N., like Mark, I'm curious to hear where your chronological cutoff is for Modern English usage in formal poetry. By and large, do you find Robert Frost's work to be vulgar, coarse, and unstructured? W. H. Auden's?* Philip Larkin's? Richard Wilbur's? Les Murray's? A.E. Stallings's? Would you say that their use of contemporary English in formal poetry "just doesn't work well for the medium"? Because most other readers find their work masterful.

I suspect that what you really mean is that when you try to write poetry in Modern English yourself, you find it frustratingly hard. But, well, writing good poetry of any sort is frustratingly hard. Welcome to the club.

Giving yourself permission to invert normal sentence structure, with the excuse that it's intended to evoke another era, is one way to try to make it easier. But cheats like pretending to be someone who talks funny to modern ears are not going to save a poem that doesn't have something interesting to say, or interesting ways to say it. (I did think that your weaponry imagery was interesting, and I enjoyed a lot of your alliteration; but these things, although skillful, were not enough to make this topic new for me.)

You have a perfect right to flatly reject the modern English idiom in which most of us are writing at Eratosphere, if that's not your style. But if so, you probably won't receive writing advice here that is useful for the effects you want to achieve.

You will undoubtedly receive criticism more in harmony with your own ars poetica in an online poetry community like the Society for Classical Poets, where the regulars never met an inversion or elision they didn't like.

(Caveat: they also tend to be inordinately fond of poems redolent of certain political and societal views, which may or may not align with your own. And they also never tire of posting poems in which the authors congratulate themselves for being so gosh darn brave and clever and countercultural as to write in rhyme and meter rather than in free verse, which they condemn as the worst thing to ever happen to Western Civilization. I haven't taken a peek over there in a while...yep, they have lots of recent examples of all of the above.)


* Okay, yeah, there was that one incredibly profane blowjob poem of Auden's, but that was intended as an inside joke to be shared among friends, not for publication.

I am familiar with TSfCP, and while some of their translations of the works of Dante, Vergil, Horace, and the other Mediterranean masters I thoroughly enjoyed... their entire political jargon is, and forgive me for recycling a word, anathema to me. I'd scarcely consider some self-indulgent politicizing with the intent of reaffirming their bigoted (apologies to anyone contiguous to that province of the political aisle, but I'll speak candidly) to merit the epithet of poetry, must less the artistry. I recall distinctly a rather beautiful rendition of Petrarchan verse that piqued my interest, only for it to be swiftly vivisected by an aggregate of hymns to an orange-tinctured despot. Some were so vain and vapid that I almost mistook them for parody, bringing Poe's law to its absolute threshold. Despite what certain members may be inclined to believe, I am thoroughly against their ideologies. One of the reasons I nearly gave up on writing verse was because I did not wish to associate with them in any meaningful format. And, as much as I loathe free verse, I would sooner pen it for the rest of my life than cater to their outlet. Which makes those few poems that do have authentic beauty all the more bittersweet.

Of the poets you've listed, only have I genuinely enjoyed Stallings' work, and even then her poems concerning more modern things like Jetlag and Jigsaw Puzzles are not of interest to me. There is just... almost nothing in modernity I find enjoyable or even remotely worth my time. And I certainly can't enjoy a poem about the discourse, much less hope to write one. Medieval and ancient poems just appeal to me more; the way they sound, their mannerisms, their similes, their invocations to deities (Pagan or otherwise), the religious awe, the complexity of their speech, etc. To me, it's like comparing a candle to the chariot of the Sun.

N., I'm glad you find our politics and philosophy more congenial than that of the Society of Classical Poets, but unless you also can understand our overall aesthetics, we may not be able to give you what you need. We all have widely varying styles and subject matter, but we tend to agree that archaic language does not have much place in contemporary poetry except in parody or pastiche. I love classical, medieval, and Renaissance poetry, but I don't try to write like it.

Also, I concur with Julie in having small patience for poems that go on and on about women's beauty as a weapon. Back when it was the only weapon women were allowed to have, it may have seemed an interesting trope. These days, not so much. Several times I have read through your poem, but each time the language does not make much sense to me. I understand all the words, but when I try to ask myself what is happening in the poem, I can't figure it out. Milton used dense language and unusual syntax, too, but I can usually follow him much better.

I don't think anyone should tell you what to write about. But if they tell you what they are or are not getting out of what you write, it is worth listening to. We are willing to help if you are willing hear. You don't have to take every suggestion, but if you reject all of them, we can't benefit you.

Susan

N., I am confident that if you look at A.E. Stallings's "Jet Lag" and "Jigsaw Puzzle" less hastily, you will find that both those poems are making arguments very similar to the views you have expressed above in prose. They do so in a very oblique, playful, poetic way, by curating a mood and an experience rather than by making an explicit statement. There is far more going on in their depths than can be judged on the surface level of subject matter.

The first poem is so chock-full of Greek mythology that I am gobsmacked to hear it accused of too much modernity. I hope you can be persuaded to regard the poem as evidence that the antiquity of which you are so fond is still relevant, vibrant, and life-enriching in modern times. I'm frankly stunned that you are dismissing a poem that seems to resonate so well with your own more extremely-stated sensibilities.

The second poem can taken as a meditation on humanity's constant struggles to make sense of life's chaos by employing various strategies. Seeking the structural outlines of the puzzle (corners and edges) might suggest religion, or it might evoke using the stanzas, lines, and metrical requirements of formal poetry-writing. Grouping pieces by color could evoke the racial stereotypes that many resort to in order to quickly categorize perceived threats, or it could suggest a poets' attention to rhymes and patterns. Stallings leaves it up to the reader to connect those dots in whichever way they wish. I love what she does with the line lengths and meter over the course of the poem, to help underscore the experience of disconcerting absences and things falling apart. I find that exhilarating. Again, I can't believe you're dismissing this poem on the grounds of modernity, or that you apparently think that this deceptively simple poem would have been improved by giving it more flourishes or by making the language sound as if it was written a few centuries ago.

To me, neither poem is "about" its subject matter. To me, both are "about" inviting the reader to briefly experience life itself from a new perspective. I am genuinely sad that you seem to be declining these invitations from an arbitrary determination not to enjoy "modernity." I fervently hope you will give these two poems another chance.

Julie,

My interpretation of the current climate is of millions of people thinking the same things, of people not saying stuff that other people have not already said, of people being put into boxes and acting like the boxes are real. In this vehement disagreement there is not caring for other people's feelings, which undercuts leftist folk who think they are fighting for the oppressed, and rightist folk who think they are more "real world".

But to match your point, I did not get the impression that anything new was being attempted. I interpreted the poem as writing in style, and I did not think myself experienced enough to comment on 16th century (thanks Mark) style. N. Matheson is obviously more experienced then I am in that style, because I could not sustain the style myself.

N. Matheson,

You have smoothed out the rhetoric of the final four lines, but I still think that you are struggling to make use of Glenn's suggestion, in that the final lines don't quite land. While dabbling and playing a little, I also could not find lines that nicely scan, so, yeah, it is a puzzle.

Now the voice topic is interesting to me for two main reasons:

[1] On discussing certain topics, a friend of mine said that my English reminded him of Plato's Greek.
[2] I also discovered that my voice fitted naturally into or is harmonious with 19th century English.

Now I don't know any Ancient Greek, and I did not study 19th century English, but it just turned out that way. I too find the modern English idiom a little uninspiring, with one of the reason being the massive simplification of sentence structure post the invention of radio and television. I say it all the time: not everybody speaks the same English.

Also, for sure, without a persistent and consistent mythos, modern poetry can fracture into a million fragments of personal concerns like so many diary entries.

But all the above is part of what makes poetry writing a fun hobby for me.

Addendum: An a recent English friend of mine described my speech as "ancient". Which was fun!

The question I have is how much one benefits from posting a poem if the thread is going to turn into a conversation about the superiority of centuries-old English. How does that help a poem? Is posting it more of a statement? There is no point in pointing out all the beautiful poems of the last hundred years that use very contemporary English. But I would ask myself what is the point of posting my imitation 17th-century poem.

N., I’m curious: Are you writing in the language of a specific period or specific writers? If you’re writing, say, in the language of Spenser or Chapman, I suppose you should be using “liveth,” “wieldeth,” etc. But I think Shakespeare was already moving away from those forms, so Chapman himself may have been using old-fashioned language for poetic effect. I suppose your target period is mid to late seventeenth century: Milton and Dryden.

Note that your new second sentence is no longer grammatical—unless “that drop” is subjunctive, but I doubt anyone will read it that way. Here’s my modernized paraphrase as an illustration:

She outwits armies that soldiers drop their arms.

You need “so” before outwits. A metrically less problematic solution, though weaker, would be to replace “that” with “, and.”

Hi N,

This poem is somewhat hard to critique. Firstly, as others have said, because of the language: Is it genuine archaic English written by someone familiar with the rules and word-meanings of the time (16th century?). In which case, in my ignorance of such things, it's hard for me to critique those aspects. Or is it faux-archaic, in which case what are the rules? Does anything go?

Second, the poem is part of a larger work. I have certain expectations of a standalone poem and what it should achieve, but this poem may be functioning more like a paragraph in a novel, and it may its gain value more from how it fits the greater whole, something I know nothing of.

Disclaimers aside, on to the poem.

This poem is a portrait. It's of a woman, or at least, of some female being. That she has lives, plural, makes me wonder if this person is human, or someone more mythical, a goddess even. Someone who lives over and over, perhaps -- reincarnated -- and is unnaturally clever. On it's own the poem doesn't do too much for me, because I'm left with a sort of "so what"? The idea of a woman using sex/seduction as weapon is hardly new after all. But seen as part of a larger work, in which this character plays a part, maybe I'd like it more, maybe it gets its value in the context. Maybe the poem is primarily functioning to introduce this character?

The grammar of the first sentence has me confused. Is it comma-spliced? This is a complete sentence, with "as" meaning "like":

As whetted steel / in wanton war, she wields her beauty’s hilt.

But how does it attach to what precedes? The preceding part has a subject "A panoply of whispers, charms, and smiles" then never seems to get a verb. Also, I can read,

"A panoply of whispers, charms, and smiles [...] as [=like] whetted steel ..."

So maybe "as whetted steel ..." isn't attached to "she wields"? But either way, I'm still waiting on a verb that never seems to come.

Her wits out-legion all th’ embattled hosts
That soldiers trade their arms to beg for alms;

I like the word-play on legion / host (army), also sonically "arms" and "alms". I think you want "that" to mean "so that", in which case a comma after "hosts" would be needed, since you have two independent clauses. At least, in the 21st century it would. Without the comma, it doesn't make much sense to me.

A mortal arrow fletched with groans and sighs

This is hard to picture. I'd suggest "feathered sighs", but I think you want the groans for their sexual implications.

Her velvet arms, those slender instruments,
Which fan perdition’s flame with ecstasy,
Claiming usury’s interest for her loan
Of pleasures brief, which she demands in pain
With ev’ry idle bliss repaid to her
Times three, with jagged woes and barbed regrets.


I'm a bit confused here. I can see how her arms (and being in her arms) can bring ecstasy. But how/why do her arms, specifically, claim the interest on the loan? Why not also her lips, and so on? Plus, it seems odd to me that she (the whole person/being) demands the interest in pain, but only part of her, her arms, claims the the interest?

But then, given "instruments" (with its suggestion of torture which fits with the coming pain), I wondered if "arms" meant weapons, as does earlier in the poem (and her weapons are mentioned -- bow and dart), or "arms" in the sense of her upper limbs (to go with the earlier "lips"). If you mean in it in the sense of weapons, then I'd be specific:

Her velvet weapons, slender instruments,

"velvet weapons" is quite nice sonically too, I think. Though I'd still be unclear as to how the weapons (of seduction) claim the interest.

In fact, I'd say the poem leaves it unclear as how the interest is paid. The debtors are left in pain and woe, but how is that brought about by the same things that brought the ecstasy? Or if she brings it about some other way, then how? Does she blackmail them? Break their hearts? I guess maybe that's for the next instalment.

best,

Matt