No.9962
I really struggle to follow whats going on unless its Keats. Every poem I read, from Homer to Goethe, I get completely lost or feel like i'm not experiencing their full potential.
What should I do lit? Is there some interpretative technique I should use? Do I "get gud"? Is it just about experiencing the prose and ideas the author is weaving and I should just relax? Should I just read more poems and get used to how they are written?
Pic related, not sure if its strictly a poem but its my personal final boss
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No.9963
>>9962
>Every poem I read, from Homer to Goethe
the fact that you are reading translations might be one of the reasons.
i, too, am a prose kind of guy. i read poetry every now and then. but did not appreciate it till very later in life. i didn't see the point.
plus i was really turned off by "poets", the kind that just writes stuff in a small column but doesn't clearly has an idea of what the fuck Xe's doing, or the ones that do slam.
just pick stuff that actually interests you.
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No.9964
At least to me the confusion comes from poetry's predisposition towards metaphors and nonsense ideas, rather than sentence structure or such.
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No.9965
>>9963
Well that stuff does interest me. Have you read Faust? How did you get through it and understand it?
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No.9966
>>9962
>I get completely lost or feel like i'm not experiencing their full potential.
I simply have no clue about poetry. It is almost meaningless to me. I can read the salient quotes in their poetic context and miss completely their significance even though in isolation I "get" them. I can read whole poems and just be bored before I get to the end of a few hundred words.
But then I find this with well-written books, too
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No.9972
>>9965
>Have you read Faust? How did you get through it and understand it?
no i haven't. s-sorry.
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No.9974
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No.9976
>>9966
i think you are taking it wrong.
and i mean that i doubt that you can experience every piece of art in the same way.
some pieces speak to you, some don't.
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No.9979
I think it of help to you to study how poetry is done. No need for a PHD level commitment, just something introductory. A general guide. There is a suggestion for poetry study under the FAQ/Writing guide in the sticky.
This will give you an idea of what a given poet is doing, and why.
Also, there's no shame in busting out one of the Cliff Notes support cheat sheet summaries, if you can find one that covers a specific poetic work. They're not just for students halfassing their way through a semester. For a difficult or obscure work I like to read the summary after completing a chapter or section of the original work, so as to see if there is anything I missed. If you are really having trouble you will need to read the summary first, then plow into the original.
Finally, accomplished poets themselves differ on how they rate another's work. Sometimes surprisingly so, any two poets may be diametrically opposed on what is great, or what is garbage. As per:
>>9976
to which I completely agree.
But if you study technique a little, you will understand why something works for you, or what sucks, without being mystified.
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No.10020
>>9962
Just start writing it. Find someone who understands poetry and let them critique you. Sometimes focus on letting emotions flow, sometimes experiment with rhyme or meter, experiment constantly, just keep writing.
When I was a freshman in high school, I couldn't understand poetry for the life of me, but I wrote one to try to impress a girl. A few later, I banned myself from writing love poems because they were shit, and just started focusing on writing. Slowly I began to read, and even slower I began to understand poetry, until finally I broke through the angsty teen stage, through the sort of naturalistic externalist stage, and could finally write my understanding of things as it was supposed to be. At that point I lifted the love poem ban and got my girlfriend with love poetry. It was at that point I could understand the poetry of others, because I'd trained my brain to work on that specific emotional level. Before all this I thought poetry was bullshit, but now I write it for a living essentially. more than anything else it's definitely a mindset thing.
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No.10023
>>9979
>But if you study technique a little, you will understand why something works for you, or what sucks, without being mystified.
i don't know about that.
it happened more than once that i went through poetry books by the same author and maybe being blown away by a couple of poems and finding the rest boring, banale and uninspired.
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No.10071
/lit/, I don't get meter for the life of me. I cannot.
When I see things like pic related, it honestly seems arbitrary to me. If someone reads this out loud naturally, I don't hear the stressed or unstressed syllables.
When the English teachers would read them out loud and lay emphasis on the stressed syllables, it seemed like they were just picking words to focus on in a preconceived pattern, not genuinely pointing out a phonetic phenomenon.
Maybe this has something to do with the fact that I find rhyming indispensable when writing my own poetry? Unrhymed poetry seriously sounds like prose to me.
This coming from a guy (seriously not bragging) who has everyone tell him he's a fantastic public speaker and writer. Pls halp nao
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No.10079
>>10071
my only true encounter with meter was when i was studying ancient greek and i didn't do great in that particular aspect, even though the concept seems to make more sense than in english since vowels in greek have a "quantity".
i do not seem to get meter in the english language either…
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No.10087
>>10071
It's really a feeling thing you have to have a brain for.
I don't mean that as any sort of insult, but a lot of people don't have that intrinsic understanding of the art of words that poets have. Writers use words, and even use them well, but poets understand words, understand structure, and even understand arrangement on a level that a pure novelist can't. It's almost a synesthetic thing, where you can feel what is right as you're writing. When I was younger and just getting into poetry, most of the people around me didn't get it either, but once I picked it up, I couldn't help but tap along to the really good stuff. To this day I still can't really satisfactorily explain it, but people notice in my work and tell me on the rare occasions I break rhythm.
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No.10094
>>10087
>a lot of people don't have that intrinsic understanding of the art of words that poets have
As a writer (pfff, who here isn't), I will attest and agree to that.
Poets – unless they're into epic poetry – are generally agonising over a few hundred words and get to carefully construct sentences with very, very purposefully chosen words and pronunciation of those words.
Lit' writers care about the words, but they've got 80-100,000 of the fuckers to put on the page, so they're not going to construct every sentence with so much care to worry about morae and meter, but they will spend time refining the way words hang together and how sentences "flow".
We genre writers, on the other hand, generally don't give a fuck so long as readers understand the pretty scene or character we're painting with those words. kinda
To wit, I have maxi respect for poets. You lot have a skill I will never master.
tl;dr?
Poets are the true wordsmiths. Genre writers are storytellers. Lit' writers masturbate on the fence in between.
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No.13853
>>9962
Does this also happen while reading Kipling?
Or Carroll (The Hunting of the Snark)?
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No.13897
>>9962
Poetry generally is meant to provoke emotion rather than convey an idea. It's more akin to music than prose in it's goal.
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No.13933
>>10094
>Genre writers
>Lit' writers
The fuck is the difference? Is it that one of them knows how to write charismatic prose and the other one doesn't? Stop being lazy.
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