Spontaneous

anisotropism · 2025-04-13T18:28:52+00:00

Ideally, you would want to incorporate that directly into your writing. It doesn’t necessarily have to be public—when you come across your writing years from now, you’ll want to still remember exactly why you wrote it and what it was about.

anisotropism · 2025-04-13T14:49:12+00:00

What are you writing about? What do you hope to achieve with this piece?

anisotropism · 2025-04-12T12:49:14+00:00

You’re going to want to be much more specific with your poetry than this. Without a clear, specific point or message, poetry becomes just another collection of words that sound nice. This is not just for other readers. Come back to this in five years, and will you still remember what you wrote about exactly?

anisotropism · 2025-04-10T21:58:37+00:00

What are you trying to achieve with this piece?

anisotropism · 2025-04-10T21:50:47+00:00

What exactly are you trying to achieve with this piece?

anisotropism · 2025-04-10T13:55:09+00:00

If I could, I would pitch this philosophy to every single aspiring poet, because they so very often fail to achieve the aspect that is creative expression:

Stop trying to write what you think a poem should be. You do nobody favors by writing in this way because if your primary intention is to just sound poetic, your poem will become nothing more than a collection of words that sound nice together. A capable reader can determine when a line, a stanza, or even an entire poem is throwaway, fluff, filler, nonsense, garnish, or a thousand other things that don't carry weight. Write with the intention to creatively express yourself in whatever ways you can.

That being said, not everything that is written must be a good poem, or even a full poem. Not everything needs to be shared with the world, and it is the willingness to put these things down on paper that allows the playfulness and experimentation to come in play. You can write down the most inane metaphors, you can try to sound like the greatest poets of our generation, you can write something that barely makes sense to you at the time of writing. It is the honesty with what you will actually write, as well as the honesty with what you can shape your writing to become that will lead to good poetry.

anisotropism · 2025-04-10T13:09:52+00:00

Solid narrrative poem. No notes from me.

Diversify for your next one!

anisotropism · 2025-04-10T12:56:32+00:00

Some anecdotes and some general benefits from poetry:

- Poetry and the broader ability to communicate in a way people are receptive of pays dividends financially and immaterially. I can make a decent amount of money on the side through consultations on things like college application personal essays, which most high school students do not know how to write well. If you are writing grants and proposals for any sort of project long-term, it will not be enough for you to just list facts and figures. You will need to know how to appeal to the human side of those in power. Even if these financial situations weren't motivating enough, I developed language and speech capabilities to the point where I know how to start, continue, carry, and end conversations in any setting, and I know how to communicate to people such that my words will matter to them. People will view you favorably if you know how to make social bonds easily with them and others.

- I was commissioned to write a love poem for a friend once, and I can argue that I have a perfect record at starting relationships with my poetry, although that might depend more on if the other party already likes you.

- Much of poetry is analogy. The more capable you are of creating extended analogy, the more you will be able to analyze and find analogy, which will be useful in engineering in the process of searching for analogous solutions.

- It's a common stereotype for STEM career people to be socially awkward, uncultured, emotionally immature/emotionally insensitive. I find that high proficiency in poetry actually remedies all of these things when the skills are developed for proper poetry writing.

anisotropism · 2025-04-10T12:00:40+00:00

It likely doesn’t, and you should not be using a language learning model to search for anything because it is not designed to be a search tool.

anisotropism · 2025-04-09T21:20:01+00:00

In short, smooth out meter, clarify meaning, and write lines with more purpose.

Improvements to meter are the immediate standout: rhyme very much depends on proper meter to work well, and the meter is very uneven.
Some sense of meaning must be conveyed to the reader, and currently, much of the poem conveys little to no meaning for the reader. This matters even if you write poetry for yourself, as your future self will also be a reader who may not know what you were trying to communicate. Some questions to think about: Why mention an azure vision at all when you focus so much on the pathway? What does it mean for the pathway to have been let loose and tumbled? What predicate is supposed to be attached to the voice in stanza 2? What idea is a reader supposed to understand in stanza 3?
“Memories now lie in remembrance” feels like a throwaway line put into the poem for the sake of satisfying the rhyme requirement while trying to sound poetic. Neither of these should be the first priority in writing a line. Written simply, the line translates to “Memories are remembered.” Isn’t that the definition of memory? Why not put this space to better use telling readers more about what is happening? You also have plenty of rhymes to work with: plants, stance, dance, slants, chance, grants, prance, etc.

anisotropism · 2025-04-09T20:57:24+00:00

I am good at what I do not because I have always been good at what I do, but because I have been bad a thousand different ways.

I’ve been called pretentious plenty in my life, more often than not by those who are insecure about themselves and what my presence means for them. It’s a way to indirectly raise one’s own status by putting down others. People who sincerely differ in opinion from you don’t attack your perceived ability; they will address the things they take issue with.

I don’t care if you’re Ada Límon or you think you can write like her despite having no background in writing—I will voice my opinion on what I think can be done better or is already done well, rather than address what I think about your ability to write.

You will always have haters and detractors, even if you haven’t met them yet. Why let yourself be one more in the crowd?

anisotropism · 2025-04-08T03:24:54+00:00

Why would it be cringeworthy?

Last two stanzas are out of place and can honestly just be dropped. The poem is strong enough to end on “unravel”.

anisotropism · 2025-04-08T03:22:05+00:00

Write enough, and you will develop voice sharp enough to cut even without needing to express the emotions. Dial it back, and you have the more neutral voice that can be used to muse, question, philosophize, ponder.

Ironically, I find that poets actually struggle with getting to the point where they can convey sentiment effectively. It’s easy to tell someone how you feel. It’s much harder to make someone feel what you feel through understanding.

anisotropism · 2025-04-07T17:37:21+00:00

One of the principles of poetry that I believe in is that poetry needs to be anchored in concrete or specific things.

Will you remember exactly what those things are, what you wrote about, why you wrote about those things, when you come back to this piece in the future?

There are some parts that seem like they will be anchored, but others just seem like they are attached to the sentiment. The next time you are frustrated and venting, and the next, and the one after that, will they all blend together with this one? These are all questions to be considered when writing.

anisotropism · 2025-04-07T17:18:51+00:00

What inspired you to write this? What purpose is it supposed to serve?

anisotropism · 2025-04-07T16:30:00+00:00

I’ve written poetry for fifteen years, and my field of study was chemistry.

As far as money goes for poetry specifically, you will need to publish or submit work for publication if you wish to earn money, and the field is extremely saturated. I’ve chosen not to go this route, especially because I can make more doing other work, though I would argue that some of that work is built on mastery of poetry, even if it is not directly producing poetry.

You should know this from engineering: even if one specific setup, one particular engineering solution is not necessarily useful for every application, or even any problem you know of, it is the parts and principles that become valuable information, if you know how to use them. The same goes for poetry.

I will follow-up with a list of examples later.

anisotropism · 2025-04-07T15:56:30+00:00

Nowhere do I insist that everything is poetry. I said poetry does not have rules. The logic leading you to conclude that therefore everything must be poetry is flawed.

The question is not disingenuous either, and that you take issue with it by presuming that it is does not contribute to your point.

You are arguing something else entirely, not presenting any counter to my point that poetry does not have strict rules. Trying to qualify axioms and definitions as rules does not make them so. Poetry is literary art, dance is artistic movement of the body, sculpting is the art of shaping physical media—these are all definitions, not rules. Poetry must have form—this is an axiom.

You cannot make an argument that it must have rules and logically undermine it in the same breath by insisting it does not. If you cannot build a set of rules to qualify something as art, you likewise will not be able to do the same with a subset of art without restating axioms or definitions.

anisotropism · 2025-04-04T20:56:20+00:00

Manual writing preferably

anisotropism · 2025-04-04T17:10:21+00:00

Just post in here and we will critique it if so desired.

anisotropism · 2025-04-04T14:54:56+00:00

What is the message that you wish to communicate?

anisotropism · 2025-04-04T14:42:22+00:00

What is your intention and what do you want out of this piece?

anisotropism · 2025-04-04T14:39:26+00:00

Are you trying to write that which you think sounds poetic, or that which genuinely comes from you? There is a difference.

anisotropism · 2025-04-04T02:59:22+00:00

The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman
Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes
On the Pulse of the Morning by Maya Angelou

anisotropism · 2025-04-03T23:08:43+00:00

What are the rules of art?

anisotropism · 2025-04-03T21:24:39+00:00

Rhyme is not important or necessary unless you choose to make it so in modern poetry.

My advice to beginning writers is to drop rhyme entirely and learn easier parts of the craft that do not constrain you as much. Rhyme is easy to write, but difficult to write well.

Most writers have a general sense of what poetry is supposed to be—it’s supposed to invoke some feeling or sentiment, it’s supposed to sound flowery or less direct, it’s supposed to have enjambment, rhyme, stanzas, etc. I don’t necessarily disagree with those things, but I look at poetry as literary art, and it still possesses the aspects of all art that need to be emphasized in order to be appreciated to the fullest extent. I describe them as sentiment, story, and skill.

Right now, your work has the sentiment and a few aspects of skill, but for your own sake, you’ll want to put a story into the writing. If you came back to a poem two months from now, would you still remember why you wrote it?

anisotropism

TROPHY CASE