Poetry

I have some questions to stir up discussion in this thread:

1. Who are some living poets you think people should read? Do you have a favorite poetry book?
2. Do you write poetry? What's your preferred form/genre?
3. As a silly question, what's some imagery that you are sick to death of? What's some imagery that is so trite nowadays that you snap out of the poem because it's so jarring/bad?
4. In your opinion, why has poetry become so unpopular?

As for me, I ask the first question because I would like some recommendations. I don't have many living poets on my radar at the moment. That said, I do write some poetry and have been published a whole total of once. I really enjoy the sestina form, to be honest.

As a former student and someone who attended many open mic nights, I gotta say that I am sick of erotic imagery, especially peaches. But generally unexpected erotic imagery is quite jarring.

And I'm not sure why poetry has become so unpopular. I recently read somewhere that it boils down to the university system and elitism. By putting poetry on a high pedestal, writers are too intimidated to write their own poetry and people are put off from reading what's out there. IMO, on top of that, university writing workshops have severely impacted American poetry, with a lot of poetry that I've seen looking and sounding the same.

Does Heinrich Hoffmann count as a German poet?

If Wikipedia is to be believed, he was German, and published poetry, so I would say that it's fair to call him a German poet.

I myself saw mentions of many German poets when I first entered this thread... but nothing about Hoffmann. I was technically introduced to him when I read "The Story of Augustus Who Would Not Have Any Soup" in 4th or 5th grade, but that's actually not by him, as it's a translation of one of his Struwwelpeter poems (Die Geschichte vom Suppen-Kaspar/The Story of Soup-Casper).

Today, I know all of the Struwwelpeter poems in the original German, as Hoffmann wrote them. I have only found one good and accurate translation into English, though.

It may just be that those posters weren't familiar with Hoffman, or that they weren't fans of his work. Indeed, I would be very unsurprised if there were many other German poets not yet mentioned in the thread!

Reposting from the Chatterbox: Literature thread.

Here's a fun bit of trivia. You may have heard that you can sing all of Emily Dickinson's poems to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas." This is actually true, for the most part anyway, but there's a reason for it. Dickinson wrote most of her poetry in ballad stanza. In poetry, a ballad stanza is a type of a four-line stanza, known as a quatrain, most often found in folk ballads (British and American folk ballads, anyway). The ballad stanza consists of a total of four lines, with the first and third lines written in the iambic tetrameter and the second and fourth lines written in the iambic trimeter with a rhyme scheme of ABCB (sometimes assonance is substituted for rhyme). "The Yellow Rose of Texas," being a traditional ballad, is also written in ballad stanza, and so naturally you can sing pretty much anything written in ballad stanza to the same tune. You can also sing "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (also written in ballad stanza) to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

I always heard that you can sing Dickinson's poems to "America the Beautiful", which sounds completely different from "The Yellow Rose of Texas".

True, but "America the Beautiful" is also written in ballad stanza, so any tune that worked for it would also work for anything else written in ballad stanza. You can sing "America the Beautiful" to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas," and vice versa.

American actor, singer, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson also wrote a lot of poetry in ballad stanza.

Edited by Robbery on Feb 26th 2023 at 5:36:25 AM

Is poetry still popular in the Anglophone world? We used to have a thriving poetry scene in the Netherlands in the 19th century, but then the literary movement of the 1880s came along and killed it off forever, at least popularly, so...

Makes me wonder. Is Hip-Hop a form of poetry?

Don't see why it wouldn't be, though I expect it might depend on who you ask.

I'd say yes, it is. It's basically a step up from slam poetry.