Exploring Poetry: Seeking Advice & Ideas

[rathma]

Does anyone here know anything about poetry? I've got an idea but I don't know how to say it. Suggestions?

 

[Loren Booda]

Find meter for each moving line;

while rhyme might seem the sweeter,

the heart itself doth follow time.

-Loren Booda



(I have three poems on my website, below.)

 

[Dagenais]

Originally posted by rathma
Does anyone here know anything about poetry? I've got an idea but I don't know how to say it. Suggestions?

http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/poetry/

I found that on a quick google search.

My opinion is that Poem's should flow, and have a structure to them (lines, stanzas).

When I write poems, they always rhyme, or I'd just write a story.

Most have good metaphors and deeper meanings.

 

[zoobyshoe]

To write a good rhyme you must dig
In that brain you keep under your wig,
And make sure your meter
Is bold, tight, and neater
Than the grunting produced by a pig.

 

[cragwolf]

Oppenheimer was working at Göttingen and the great mathematical physicist, Dirac, came to him one day and said: "Oppenheimer, they tell me you are writing poetry. I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say something that everybody knows already, in words that nobody can understand."

 

[Loren Booda]

Poetry manifests an equation

Yielding balanced, cogent persuasion,

But if you find yourself alone

You might avail RhymeZone.

 

[motai]

Originally posted by Dagenais
When I write poems, they always rhyme, or I'd just write a story.

Be careful not to force the rhyme into the poem. When writing a poem, the scansion of the poem should add and not detract to the overall effect of the poem.

In poetry, words or stanzas must be in their right place. It should be detrimental if it is put in any other spot.

I could go on, but I got to go right now.

 

[Janitor]

By the way

Loren, your avatar looks like a War-of-the-Worlds Martian invasion. What's up with that?

 

[holly]

Just write what you want to write, how you want to write it. Rhyme it if you like. Don't rhyme, if you like. Make a "shape poem." Maybe you'll come up with something really fresh.
* * * *

Loren Booda, by the way, your poem contains a "vowel rhyme" in the first and third lines. Blake did many such, as well as a fabulous number of "eye rhymes." Very sophisticated.

 

[Loren Booda]

Janitor,

For my avatar I borrowed a surrealist image cropped from Rene Magritte's "Voice of Space." The painting is more representative of dream than science fiction, though. You may have seen some of his works on rock album or book covers.

holly,

I believe the most famous "shape poem" is "The Mouse's Tale" by Lewis Carroll. Thanks for noticing my extra effort - a "vowel rhyme," eh? What is an "eye rhyme"? Your expertise indicates an English major; my attribution is an MS in physics.

My favorite poetry is that of Romanticism, the ultimate being "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He wrote the poem in an opiate haze but was interrupted, with only a entrancing fragment transcribed.

A great help for the Aspiring Poet is Roget's Thesaurus.

 

[holly]

L. Booda, an eye rhyme you will immediately recognize: Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright/in the forests of the night/What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry.

Blake. Of course, a body doesn't get angry in heaven, but I bet he gets a little tired of hearing people say "sym-me-TRI" all the time, trying to make it into an ear rhyme.

The very best suggestion I have for anyone wishing to write, wishing to break out of a rut, wishing to do something they love but are fearful about, wishing to break their chains, etc and etc, is a slim volume by Brenda Ueland, entitled "If You Want to Write." Fabulous advice by a very interesting and acutely intelligent person, a good-hearted person, and very sensible, too. Make yourselves go get it! Thank you.

 

[Janitor]

The only Magritte painting I can think of off the top of my head is the "This is not a pipe" one.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by Dagenais
When I write poems, they always rhyme, or I'd just write a story.

And yet, one should not distain the beatiful prose poem.
An example by ee cummings:

If I Love You

if i love you
(thickness means
worlds inhabited by roamingly
stern bright faeries

if you love
me) distance is mind carefully
luminous with innumerable gnomes
Of complete dream

if we love each (shyly)
other, what clouds do or
Silently Flowers resembles
beauty less than our breathing.

Poetry by ee cummings
Address:http://www-scf.usc.edu/~thier/ee/

 

[Monique]

Originally posted by holly
Loren Booda, by the way, your poem contains a "vowel rhyme" in the first and third lines.

Could you explain that, because I don't see it :(

 

[Loren Booda]

"line" and "time" - matching long i's with alliterating consonants, n and m?

 

[holly]

Yes, L. Booda, the "i's" but not the consonants, they don't come into play in the vowel rhyme. You cleverly added the alliterative sound to draw us further in...

Monique, try to say LINE and TIME without the Netherlandish accent, ha ha, you'll hear it!

Many poems contain internal vowel rhymes, too; adding to the feeling the poem is being almost perfectly woven -- is somehow fitting together just right -- but not detectable to those not on the alert for it.

 

[Loren Booda]

holly, is that avatar a wolverine or what?


Potential poets beware

The Poet's Market fare

They'll reel you in

With a promise to win

And leave you in despair.

 

[holly]

LOL L. Booda! Very clever! And so true!

My avatar is a ferret. I have one that's animated (the avatar, not the ferret), but I couldn't upload it. Sadly, all the native ferrets in West Texas are gone, probably victims of having to learn physics. I know it's almost killed me.

Your avatar is very nice. You and Doc Al have strange avatars, eerie spheres. Must be a science thing.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by holly
Yes, L. Booda, the "i's" but not the consonants, they don't come into play in the vowel rhyme.

Well, I was just as confused as Monique.

I googled vowel rhyme and came up with this definition on two different sites: the repetition of similar vowels in the stressed syllables of successive words.

My dictionary defines successive as: following each other in order: following each other without interruption.

"time" and line" in Loren's poem do not seem to constitute a "vowel rhyme".

Had he constructed a line like this:

"Booda's time line flows eternal,"

then time and line would constitute a vowel rhyme.

 

[jimmy p]

I'm a poet
and i didnt even know it!

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by Loren Booda
"line" and "time" - matching long i's with alliterating consonants, n and m?

Actually n and m are not alliteratives. An alliteration is: "the repetition of usu. initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables (as wild and wooley, threatening throngs)"

"nor nannies" = alliteration

"more nannies" = not alliteration

 

[cragwolf]

A poem, by Stanislaw Lem (translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel) from The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electronic Bard in The Cyberiad:

* * *

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such $a^2 \cos 2\phi$!

 

[cragwolf]

Want some more Lem poetry? The Electronic Bard, a machine that composes poetry, is challenged to compose "...a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!" And so:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

(But really, I think most of the credit should go to the translator!)

 

[Janitor]

Is he allowed to say "ergodic" in this forum?

 

[motai]

ah too many s's in that poem. It (intentionally?) slows it down because of the nature of the letter s. Others that do this are the double-o sound and repeated alliteration of b's. There are more like these, but I can't remember them right now.

If emphasis needs to be placed, change the sound of the emphasized words so that it slows it down in some way.

 

[Loren Booda]

Alliteration, consonance, assonance -

What's in their meaning's difference?

 

[motai]

Alliteration: Repeated use of inital (first) consonant sounds.
Consonance: Repetition of final consonant sounds.
Assonance: Repetition of vowel sounds.

Hope that helps.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by cragwolf
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

Ths is really good. I've never seen such an extended alliteration without one article or non-alliterative word to help it along, that was so coherent.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by Janitor
Is he allowed to say "ergodic" in this forum?

It's OK. I reported the post to the mentor and soon he will be banned. Quite the potty mouth, isn't he.

 

[holly]

Zooby, you are welcome to construct your own definition of what constitutes a vowel rhyme by piecing together what you find in your web/dictionary travels, but it does not match the poets' definition of a vowel rhyme...and M and N are close enough to be considered alliterative...

I think it's sort of funny to watch people attempt to plug something like poetry or art into the Science Mill.

 

[holly]

And another thing! I did not put the words "Radio Wave" by my ferret. That is not the ferret's name! I'm going back over to the homework forum where I belong. Maybe the words will just go away, even though THEY CONTAIN A VOWEL RHYME, ahem.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by holly
Zooby, you are welcome to construct your own definition of what constitutes a vowel rhyme by piecing together what you find in your web/dictionary travels, but it does not match the poets' definition of a vowel rhyme...and M and N are close enough to be considered alliterative...

I think it's sort of funny to watch people attempt to plug something like poetry or art into the Science Mill.

Reine Knarrischkeit. Do you know the difference between a sweet fool and a bitter fool, nuncle?

 

[holly]

Oh gosh, do I have to hear "fool" EVERYWHERE, even on the boards? The gang members I tutor say "foo'" all the livelong day... everything is FOO' this and FOO' that. I will admit that it's a welcome break from their OTHER favorite word, also beginning with "F"! However, it did give me the idea to put a new slogan on my car (the Christmobile): Be A Foo' For Jesus.

I hope that humorless guy doesn't come along and put a little lock on me! I'm not discussing religion, just making a remark. I hate those little locks!

 

[hypnagogue]

I don't see how the term 'vowel rhyme' is in any way distinct from the term 'assonance.' Assonance is the term usually used to describe the literary device.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by hypnagogue
I don't see how the term 'vowel rhyme' is in any way distinct from the term 'assonance.' Assonance is the term usually used to describe the literary device.

The Merriam Webster's defines assonance as:

1: resemblence of sound in words or syllables
2a: relatively close juxtaposition of similar sounds esp. of vowels
b:repetition of vowels without repetition of consonants (as in stony and holy) used as an alternative to rhyme in verse.

So, they are similar, but if you compare with the definition of vowel rhyme the distinctions can be seen.