i mean i don't want to share my shitty prose either lmao i have standards honestly yeah though poetry education is crap. I sure didn't gain an appreciation for any of it from what i studied. Except shakespeare plays (barely count) and the rime of the ancient mariner. and that weird poem about stabbing a guy that was removed from all the GCSE coursebooks. certainly not wordsworth. bugger wordsworth. I do enjoy reading poetry aloud, though. maybe that's it. i like it less when it's just pinned onto the paper. I read a lot of kids' poetry books when i was small but i guess none of it especially stuck. and i have no natural ear for metre, tbh. i can't count syllables and i don't enjoy it. and trying to rhyme drives me nuts. hence just producing weird meandering free verse whenever I try to write any poetry. also it encourages my natural tendency towards disgusting amounts of metaphor
i was never very good at prose and it is so much harder than poetry because it has such different fucking considerations and it takes so much more effort for me than just poetry does
it sounds like you have the opposite problem from a lot of people, then, which must be hideously frustrating.
great so poetry is just fucking bad and awful and too much work just fucking great I'll never get more of it unless it's written by me because it's too fucking hard.
most of my language teachers tried so hard to teach us poetry and made us read a bunch and I llove the idea of poetry, but man am I bad at it. Like letter writing and reading maps. Some Things My Brain Was Not Meant To Understand Well
YES IT IS. I HATE WRITING IN FUCKING PROSE. IT IS THE GOD DAMN WORST AND IT IS FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE ANYTHING SOUND NICE WITHOUT PEOPLE GOING OH BUT THAT'S TOO REPETITIVE OR REDUNDANT OR WHATEVER THE FUCK ELSE HAVE YOU.
but no poetry is just harder so i won't ever get to read poem fics because it's harder and no one will even try because it's just harder and no one likes poetry anyway
hey, hey aon, if you want you can request a poem from me! I can't promise it will be very good but if you got any specific character or fandom I should work with I can certainly try something! It'll be practice and fun or something :P
Weird meandering free verse is fine. It takes time to build an ear for poetry. It is fine for that. It takes time. It takes time to not write absolutely god fucking awful prose but people will put in the effort for that even though it takes just as much fucking work.
after a while i stopped giving a shit about the proper way to write prose and just wrote how it sounded best to me. also i think maybe this is really upsetting you? Do you need to go get a comforting drink?
YES IT IS REALLY FUCKING UPSETTING ME BECAUSE I HAVE PEOPLE ACTING LIKE PROSE IS SOMEHOW FUCKING EASIER AND BETTER AND POETRY IS JUST UNIQUELY FUCKING HARDER WHEN THAT ACTUALLY ISN'T THE FUCKING CASE.
fyi, when i was in grad school, i made friends with a ton of professional poets. it was a smaller niche than novelists or popular non-fiction writing, but i assure you it is FAR from a dead art form, and judging by how packed some of the readings and book launches i went to were, plenty of people like it.
it feels like it and there's so little of the poetry i want to see i want to see more of it in fandom so much of what i see is original poetry and i love original poetry a lot and go and read things but i also just really want to see more of it in fanworks and i see so fucking little of it
No I mean I am 100% certain poetry comes super easily to some people and it's no harder than prose, just different. And I probably should practice it more, because it doesn't come naturally to me. And Epic Poetry is fucking baller and amazing and can tell such cool stories. It really cool that you appreciate something that most people don't know enough about tbh. That's okay! -hugs if wanted- take care of yourself ye?
i don't know how to i'm just so sad i just want to be able to read stories and lyrics about characters i like but i can't hardly ever i even read the sonnets i find and i don't even like sonnets much
also, ftr, here's a poem i made up in my head a while back and never wrote down, best as i remember it Spoiler: weird meandering free verse I am what I was born on Chalk and clay Flint and pudding stone These things make up Hertfordshire I am chalk. I smudge and crumble Leave my mark Even where I shouldn't. I am clay. I am easy to mould I obey and set In fragile shapes that fall apart. I am the puddingstone. I am many different things Crammed together Held as one only by my own head. But deepest down I am the flint. I am sharp. I have my uses. And I am everywhere.
That is nice, really. There are some bits like maybe adding a that to the last line of the first stanza but it does have nice flow in several bits. The first stanza in particular trips off the tongue in a natural fashion. It also has a nice structure, and a structure I'm very fond of. Though part of that is due to my fondness for Irish folk songs of the sorts where the structure is 'Mention a name, then a list of traits and such associated with that thing.' It's a good sort of structure though. It goes through the list in a good fashion too, ending with the thing that most defines you to neatly close off the poem. Closing off can be done in many ways, but that's a good one for poems with those sort of focus. Other ways being like the dunad, a sort of book ending with lines and words, or just simply cutting the poem off in the middle of a line. Simple structure but simple is much of the time all you really, truly need.
Thank you. I made it up when I was feeling kind of maudlin about moving away from where I grew up, and it refused to settle in any shape other than a poem. Also yes, that last line of the first stanza does need a 'that', you're right. Good catch.
