epoch

what is the difference between poetry and prose you know the old analogies prose is a house poetry a man in flames running quite fast through it

[firstfullmoon]

Lucie Brock-Broido, from a Guernica interview

[apocryphics]

lydia davis

[rmscarpathia]

“Competition is a patriarchal structure that privileges conquest. The most pivotal thing for me as an artist was to be able to say “no” to those structures in order to say “yes” to the structures I want to create. [......] Competition, prizes and awards are part of a patriarchal construct that destroys love and creativity by creating and protecting a singular hierarchical commodification of quality that does not, ever, represent the myriad successful expressions of art and art making. If you must use that construct, you use it the way one uses public transport. Get on, then get off at your stop and find your people. Don’t live on the bus, and most importantly, don’t get trapped on it.”

— Ocean Vuong, on being generous in your work

[lissar-deactivated20200503]

the one piece of writing advice i see everywhere on the internet—especially in nanowrimo contexts—is the sentiment that your first draft should be terrible. you should have no expectations of it. just get it pumped out to edit and refine. and I don’t like that idea… a first draft is more likely to have structural flaws, yes, but you could be wasting time by just rushing through it too fast. it’s fine to take it careful and heartfelt too. not everyone thrives with any piece of advice, that’s the thing.

catherynne valente wrote it so perfectly for an article for nanowrimo motivation:

“You can be good and fast at the same time. 

Though it is important not to put too much pressure on yourself, it is also important to know that quality and speed have absolutely nothing to do with one another. You can write something heart-catchingly brilliant in 30 days. You can do it in 10. There is no reason on this green earth not to try for glory. You’re going to spend these 30 days at the computer anyway. You might as well be mindful while you’re there.

 You can come out transformed. 

Write something true. Write something frightening. Write something close to the bone. You are on this planet to tell the story of what you saw here. What you heard. What you felt. What you learned. Any effort spent in that pursuit cannot be wasted. Any way that you can tell that story more truly, more vividly, more you-ly, is the right way. 

So holler. Tell it loud and tell it bright and tell it slant and tell it bold. Tell it with space whales and silent films or tell it with quiet desperation or tell it with war or tell it with dragons or tell it with tall ships or tell it with divorce in the suburbs or tell it with dancing skeletons and a kraken in the wings. 

Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You’ll never wish you’d held back a little more.”

[bostonpoetryslam]

A much older friend writes: Most romances do not last, and it is best to forget them. Tolstoy writes: All happy families are alike. My teacher says: Bad poems are all bad for the same reason: imprecision.

Sarah Manguso, “Address to Winnie in Paris,” from The Captain Lands in Paradise (via bostonpoetryslam)

[arckhaic]

hello! i thought it was super cool of u to actually read and compliment that blog's poetry and i just wanna drop by and show my appreciation. i've seen a lot of poetry tumblrs talking ((policing)) how ppl should write and how generic tumblr poetry is shit and it just seemed rly pretentious to me for them to talk that way?? anyway, that's all! thank u so much for taking the time to read others' poetry and im sure tons of other people appreciate that as well! 💕💕

hello hello!! ahh, thank you tho we’re actually mutuals & i’ve been reading their poetry. but i really do appreciate you stopping by!! 💛 💛

& well …. i agree that no one should be telling other people what to write. writing is a deeply personal and intimate thing and attempting to … direct how people should be writing simply because the ‘'’’aesthetic’’’ of the moment isn’t your jam — no, absolutely not. that’s why so many writing books are like: bro, i can only tell you how to write, i can’t tell you what to write. 

you only have the power to control your poetic voice. 

on the other hand, tumblr does have a generic poetry side. it is there, it does exist. and some of it isn’t good. and i can say that because i’ve written bad poems. i still write bad poems. but i think i hope what those blogs are trying to say is that … it can be tiring to read the same thing over and over again. generic tumblr has like three flavors of poem. and reading those flavors recycled over and over again can be a little tedious & sometimes you just wanna read something that just goes for the throat in a different way.

HOWEVER! if someone wants to take their newly discovered poetic voice and write about the things that’s popular on tumblr then damn, i will be the first one to tell them to do that. write that aesthetic, do those prompts, write about how the moon is gently swallowing you whole. whisper your secrets to the ocean. compare your love to honey. kiss a god. do it. learn poetry. if that’s how you’re going to get into this absolutely beautiful, terrifying world of poetry — yes, by all means, write it. 

but new poets … are new & tumblr might be the first time they’re ever even thinking about the idea to try poetry. and those first few poems are going to be … bad. they’re going to be because they have to be. you don’t start off writing some poet laureate level shit. you begin with bad metaphors because you don’t know what a metaphor can be yet. ( hell, i don’t know even i know what a metaphor can be and i’ve been doing poetry for near 10 years now. ) it’s a pure and wonderful discovery of yourself and your voice & it’s so good.

edit because i missed my whole thing bc im a dingdong sometimes: but just because it is new & doesn’t match the ‘’’aesthetic’’’’ of others, just because it is new and doesn’t have a defined voice yet, and just because it is new and it is bad — that’s no reason to call those poems shit. new poetry is just that. experimental poetry is just that. that’s wonderful. that is how you learn. it is not shit and should never be treated like that by other poets. if a poet makes your work feel like shit despite how much work and effort you put into it — that’s not true. your poem is pure creation even if it is bad. 

i’m not trying to defend those blogs because sure, there are some assholes on here. it’s tumblr, yeah. but i’m not going to say that there aren’t bad poems on generic tumblr poetry because there are. i have nothing against it, i love poetry in all it’s forms from new on tumblr to classic bound emily dickinson. i love it, poetry is beautiful. 

it’s … honestly, one of my most favorite things in this wild world of ours. & no one has the authority to take it away from you. write your bad poems. i love them. 

that soap box finished though ( this is so long lord help me )— i do ADORE discovering new poets. published, unpublished, on tumblr or not … i love it & i am always open and willing to read your poetry. i won’t promise reblogs/likes but i will read your work. ( with the understanding that i am a writer too and i love that good good feedback. ) 

[oceanvuong]

Just wanted to say I too am Vietnamese and identify as LGBT, and that you make me feel less alone with your writing and poetry. How do you write so beautifully in general, though? I happen to be very good at academic essays and love to write a lot, but I'm never good at wriitng creatively..

I’m not sure how to write beautifully–because beauty is so subjective and myriad. I think poetry is wonderful becuz it’s a private instance of an idiosyncratic individual’s idea of beauty. my idea of beauty,for exmaple,is not so much aesthetic/decorous beauty–but rather the fact that life can survive despite the violence that seeks to snuff it out. in other words, that survival is a kind of beauty–one that is perhaps more beautiful than beauty itself. which makes it BEYOND  beauty. like beauty plus. surviving, in this sense, is beauty 2.0.

hugs, –ocean 

[boykeats]

any tips for writing poetry with strong visuals and beautiful words?

i have a flash essay on how to practice writing poetic visuals here. that’s probably the most solid advice i can give you.

some other tips: work on paring down your sentences so they’re as concise as possible. practice describing situations, emotions, etc. only in images. disregard the rules of grammar, make up verbs that have never been used before, pay attention to the order in which you string your words together. find what brings beauty into your life and immortalize it. reread your favorite poets to figure out what it is they do with language that fills you up with fire

[pissedofflesbian-archive]

The Problem With Rupi Kaur's Poetry

The milk and honey author's use of unspecified collective trauma in her quest to depict the quintessential South Asian female experience feels disingenuous.

This is a really well written look into Rupi Kaur and her place in the literary world, how she markets herself to different audiences, and how she aims to present an image of South Asian women. I highly recommend people with opinions of her poetry - whether positive or negative - read this. 

[freshmagicalyear-deactivated201]

☽ ☾

① First you need to know that Nosebleed Club is dead.

② We’ll be looking at works that actually challenge and take you out of your comfort zone.

③ All writing advice is opinion. You do the weighing.

④ Unlock the hidden treasures of the subconscious.

⑤ Yes, there is such a thing as bad writing, but bad writing can serve good purposes. Most everyone starts out writing badly; some break out of it. 

⑥ Write freely. Write to fulfill yourself. Some people will want to set fire to your books. Censor you. Write anyways. And don’t produce vanilla to appease others. 

⑦ Most diaries, aside from one’s own, or those of prolific and dead writers, are boring.

⑧ How many have a full day to devote to book-writing? I did it before or after school, before bed, in the dark hours. A way exists.

⑨ Make writing every day a habit.

⑩ You don’t have to hold hands all the time. You’re allowed to have controversial opinions.

⑪ Read widely. Consider recommendations, but also read what no one else in your circles is reading.

⑫ With language: play, experiment, dissect, build and rebuild. There are so many possibilities!

⑬ Writing too generally towards universal truths produces uninteresting work. Write YOUR truth. What specific things move or resonate w you?

[arckhaic]

Do you have any writing tips for poetry or just texts in general? Your poems are strange, grotesque, absurd and weird in the best way posible, and your writing is also fantastic! I think you would have some nice tips

strange, grotesque, absurd and weird …. god, that’s exactly how i want them to be. that’s exactly how i want to be described wow. thank you so much!! i’m so glad that you think so!! like i’m smiling so loud you can probably hear it.

there are a few writing tips that i’ve collected throughout my years:

read. read read read. if you don’t know what to read or where to get started on reading, tumblr is an okay start. ( i say okay because i have a lot of beef with ‘lit’ side of tumblr. ) you can follow blogs that post poetry quotes. like, i’ll just scroll through @lifeinpoetry and find a quote that just really sticks out to me and go read the whole poem. they usually have the source right there & that’s a good way to find lit mags which’ll have more poetry!  poets.org and poetry foundation both have a poem of the day that can get you started!

but also, consume all types of media, not just poetry. watch that movie you’ve been putting off. read that book sitting on your shelf. sit for two hours at a comic book store and read through them. interested in some weird thing that’s not even related to poetry? read about it! watch a youtube! ted talks! just put yourself into everything you can. you’ll learn so much from it and not even know. 

@boykeats answered this ask about repetition in poetry which i know a lot of poets feel that they do and honestly? just … probably one of the biggest reasons why i restarted my poetry blog. like if i wanna write 235 poems about digging bones out of the mud and the concepts of decay then that’s what i’m going to do. who’s going to stop me? no one. 

another thing for feeling like you’re repeating yourself too much in poetry is to create a blacklist. write down all the themes/words/feelings that you feel you’re overusing and just don’t use them. 

“write what you know” is a buncha hogwash. write what you want to write. write what you want to know. write because you feel like writing. i write about a buncha nonsense. i write about my characters in my stories. i write about how i wish i felt, i write how i think certain memories could’ve played out. i write about things that’ve never happened. i write about feelings i’ve had or haven’t had or could have had. write whatever you want to write. and write it because … you want to write it. 

write down the line in your head. you might never use it, you might write the next epic with it, whatever. but if you lose it, it’s gone forever. write it down. 

when you realize that you should only ever write for you, oh my god—the fucking freedom of that. do you know how nice it is to sit down and be like: man, i want to write about decomposition and i can just …. do that. i literally can … just do that? like … you literally can just sit down and write whatever the fuck you want. and once you learn that … oh, man. it’s going to take you so far. 

and @nnhorn, an absolutely prolific writer, says “sit down and do it and stop scrolling tumblr pretending like thinking about it is good enough.” and honestly? mood.

addition: “always push for five-hundred more words. always just five-hundred more. it’s enough for a scene, enough for a good chunk of dialogue and description. it’s enough to make you feel satisfied but enough to dissatisfy you too, making you want to continue until there’s five-hundred more”

[epekhein]

An Interview with Physicist and Poet Florence Lenaers, by Amee Nassrene Broumand

[bostonpoetryslam]

Lose that first stanza: The first stanza is often the path to a poem, and it provides scaffolding for us, but our reader doesn’t need it as much as we do. Read the poem without the first stanza, and see how much is missing. Consider how quickly the first stanza situates the reader in the poem.

Editing advice from Carmen Giménez Smith, part of her “Twenty-Two Poem Hacks” published on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Blog

[epekhein]

The Tumblr Poetry Aesthetic, or: the stars, the sea, Icarus, dark suburbia, and the (un)intentional pandering and ungrowth of the well-established

this conversation was initiated for me (madina) personally by giana @syrupbrat and stefan @travelingsalesman. epoch discussed this extensively in our discord chat, and the content of this post is mostly pulled out of that discussion.

When browsing through the usual tags used to promote one’s own writing on Tumblr, such as #inkstay, #spilled ink, #poets on tumblr, etc, we seem to drown in the sameness of everyone’s writing styles that it all is indistinct. It boils down to a haze of blah blah blah stars, blah blah blah yet another comparison to a Greek mythology figure, more love poetry, girl as dangerous, boy as god, alcohol is the only way we’ll survive.

These themes originated in what one might call the heydays of Peak™ tumblr poetry (this is starting to sound like a school essay & smh I can’t let this post go that direction), circa 2013(?)-2015. Most of it was documented in @nosebleedclub‘s “Memories of a Certain Spring: A Workbook” – Nosebleed Club was, in fact, what you would point at if you were asked in 2014 what “Tumblr writing” is (cue the emphasis on was, the evolution of NBC continues until now & I feel like a proud daughter about it). Multiple networks and groups have then spanned from that model, some which are still going until now, some abandoned and left to the dust – just so that you could be part of that “elite cool kids club”, whether the original one or not. the writers in the original collective also had their writing styles copied and/or plagiarized to capitalize off how prevalent and popular this aesthetic is but nvm that’s not my place to extensively rant about

I do love the stars. The sea, mythology, dangerous teenage gods, I love them all and I honestly would die for them (yes, the planets, ocean, and those tragic myths included) – but when people write about them just because they think it’ll be popular, just because it fits into the predefined box of what is proven to be well liked – an aesthetic that has since consumed us – exploration and experimentation dies, and that’s when it becomes dangerous. Everything posted will only be the product of rehashing and emulating what has been written and consumed before – shallow imageries without anything to say, without anything to make it yours. It got over-commercialized fast and crumbled. Let’s not even mention those who made a fake persona to make their poetry feel more “real” and authentic, those who write about drugs and alcohol w/o experiences backing them up and only stereotypes & what other people have written about it.

This phenomenon is further supported by Tumblr itself being a bad site in general bad platform for writing on its own – those notes, those likes and reblogs, really do shape up to define you, whether you’re conscious of it happening or not. We all crave for that feeling of being noticed because that’s just how it is. I myself can’t even say I never wrote something just for those notes, and I’m sure others that started out writing in Tumblr can say the same. If you don’t realize it yourself; if you don’t become self-conscious of the fact that really, Tumblr is a bubble, and do not actively seek out for anything new because you don’t see the need for it – you get stuck in it. Even if you wrote with the aesthetic that we all fell in love with, there’s a chance that you won’t get the recognition you think it deserved – it crushes you, and the cycle repeats again.

(this aesthetic, in turn, bled and drenched almost every tumblr roleplay until they all became the same and unrecognizable individually, whether with the usual tropes of characters: Sad Rich Girl With A Heart Of Gold. Bad Rich Boy With A Heart Of Gold. Gay Guy With A Bad Past So He’s Hypersexual Now – or situational: your edgy Welcome To This Small Suburban Town Where Everyone is a Supernatural Creature, or perhaps your This Is A Simulation of a Real Life Town for People Who Have No Lives)

Personally, I do believe in the existence of Bad Poetry – though “underdeveloped” is the word I prefer to use (maybe it’s just because I’m a softie and I can’t say outright that it’s bad, but let’s be real, bad poetry is bad poetry). No soul and nothing else to offer than just a few pretty words and fleeting concepts. Pseudo-profound bullshittery. u wanna get off it?

internalize the fact that we unconsciously seek for approval

get off tumblr for a while and write in your solitude 

consume more than u write.

explore & experiment upon different themes and structure. get out of your comfort zone in writing

write about your own memories and experiences, whether good or bad or interesting or not interesting, not what is deemed is consumable

turn to your culture and read up those local myths

– Honestly, I don’t know how because it cannot be forced. But recognizing that this exists will in turn make you think even more critically about your writing.

oh, that’s it – be critical. To the words that surround you & the words that come out of you.

To close this off: “its Everywhere like i get it . u wanna be a vampire cheerleader with a smile too big. i Get it . lets do something else” - @arckhaic

[meiselr]

I agree partly with this but in the end how about we just let people write what people enjoy?

It’s not bad to write some cliché or tell the story for the hundredth time as long as you write in your own voice and not just to get notes. I love Greek mythology. I love the story of Icarus and if it pleases me I will rewrite it as often as I feel the need to.

As long as people enjoy writing and write to express themselves or only for the fun of it or even because they know that these poems will bring joy to other people, there is no harm. No theme can be ‘overdone’ - if that would be the case we would not have enough art to fill museums and no writing to fill enough books.

How about instead of trying to tell people 'don’t write about things everyone else wrote already because I find it boring’ we learn to say 'Write about whatever you want because every piece - if good or bad - is worth the time’? Why does this age limit people so much instead of letting them explore themselves? Some people have to write about the sea and the stars and dead myths to find more of themselves, some start directly with something else. Let people write whatever they want without the need to apologize or explain why they write about it. You wouldn’t ask Gaiman why he wrote about Gods either. You wouldn’t tell King he should start to write romance because all the horror is getting old. Posts like this will not help but only harm writers. They have enough selfdoubt already. Let them write whatever they want and if you don’t want to read about it anymore maybe just click or scroll away. There is enough poetry and writing here on tumblr for everyone. I don’t think we need to limit any of them.

[epekhein]

hey, op here (are we an op? we’re a writing group lmao). i totally, totally agree that it is up to the writers themselves what they want to write – nowhere in the original post was i saying that you should stop writing about the stars, the sea, Greek mythology, etc. also, where did i even say those things were boring? i love those themes and imageries, especially if there’s new takes on how the themes can be explored (a great example is @inkywings/ramna safeer’s poem “fajr”, which explores icarus as a muslim boy & i love love love every single part of it)

it’s not the themes being overdone as a whole, it’s the writers themselves feeling that they’ve exhausted those themes, how they are writing those poems just for the sake of the aesthetic and notes. the post jabbed at tumblr culture more than it did to individual writers. i’m sorry that my tone came off as attacking, or that you think i seem to be harming writers, but if you have xkit and enable tagviewer you can see that the post helped writers who stopped and/or was dissatisfied with their own writing realize what the crux of their problem was, and so they acted accordingly. this is not about adding to their self-doubt. this is showing a perspective that’s been brewing on people’s heads for a while, but nobody has ever written a 800-word post for.

also, yes, we did tag it with the common writer tags so that writers could read it. aren’t tags used for exposure? yes, we wanted notes, only to know that people actually read this post & that they shared it around.

(@quibblersandquidditch @discardedtwigs @maryamorvena i’d appreciate it if you read the response, thank you!)

[epekhein]

favorites from How To (and How Not To) Write Poetry, by Wisława Szymborska

[epekhein]

on r.h. sin, a collaborative poem by madina / ryena / saki / kwan ann

[epekhein]

So you want to be a writer? Essential tips for aspiring novelists, by Colum McCann