archive of forms

links on the writing of poetry. I'm collecting most of my information from www.poetry.org, but I will look further afield at some point. Just notes really. Genevieve

[observando]

7 tips from William Faulkner on how to write fiction

1. Take what you need from other writers

I think the writer, as I’ve said before, is completely amoral. He takes whatever he needs, wherever he needs, and he does that openly and honestly because he himself hopes that what he does will be good enough so that after him people will take from him, and they are welcome to take from him, as he feels that he would be welcome by the best of his predecessors to take what they had done.

2. Don’t worry about style

I think the story compels its own style to a great extent, that the writer don’t need to bother too much about style. If he’s bothering about style, then he’s going to write precious emptiness–not necessarily nonsense…it’ll be quite beautiful and quite pleasing to the ear, but there won’t be much content in it.

Keep reading

[archiveforms]

Reblogging directly, an older post was deficient. 21.12.2022

[michaelnordeman]

Red squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (October 30, 2022).

[archiveforms]

Sourced from Twitter and Google. A fine description of intergenerational trauma.

Maybe I overdid it when I called my father an enemy of humanity. That might have been a little strongly put, a slight exaggeration, an immo

[mulberryroad]

“Deep Listening/ I practice listening carefully at my art table to what the materials want to do, what ideas emerge through the creative process and what my next step is without worrying about the final outcome-an ongoing, daily practice. “

Emma Freedman, Buddhist philosopher, poet and artist on her guiding principles. Read and refresh yourselves.

[archiveforms]

It appears Emma Freeman has removed this post from her website. Here is a link to her newsletter subscription page if you are interested. April 2023, G.

[24hoursinthelifeofawoman]

André Kertész ,1940

[archiveforms]

Prom poem with a formal shape, practically a sonnet.

A bird is hunting fresh food down below,

a smaller bird gives chase to his success.

Wind tosses waves not far away, fresh breezes flow.

This is our last day down the Prom today.

I won Scrabble last night: slow and steady did it,

a flurry of vowels, some double words, was all

it took to erode my tax commissioner's credits

and send him slowly screaming to the wall.

When I don't care to win, then things do show

Coming to light, to hand while not in excess,

certainly finding paths where little merit

pushes through crusts of doubt, bursts over all.

What this new year holds is too soon to find,

Will I build something new, or lag behind?

(I have scrawled in capitals below the original, WELL YOU CAN RHYME AND SCAN ANYWAY.)

[archiveforms]

yanakie poems, after robert gray: uno

lowering clouds over sludge horizon

windows all around call sun in

lemon through the windbreak,

casting a moving pen's shadow.

Then, rain on gumtips.

Birds take off over the roof

as the sun lifts clear of the cloud,

the work of a moment because

this is the windiest place in Victoria.

Look- bands of green on the sea.

then, in the fading afternoon, my ex-hire Toyota

is the same colour as the milk-blue sea.

Though a car from the sea is hard to find

in a crowded carpark.

Here it's less anonymous;

speeding towards Cape Liptrap

it is an agent of deliverance,

exhaling dirtily, butaneously, like lime from the Walkerville kilns,

or sealers' fires on Corner Inlet.

We didn't have to come here, this isthmus didn't need us.

[archiveforms]

prose poem in time of lockdown

so my daughter liked my poem for her friend, celebrating her fortieth in lockdown and insisted on the phone, write more! write more! you are good at this. and I protested that I need to polish my poems, to play and then polish, and to know when to leave it alone, that is what poetry writing is.

the neighbour calls to her baby boy, Benny, Benny, and I wish she would just call him benji so I know she is not calling me (genny! genny!). cold wind blows softly through the window bringing rich spring smells. i will call my sister in law soon and we will talk about her dead brother, or not, depending on how the call goes. she looked sad on the family screen last night.

on the wall, a collage of matisse’s cut out, cut out of a calendar that I must have had bluetacked in two places in the house for over ten years. it is splendid, only five colours and some faintly grey whiteness for the wolf’s head. from the jazz series, the pencilled title is fading with my finger rubs.

also on the wall, artwork of the daughter dressed as a piece of toast at Sydney Road street festival, photos: one with her siblings at christmas, two working with another comedian, three looking gleefully at her birthday cake. a hello card from a baby called athena, plump and succulent. a printout of the rules corita kent posted in the immaculate heart college art department all those years ago. birds, another baby who is now thirty-seven in a bath on the lawn .

my favourite rule from corita - rule one find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.

gee it is nice typing without autosuggest, isn’t it.

[nathanielthecurious]

A Lovely Poem About How Much I hate my English Teacher

Arma puerumque cano, lycaei qui primus in cameris ventitat, discipulus lege, multum ille et ludo iactatus et domu saevae memorem magistrae Anglicorum ob iram; multa quoque passus, dum inferret sibi studia universitati.

Musa, mihi causas memora, qua dementia turbata, quidve dolens, illa tot volvere casus insignem pietate iuvenem, tot adire labores impulerit.

((I can add translation if you guys want, or nah. Still annoyed that I couldn’t find the Latin word for homework. If anyone knows what it is and/or has a link to the version of Colloquia Cottidiana that has that in it, let me know.))

[mythologyofblue]

This is how you live when you have a cold heart. As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock, under the great maple trees.

The sun hardly touches me. Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away. Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it. I feel it glinting through the leaves, erratic, like someone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.

Living things don’t all require light in the same degree. Some of us make our own light: a silver leaf like a path no one can use, a shallow lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

But you know this already. You and the others who think you live for truth and, by extension, love all that is cold.

-Louise Glück, “Lamium”

[hideback]

William Blake (English, 1767-1827)

Songs Of Innocence and Of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, circa 1789-1794

More William Blake on hideback

[throwingconceptualbricks]

Crisp Valleys

Louise Crisp says: she grew up in hard country meaning, she was free to wander. I say: I grew up in soft country meaning, I was free to wonder. The rainforest mountains sheltered me in nurturing undulation. A tanned kelpie followed my scent upstream. We ate from tropical fruit trees with abundant exoticness. Swollen rivers often left gullies full of water. The music was as consistent as the rain. Even the cicadas had rhythmic purpose. In creek corners we hunted crystals. The canopy was my home, and it was anything but silent. With nothing but harmonies, even in the pitch black dark, I never felt alone. How else can I explain rainforest-dwelling?  

[archiveforms]

Saving this because I know Louise's daughter. And also because it is a fine piece by Stevi-Lee Alvers.

[poetsorg]

The filídh were a professional caste of poets in early Ireland who were often credited with the supernatural power of prophecy. The words fili and filídh are etymologically connected to ‘seer.’ These poets, who were the successors of the druids and could practice divination, were magicians and lawgivers.

Edward Hirsch on this week’s Poets Glossary term. (via poetsorg)

That’s my people he’s talkin’ about.

[poetsorg]

The epic is inherently nostalgic. It looks back to greater and more heroic times—the emergence of tribes, the founding of countries, the deeds of legendary figures…It moves beyond individual experience. It binds people to their own outsize communal past and instills a sense of grandeur.

Edward Hirsch on this week’s poetic term. (via poetsorg)

[archiveforms]

[poetsorg]

Eavan Boland calls the aisling tradition ‘that old potent blurring of feminine and national’

Edward Hirsch on this week’s poetic term: Aisling. (via poetsorg)

aisling: Irish for “dream.” The aisling (pronounced “ashling”) is a vision or dream poem, which developed in Gaelic poetry in Munster during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It has its origins in the Old French reverdie, which celebrates the arrival of spring, often in the form of a beautiful woman. The aislingí present and personify Ireland in the form of a woman, who can be young or old, haggard or beautiful, lamenting her woes. The woman is usually referred to as a spéir-bhean (sky-woman). Aodhagán Ó Raithille inaugurated the tradition of the political aisling with his eighteenth-century poem “Mac an Cheannuidhe” (“The Merchant’s Son”), which closes on a note of total despair. Throughout the eighteenth century, the form took on a strong political ethos, expressing a passion for Irish deliverance.

In The Hidden Ireland (1924), Daniel Corkery calls the aisling an “intimate expression of the hidden life of the people among whom it flourished.” The aisling provides the legacy for such iconic female figures as Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the Shan Van Vocht, and Dark Rosaleen. The subgenre still reverberates, though reflexively. Seamus Heaney has several aislings, including “Aisling” (1974), “An Aisling in the Burren” (1984), and “The Disappearing Island” (1987), which he recognizes as “a form of aisling, a vision poem about Ireland, even though it is an aisling inflected with irony: ‘All I believe that happened there was vision.’” In Paul Muldoon’s mock-vision poem, “Aisling” (1983), written in light of the 1981 prison hunger strike in Northern Ireland, the maternal figure of Ireland is recast as Anorexia. In A Kind of Scar (1989), Eavan Boland calls the aisling tradition “that old potent blurring of feminine and national.”

Excerpted from A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch. Copyright © 2014 by Edward Hirsch. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

[archiveforms]

so beat harder

you failed to notice your success again :-)