging what survives, explores in more depth what is lost. The more I think about this piece the more I love it. - If you were to get a few more crits on this, polish it up, and at some point eventually edit it out of the thread, some version of this piece might find a home at a journal. The weaknesses: - Your frequent use of commas at the end of lines in your first stanza doesn’t read like a careful, judicious choice on your part. Although you should keep some imo, since some look like they could lead to longer lines that aren’t there. - I guess the commercial space could tie in a bit better than as mere juxtaposition for the cemetery, but if you do that be careful not to shoehorn too much of that in, lest it seem too forced and not subtly fragmentary enough. 8. Jon Joe – As We Be My interpretation: The poem describes The Devil (or at least a devil). The strengths: - Cool choice of epigraph. I’m supposing it relates to the poem in that both pieces’ subjects have had a sort of fall from grace. The weaknesses: - You don’t need those commas at the end of your lines. - Although your poem relates to your epigraph, it is very much eclipsed by it. Sadly your piece is short on content. It offers little opportunity for the reader to make inferences, draw conclusions, reflect more deeply on the text. It reads as low effort. 9. flerp – An Elegy to a Supernova Down the Street My interpretation: - The narrator reflects on how a dead relative (presumably a grandparent) “burned out” due to geriatric infirmities. Likewise, the narrator considers how “burned out” the family got caring for that relative. The strengths: - Excellent use of metaphor. Well done. - It’s a strong, emotionally resonant piece. The weaknesses: - C’mon man, I mentioned three times in the prompt that the epigraph had to have been written by a named (i.e. not anonymous) poet. - Unclear why the second and third stanzas start with lowercase, while the first and fourth start with capital letters. - The poem might’ve been better if it structurally looked like it too was “burning out.” 10. Thranguy – The Vigilantes My interpretation: This sestina details a man and his daughter conning a community into believing some tool of his can bring rain. It doesn’t work, so someone fires a gun at the conman, but his daughter takes the bullet. The strengths: - Sestina, eh? Nice decision. Congrats for working with such a challenging and intricate form. The structure, the traditional meter, combined with the expansive vocabulary, give the piece an old-fashioned feel, which is appropriate for a week highlighting ancient epigraphs as well as for your poem’s apparent setting. - The poem relates to its epigraph appropriately. The weaknesses: - There’s nothing that says you have to keep strictly to your iambic pentamer. But once the regular pattern is set, too many deviations from it can get clunky. I think you have strayed from the iambs too often here. - Sometimes fairly weak words that don’t really deserve emphasis are getting the stress. Like “to” in line 6, “which” in line 16, “to” in line 18. - It’s challenging to give feedback because the piece’s faults tend to be unintended consequences of its sestina form. Its length is fixed by the form, but nevertheless the piece feels longer than its stanza-by-stanza content warrants. Likewise the piece doesn’t quite reach the level of drama it’s grasping at, but again I assume that’s because of the constraints. 11. GenJoe – Anglerfish My interpretation: The poem depicts the narrator watching a TV version of Troy for perhaps the sixth time, surrounded by modern yet ultimately unfulfilling amenities. The strengths: - The anecdote succeeds at suggesting the narrator’s life is bland and banal. Society too, given the “year of the flatscreen” and the adverts. - Yep, the poem and the epigraph sufficiently relate to each other. Thematically, since in their own respective ways, they each argue that humans are wretched. But also insofar as Homer, of course, wrote the source material from which the poem’s Brad Pitt movie derived. - Decent work. The weaknesses: - I actually wish you hadn’t directly said the movie was Troy. The reader can figure out what movie it is just based on your description of it, and then of course there’s the epigraph. - The piece doesn’t quite feel done. Seems like it ought to be expanded upon. Armack fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Dec 1, 2019 |
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Dec 1, 2019 00:40
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Dec 5, 2019 21:20
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[redacted for submissions]
Armack fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Dec 23, 2019 |
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Dec 12, 2019 05:08
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Hadn't come across it before, but this is cute, thanks for putting me onto it. "For by stroking of him I have found out electricity." lol
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Dec 12, 2019 19:06
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Week V: Rolling a Bard Write a Shakespearean sonnet, also known as an English sonnet, also known as an Elizabethan sonnet. It must conform to the usual Shakespearean sonnet format: 14 lines, iambic pentameter, rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg, and so on. Here's an example: William Shakespeare posted:Sonnet 2 Yes, you do have to rhyme, but please be sure your rhyming words look like they're there because they are the best possible words for you to use, and not like they were shoehorned in just to fit the rhyme scheme. Usual submission rules apply (see the OP). Signup Deadline: Monday, December 16th @ 11:59PM PT Submission Deadline: Wednesday, December 18th @ 11:59 PT Judges Armack Poets Djeser cda sephiRoth IRA Armack fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Dec 18, 2019 |
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Dec 13, 2019 08:32
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Submissions closed. Good luck, poets.
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Dec 17, 2019 18:30
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Only one entrant. Congrats cda, you are the winner. I guess technically you are also the loser. Anyway, the week is yours.
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Dec 19, 2019 12:42
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In.
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Jan 1, 2020 16:34
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The Merits of a Banquet: To Serve Others is the Highest Virtue Upon its wooden slab my feast impresses. It’s content to come apart, emit pungent odors, revel in its allure while being devoured. It’s content to come apart, emit pungent odors: A feast self-actualizes in delighting others while being devoured, however quickly forgotten. A feast self-actualizes in delighting others; perhaps that’s why my body rests at ease. However quickly forgotten, I feel the worms make a banquet of me. Perhaps that’s why my body rests at ease: upon its wooden slab my feast impresses. I feel the worms make a banquet of me. Revel in its allure.
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Jan 8, 2020 07:58
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In. Requesting a line.
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Jan 11, 2020 11:48
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In
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Feb 19, 2020 21:38
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Leo Strauss on Narrative, Social Cohesion, and In-Group Selection To live in catastrophic night conceals all things deceitful so nihilists set myths alight and others scorch the steeple They’re right of course, there is no truth when read between the lines but common folk could grow uncouth left leaderless at times All dogs and swine love hierarchy —us privileged at the top— and so, to counter anarchy we monetize their slop Since Machiavelli told it straight (his work is hardly satire) control of stories seized the state and all the mob’s admire Strong mobs arise from nemeses their Being but ephemeral held captive by identity and joined in wars perennial What wispy gun-smoke stories make and Masons’ stone-throws parry —Nationalism! For country’s sake and from tradition tarry
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Feb 27, 2020 03:13
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