Here is a primer on the history of poetry

Features of Modernism

To varying extents, writing of the Modernist period exhibits these features:

1. experimentation

belief that previous writing was stereotyped and inadequate
ceaseless technical innovation, sometimes for its own sake
originality: deviation from the norm, or from usual reader expectations
ruthless rejection of the past, even iconoclasm

2. anti-realism

sacralisation of art, which must represent itself, not something beyond preference for allusion (often private) rather than description
world seen through the artist's inner feelings and mental states
themes and vantage points chosen to question the conventional view
use of myth and unconscious forces rather than motivations of conventional plot

3. individualism

promotion of the artist's viewpoint, at the expense of the communal
cultivation of an individual consciousness, which alone is the final arbiter
estrangement from religion, nature, science, economy or social mechanisms
maintenance of a wary intellectual independence
artists and not society should judge the arts: extreme self-consciousness
search for the primary image, devoid of comment: stream of consciousness
exclusiveness, an aristocracy of the avant-garde

4. intellectualism

writing more cerebral than emotional
work is tentative, analytical and fragmentary, more posing questions more than answering them
cool observation: viewpoints and characters detached and depersonalized
open-ended work, not finished, nor aiming at formal perfection
involuted: the subject is often act of writing itself and not the ostensible referent

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Expressionism

Expressionism was a phase of twentieth-century writing that rejected naturalism and romanticism to express important inner truths. The style was generally declamatory or even apocalyptic, endeavoring to awaken the fears and aspirations that belong to all men, and which European civilization had rendered effete or inauthentic. The movement drew on Rimbaud and Nietzsche, and was best represented by German poetry of the 1910-20 period. Benn, Becher, Heym, Lasker-Schüler, Stadler, Stramm, Schnack and Werfel are its characteristic proponents, {1} though Trakl is the best known to English readers. {2} {3}

Like most movements, there was little of a manifesto, or consensus of beliefs and programmes. Many German poets were distrustful of contemporary society — particularly its commercial and capitalist attitudes — though others again saw technology as the escape from a perceived "crisis in the old order". Expressionism was very heterogeneous, touching base with Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Dadaism and early Surrealism, many of which crop up in English, French, Russian and Italian poetry of the period. Political attitudes tended to the revolutionary, and technique was overtly experimental. Nonetheless, for all the images of death and destruction, sometimes mixed with messianic utopianism, there was also a tone of resignation, a sadness of "the evening lands" as Spengler called them.

Expressionism also applies to painting, and here the characteristics are more illuminating. The label refers to painting that uses visual gestures to transmit emotions and emotionally charged messages. In the expressive work of Michelangelo and El Greco, for example, the content remains of first importance, but content is overshadowed by technique in such later artists as van Gogh, Ensor and Munch. By the mid twentieth-century even this attenuated content had been replaced by abstract painterly qualities — by the sheer scale and dimensions of the work, by colour and shape, by the verve of the brushwork and other effects.

Expressionism often coincided with rapid social change. Germany, after suffering the horrors of the First World War, and ineffectual governments afterwards, fragmented into violently opposed political movements, each with their antagonistic coteries and milieu. The painting of these groups was very variable, but often showed a mixture of aggression and naivety. Understandably unpopular with the establishment  — denounced as degenerate by the Nazis — the style also met with mixed reactions from the picture-buying public. It seemed to question what the middle classes stood for: convention, decency, professional expertise. A great sobbing child had been let loose in the artist's studio, and the results seemed elementally challenging. Perhaps German painting was returning to its Nordic roots, to small communities, apocalyptic visions, monotone starkness and anguished introspection.

What could poetry achieve in its turn? Could it use some equivalent to visual gestures, i.e. concentrate on aspects of the craft of poetry, and to the exclusion of content? Poetry can never be wholly abstract, a pure poetry bereft of content. But clearly there would be a rejection of naturalism. To represent anything faithfully requires considerable skill, and such skill was what the Expressionists were determined to avoid. That would call on traditions that were not Nordic, and that were not sufficiently opposed to bourgeois values for the writer's individuality to escape subversion. Raw power had to tap something deeper and more universal.

Hence the turn inward to private torments. Poets became the judges of poetry, since only they knew the value of originating emotions. Intensity was essential.  Artists had to believe passionately in their responses, and find ways of purifying and deepening those responses — through working practices, lifestyles, and philosophies. Freud was becoming popular, and his investigations into dreams, hallucinations and paranoia offered a rich field of exploration. Artists would have to glory in their isolation, moreover, and turn their anger and frustration at being overlooked into a belief in their own genius. Finally, there would be a need to pull down and start afresh, even though that contributed to a gradual breakdown in the social fabric and the apocalypse of the Second World War.

Expressionism is still with us. Commerce has invaded bohemia, and created an elaborate body of theory to justify, support and overtake what might otherwise appear infantile and irrational. And if traditional art cannot be pure emotional expression, then a new art would have to be forged. Such poetry would not be an intoxication of life (Nietzsche's phrase) and still less its sanctification.  Great strains on the creative process were inevitable, moreover, as they were in Georg Trakl's case, who committed suicide shortly after writing the haunting and beautiful piece given below

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SYMBOLIST POETS
symbolism in poetry

Symbolism in literature was a complex movement that deliberately extended the evocative power of words to express the feelings, sensations and states of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. The open-ended symbols created by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) brought the invisible into being through the visible, and linked the invisible through other sensory perceptions, notably smell and sound. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), the high priest of the French movement, theorized that symbols were of two types. One was created by the projection of inner feelings onto the world outside. The other existed as nascent words that slowly permeated the consciousness and expressed a state of mind initially unknown to their originator.

None of this came about without cultivation, and indeed dedication. Poets focused on the inner life. They explored strange cults and countries. They wrote in allusive, enigmatic, musical and ambiguous styles. Rimbaud deranged his senses and declared "Je est un autre". Von Hofmannstahl created his own language. Valéry retired from the world as a private secretary, before returning to a mastery of traditional French verse. Rilke renounced wife and human society to be attentive to the message when it came.

Not all were great theoreticians or technicians, but the two interests tended to go together, in Mallarmé most of all. He painstakingly developed his art of suggestion, what he called his "fictions". Rare words were introduced, syntactical intricacies, private associations and baffling images. Metonymy replaced metaphor as symbol, and was in turn replaced by single words which opened in imagination to multiple levels of signification. Time was suspended, and the usual supports of plot and narrative removed. Even the implied poet faded away, and there were then only objects, enigmatically introduced but somehow made right and necessary by verse skill. Music indeed was the condition to which poetry aspired, and Verlaine, Jimenez and Valéry were among many who concentrated efforts to that end.

So appeared a dichotomy between the inner and outer lives. In actuality, poets led humdrum existences, but what they described was rich and often illicit: the festering beauties of courtesans and dance-hall entertainers; far away countries and their native peoples; a world-weariness that came with drugs, isolation, alcohol and bought ***. Much was mixed up in this movement — decadence, aestheticism, romanticism, and the occult — but its isms had a rational purpose, which is still pertinent. In what way are these poets different from our own sixties generation? Or from the young today: clubbing, experimenting with relationships and drugs, backpacking to distant parts? And was the mixing of sensory perceptions so very novel or irrational? Synaesthesia was used by the Greek poets, and indeed has a properly documented basis in brain physiology.

What of the intellectual bases, which are not commonly presented as matters that should engage the contemporary mind, still less the writing poet? Symbolism was built on nebulous and somewhat dubious notions: it inspired beautiful and historically important work: it is now dead: that might be the blunt summary. But Symbolist poetry was not empty of content, indeed expressed matters of great interest to continental philosophers, then and now. The contents of consciousness were the concern of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and he developed a terminology later employed by Heidegger (1889-1976), the Existentialists and hermeneutics. Current theories on metaphor and brain functioning extend these concepts, and offer a rapprochement between impersonal science and irrational literary theory.

So why has the Symbolism legacy dwindled into its current narrow concepts? Denied influence in the everyday world, poets turned inward, to private thoughts, associations and the unconscious. Like good Marxist intellectuals they policed the area they arrogated to themselves, and sought to correct and purify the language that would evoke its powers. Syntax was rearranged by Mallarmé. Rhythm, rhyme and stanza patterning were loosened or rejected. Words were purged of past associations (Modernism), of non-visual associations (Imagism), of histories of usage (Futurism), of social restraint (Dadaism) and of practical purpose (Surrealism). By a sort of belated Romanticism, poetry was returned to the exploration of the inner lands of the irrational. Even Postmodernism, with its bric-a-brac of received media images and current vulgarisms, ensures that gaps are left for the emerging unconscious to engage our interest

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IMAGIST POETRY
imagist poetry

Even by twentieth-century standards, Imagism was soon over. In 1912 Ezra Pound published the Complete Poetical Works of its founder, T.E. Hulme (five short poems) and by 1917 the movement, then overseen by Amy Lowell, had run its course. {1} {2} {3} {4} {5} The output in all amounted to a few score poems, and none of these captured the public's heart. Why the importance?

First there are the personalities involved — notably Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams {6} {7} {8} {9} — who became famous later. If ever the (continuing) importance to poets of networking, of being involved in movements from their inception, is attested, it is in these early days of post-Victorian revolt.

Then there are the manifestos of the movement, which became the cornerstones of Modernism, responsible for a much taught in universities until recently, and for the difficulties poets still find themselves in. The Imagists stressed clarity, exactness and concreteness of detail. Their aims, briefly set out, were that:

1. Content should be presented directly, through specific images where possible.
2. Every word should be functional, with nothing included that was not essential to the effect intended.
3. Rhythm should be composed by the musical phrase rather than the metronome.

Also understood — if not spelled out, or perhaps fully recognized at the time — was the hope that poems could intensify a sense of objective reality through the immediacy of images.

Imagism itself gave rise to fairly negligible lines like:

You crash over the trees,
You crack the live branch…  (Storm by H.D.)

Nonetheless, the reliance on images provided poets with these types of freedom:

1. Poems could dispense with classical rhetoric, emotion being generated much more directly through what Eliot called an objective correlate: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." {10}

2. By being shorn of context or supporting argument, images could appear with fresh interest and power.

3. Thoughts could be treated as images, i.e. as non-discursive elements that added emotional colouring without issues of truth or relevance intruding too mu
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PROSE BASED POETRY
prose based poetry

When free verse lacks rhythmic patterning, appearing as a lineated prose stripped of unnecessary ornament and rhetoric, it becomes the staple of much contemporary work. The focus is on what the words are being used to say, and their authenticity. The language is not heightened, and the poem differs from prose only by being more self-aware, innovative and/or cogent in its exposition.

Nonetheless, what looks normal at first becomes challenging on closer reading — thwarting expectations, and turning back on itself to make us think more deeply about the seemingly innocuous words used. And from there we are compelled to look at the world with sharper eyes, unprotected by commonplace phrases or easy assumptions. Often an awkward and fighting poetry, therefore, not indulging in ceremony or outmoded traditions.
What is Prose?

If we say that contemporary free verse is often built from what was once regarded as mere prose, then we shall have to distinguish prose from poetry, which is not so easy now. Prose was once the lesser vehicle, the medium of everyday thought and conversation, what we used to express facts, opinions, humour, arguments, feelings and the like. And while the better writers developed individual styles, and styles varied according to their purpose and social occasion, prose of some sort could be written by anyone. Beauty was not a requirement, and prose articles could be rephrased without great loss in meaning or effectiveness.

Poetry, though, had grander aims. William Lyon Phelps on Thomas Hardy's work: {1}

"The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and reread the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention — I find even the drawings in "Wessex Poems" so fascinating that I wish he had illustrated all his books — I am always conscious of the time and the place. I never get the unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough a command of his thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar away with him. Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession. Mr. Hardy is too keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the fact that he has written verse all his life, he seldom writes unwrinkled song. He is, in the last analysis, a master of prose who has learned the technique of verse, and who now chooses to express his thoughts and his observations in rime and rhythm."

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OPEN FORMS IN POETRY
open forms in poetry

Poets who write in open forms usually insist on the form growing out of the writing process, i.e. the poems follow what the words and phrase suggest during the composition

when the milk light steals into my eyes—hey it’s grownups’ goodmorning
—I let your elbow go and then I pull it back again, soft metonymy (i
sometimes remember
when you’re awake, and abashed I keep it quiet
how you’re my favorite part
—of what?—not applicable, but this morning I remember
when your eyes are closed, and I let you feel how much I
feel you in my ribs when you’re all around me)

the punctuation of the days was always mine and I
couldn’t breathe as well without keeping the dark
for me just me
and still my eyelids weigh me down a little but
I don’t mind
hey goodmorning

Prose is unpretentious, that's its attraction. Avoids bombast of line breaks but forgoes -- what -- perfect rest. Anyway today, a November day in February, no chance getting rest with the poor clay I'm made from.

With my mother this weekend, her dementia proceeding according to what plan. Saturday the kind of day I never have. Actually read three stories by Updike. One extraordinary -- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth -- which I chose from his Complete through 1975 for the reference to Macbeth and in it he so humanely, sympathetically explains through the high school English teacher's thoughts Shakespeare's mid-life bitterness or disappointment realizing few men achieve their potential in the face of history, society and their personal flaws. Making for tragedy. Hard to be humorous about that although Updike finds in Shakespeare's late plays, especially The Tempest, a resolution amounting to wisdom that there can be contentment with imperfection and partial achievement. Updike took some of the starch out of my contention that all Shakespeare's plays are comedies, impossible to take Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth and Othello seriously. Certainly not Romeo and Juliet. It is a consolation that Updike's and even Shakespeare's achievements are imperfect although it would be wringing blood from a rock for me to achieve as much. The other two stories by Updike assured me that prose story-telling is as hit or miss as poetry. Bulgarian Poetess and How to Love America and Leave It At the Same Time made me think how fortunate I had been to find Tomorrow on the first try.

Not so much luck. I was attracted like a bee to a blossom to Shakespeare's lines in my personal anthology. No anthology and the poetry dependency it has created and I might have passed over the story. But now there is this conversation between me and all other writers. The anthology helps me know what I like but now I am tempted to try to articulate why I like what I like. Like the calendar, time and all else man lays his mind to it is a matter of bringing order from chaos by naming things according to our observations.

First, I like to understand what's going on in the poem. Not paraphrase it but describe the action. In Yeats' Lapis Lazuli, in the first paragraph, strophe or stanza, he talks about a community, a city or country, in which people, the women especially, high-toned maybe?, are upset about a political or wartime situation and are too hysterical for art or grace. Then he talks about actors playing Hamlet and Lear holding it together even though their characters die at the end of the play. No shouting, no crying. Then a paragraph or stanza about how whole civilizations are transitory too. Finally, in a reference to one of our oldest civilizations, two old Chinamen and their retainer are in the mountains. From their perspective, calm acceptance and longevity, perhaps some sadness, they look on all of history and non-history with something like gladness.

From there we can appreciate the artistry -- in Yeats' case the interesting rhymes and variable line lengths -- recognizing, however, that the artistry is not so much a demonstration of skill or a performance as the particular vehicle or discipline by which this artist discovered the content of his mind. It little matters whether verse is free, rhymed, blank, or formed as long as it is understandable and meaningful. Understandable to anyone, meaningful to someone.

The oldest formulation I have is Pound's -- the great themes of literature can be written on the back of a postage stamp. Until recently, I thought you could do it but you'd have to write very small. Now I know you can do it in your normal handwriting. I think they are Love (how we come into the world), Death (how we leave the world) and Governance (how we live in the world together). It may be possible to group Love and Death together, coming into and going out of life being similarly unknowable mysteries. The ways of talking about this one same mystery are apparently endless and endlessly fascinating. We cannot leave it alone. Almost all the greatest poems are about this mystery. Life is but a dream.

Then there is Governance -- how we live in the world together -- about which there are far fewer great poems. And usually they are about how our failure to live together leads back into the unknowable mystery through premature and sometimes mass death. Siamanto's The Dance comes to mind. I think the best poems of this type are written by so-called oppressed people.

Many poems treat both themes. But on the question of content, Pound is where I begin. My anthology -- Whole Wide World -- has a section which I'll call Double & Triple Features: Poems to Read Together, which pairs and groups poems according to my feeling that they share something -- theme, voice, structure -- in common. Subject matter is, I think, the commonest sharing. If I tried to name each pairing or grouping I might then have a hundred or more themes. Naming them adequately would be difficult to impossible. But why? And why not try? It would be a necessary start to talking about the poems: I read these poems together because....

Prose doesn't have to be beautiful, sometimes it's best when it's flat as Hemingway conclusively proved and one of its attractions is you can run on and on as long as the mind goes on following a thought without a stop sign for a whole page of books like Proust or Faulkner or Joyce.

Auden's is the second useful formulation that comes to mind (besides his chummy reverence for Shakespeare in naming him Top Bard). He classifies poems five ways:

            1. A good poem that's meaningful to him;
            2. A good poem that's not meaningful to him;
            3. A good poem that may someday become meaningful to him;
            4. A bad poem that's meaningful to him;
            5. A bad poem that's not meaningful to him.

I find I do about the same. But I discard all poems, good and bad, that are not meaningful to me. I have little taste for artistry for art's sake. The poem must speak to me or awaken me. Dickinson's formulation -- takes the top of your head off -- is the same as We can't define ******* but we know it when we see it.

A short aside: it feels inappropriate to answer the question What do you do? by saying I'm a poet. It would be like saying I'm a leader or I'm a prophet. You cannot anoint yourself a poet, a leader or a prophet -- others must do it for you. I wonder if I would be more comfortable if I had a larger audience (following) like Billy Collins for example. I think not. It would be like being a rock star, not a composer.

It's much more acceptable to say I'm a writer. Then when you answer the question Oh, what do you write? with Poetry, you are not self-aggrandizing, merely irrelevant, effete. Being a poet is viewed as being a flasher or nudist, exposing parts of yourself others would rather not see, at least not up close and personal, providing more information than others need or want to have. Maybe that's a good definition of a bad poet. Self-revelation dressed in verbal prowess is acceptable but naked, abject confession is unpardonable, tedious.

Although content is requisite for a poem to be meaningful, a poem is not really a communication like fiction or essay. It is more like an object, like a painting or sculpture, and perhaps like a musical score, sheet music. Yet I would still instruct students of poetry to first read each poem by the sentence, not the line, to derive its meaning, understand its argument, visualize its action. Then one might ask how and why is it sculpted, structured, with line breaks and strophes. Ultimately, the form of the poem is nothing more or less than the method by which the poet discovered his meaning. Although it is arbitrary -- it could have been said another way -- it is the only way it could be said by this person in this time and place. I have always liked the idea of a sculptor carving away stone or wood to reveal the form inside the block.

The poem lives on as an object, recognized by many or few or none. Like art or furniture, most are briefly useful then are moved to the attic or shed where they gather dust and mouse turds then break, dry and decay and find their way to the dump, the dust heap of history, only not even human history, just your personal history.

The anthology has made me an antiquarian -- one who cares as much for objects made by others as if I had made them myself.

So how can one talk about poems? The argument that any attempt to discuss or describe a poem is better served by simply reading the poem, perhaps memorizing it, has merit. Except in one respect -- the process can take you to undiscovered and half-discovered country within yourself. Always, first, you must understand the action otherwise we are just re-reading ourselves in our own tried and untrue ways. We must not mistake an old dog dying for a puppy being born. Misunderstanding the words is like constructing a science experiment with a flawed methodology and then using the results to shape or live in the world. It can be dangerous. Therefore reading poetry is a mental discipline worthy as the scientific method itself. It takes you out of yourself.

The fun of criticism comes in examining why and how the poem made you feel or think as you did. You can read closely for the chosen words, rhythms, lines and stanzas. You may admire the skill or wit of the poet. And you can refer to your own experience to understand your reaction. You can even disagree with the poet's thought or perception, or reject the sentiment. You can say that's him, not me.

Then there are Bloom's formulations of which I am wary, he being a critic not a poet. Yet here they are. Three sources of healthy complexity or difficulty in poems: 1) Sustained allusiveness -- cultural references that require the reader to be educated beyond the poem's content, for which he cites Milton as an example and could have Dante; 2) Cognitive originality -- leaps of perception and depths of understanding that startle, enlighten and take off the top of your head, for which he cites Shakespeare and Dickinson as examples and to which I would add much of what is memorable in modern poetry; and 3) Personal mythmaking -- whereby the poet constructs over time a system of images and personal (more than cultural) references that with familiarity become understandable and meaningful, citing Yeats and Blake as examples. How to make this formulation useful.

A second formulation by Bloom discusses poetic figures or the indirect means by which poetry uncovers truth, dancing with and romancing language rather than wrestling and pinning it down like philosophy tries. There are four: 1) Irony or saying one thing and meaning another, usually the opposite; 2) Symbol (synecdoche) or making one thing stand for another; 3) Contiguity (metonymy) or using an aspect or quality of something to represent the whole; and 4) Metaphor or transferring the qualities or associations of one thing to another.

Meanwhile, here's my **** poetica:

1) Poetry is an acquired taste, like golf or wine, with no obligation to appreciate it.

2) Poetry is divination; prose explains what we think we know but poetry discovers what we didn't know we thought.

3) Poetry is one of many man-made systems, like baseball or the scientific method, for producing knowledge, meaning and pleasure. Or are they all natural as ***?

4) Of all the other arts, poetry is most like sculpture; the word "poem" comes from the Indo- European root meaning "to make, to build."

5) It is impossible to write exactly what you mean or be accurately understood; poetry uses this to its advantage.

6) Line length -- enjambment -- is the single most important feature of poetry.

7) Poems are made from ideas; poetry is philosophy but where philosophy wrestles language down, poetry romances language.

8) Meaning is the most important product of poetry but it's completely personal; poems almost always say one thing and mean another but the poet often doesn't know what he meant.

9) It is almost impossible not to rhyme or write rhythmically in English or any other language.

10) The forms poets use are how the poet gets to his truth and are basically arbitrary choices.

11) Poems may be difficult and complex and irrational but they must be comprehensible.

12) Just describing the action of the poem will take you where you need to go.

stand(ing) here alone in the dark
like a head of tack pirouetting away
  to no music - only acrid scruple
    of this being with and not being with,
     one is always alone.

  space occupies the potteries in
  the garden as a steady arm of light
  stills in its mouth, a flowering dark.
  it is only 3 o'clock in the morning
   and the heat clambers the wall of
   the vacuously atrabilious moment
  of just plainly existing. the slender
  harlequin of moon, like an old lover
  having its own way with me, a child's
  yelp coming home — the hermetic
  air crushing the light, slivering it
  revealing all the ensconced phantasms
  too commonplace like a fork in the road
that i know, or the wayward metropolitan
  that teems with a concatenation of roads
  and gutters bilious with the squall of day.

  a figure moves entering a warm miasma,
   receiving the star of aloneness,
    vacillating between
  place and         placelessness
   telling this originary of repossessing
       the moon with a hand in my hand,
   pressing a question of where
    have you been all the raging while.

Okay, wait
So there is real life
And then there's fantasy
And somewhere in the middle
There's synecdoche

I get it, I think
At least I think I see
But still I wish that you could better explain it to me

I'm caught up in coincidence
Lost in metonymy
Every metaphor I come across
An extension of my being

I'm drowning
But swimming
I'm so lost
But winning
A battle that I can't define
Rooted in believing
A date with fate I can't avoid
But have no business seeing

I remember telling my best friend of how I once saw god
He clammed up and got real quiet
Waiting for me to go on

But there was no more to say
And on that day
I knew what it meant to be free

It was frightening
And lonely
And deeply affected me

My life ever since has been a spiritual tragedy
I don't know how to fix it
I'm not sure what to think

It scares the **** out of people when I tell them
That God is all I see

The charred scent of paper
Atop the ******* skyscraper
Burns when a life is consumed
In its greenish greedy gown
On it has been proudly sown
A golden triangle. It assumed
Its complete authority over
The human race we chase
Its glinting giggling gorge
Postponing the petty morgue
Adorning chests in a tower
Of wealth, of woe, of war
Some are the jacks in tar
Others the *****, the ace

Hovering over cities
Teasing the daisies.
That thick soot
Flawless is flaying
Slowly peeling
Away layers of our root
We gambol and gamble
Pitiful onions in unions
Hawkers jaywalking
Hunters, judges, humble
Flock of those who can think
Trying to make sense of ions
We can with a gun link
Deaths and collapsing ink.

The bright dollar bill smolders
On Atlas’ sore shoulders
An intricate golden lattice
In lieu of a benighted bodice
It lifts Man on a rusty noose
King on a heap of newspapers
The charred choking scent
Demonic, deliquescent
Atop the ******* skyscrapers.
For a divine raiment
Would the goofy government
Trade your blood and lymph
For a smoke and mirrors nymph?
I choose not, please turn us loose?

We are the scorching enemy
All in all, possessed by the mark
We gloat over the metonymy
Of our radiant success
We are nothing under duress
But pigs left bound to bark
In the mud of our sockets
Buy this diamond necklace
So you can prove, in the race
Of rats, you are the best of piglets
“How much does it cost?’’, asks the poet
But his voice is regarded as a dandling duet
Society sleeps, makes loves, guzzles
A writer too, probably feebly fizzles…


All the while the creased cremated paper
Will keep on swallowing us over and over
This smoke once was the signal of civilization
It is now the ominous gleam of our globalization
Soothing soot it is not, it throttles us all
I foresee it but soon we shall
Fall back into this drowsy land
Demise of those who did not stand
Up behind the legacy of a quill
That is now silent in steel, still
Child, write down your future
Your literature will triumph for sure!
I’d read his lines instead of gulping down
The shiny pill of tomorrow brand new uptown!

January 26, 2016
Guillotière, Lyon
7:17 pm

I create poetry
by the car crashed juxtaposition
of thought and language.

I create poetry via metaphor,
metonymy, a slight wit.

I create poetry by the
beating and bastardization
of word until the line
breaks just right.
It never truly does.

You create poetry
in your every movement.

You create poetry in the
interaction and absolution
you carry within every waking
moment.

You create poetry only
by opening your beautiful
eyes each morning as
the sun rises eagerly
to see you.

You create poetry.

This, my pale
imitation.

Is this evolution we call—

Ppl becoming things
(so that)
things become of people;
Ppl becoming parts
(so that)
parts come tgt to
become people—?
Is that not what
all there is to life...
An act
(of)
parts masquerading as wholes
as hosts mastering over themselves
as us
at the center of this all
is the substance of reverie

;

at the core of this bawl
is the call of life.

there are only 5 seats and on each end
are metal chapels. time slows down like a slug
climbing a vertical wall, or say, a drunken man
  making his way towards the oblique recess.

the ignominy of an exhausted carburetor
is the orchestra for the night.
lots of women go in and out, out and in,
  whichever is first, but the last is always
just as bland as any other truth:

we go, each foot splayed to cover measure,
  and in the flash of a scene, gone.

I watch their skirts make gossamer tune,
like some flotsam or a poised note being led
  straight to a trajectory disappearance:

the idea of the image is to glide
over them, over flesh,
over this fetal smoke that I will soon toss
  right into the womb of nothing

and fall flat as a key from a tone-deaf cathode,
a spanked melodrama of television with dull cursive,

        or as lithe as justly, the right camber of blues
             ripping straight through my day-old denims,

peering through the tease of a thigh’s penumbral shadow,
the sound of the world being dragged into double-doors

       echoing a metonymy: *silence the interlocutor, her mouth
                          full of birds. Dark birds.

I don't understand all this poetry ****.
The monotony of similes, metaphors,
rhymes, and metonymy.
All this "interpretation" from imagination.
Because you know what?
Sometimes a man ******* in the woods
Is just a man ******* in the woods.

who could you be
if not metonymy
under another name?

the body of the name lying naked on the tongue

the touch of rust

the sunset at the change of the season

the sea coming home to a lonely shore

the lips asking for more, the ears the amorous organs

emptied of echoes, the cities built on bones

from scrambled noise emerges syntax

that conjugates attraction in parallax

and someone or not-one spoke a metonymy of solicitude

in the beginning in the end, in the garden in the ruins

events ever fragile, encounters that were almost nothing

the hounding difference between a thing and a word

between us and us

between the data, the predictions thereof

and the unexpected

that we have not yet learned to trust

the body unspoken, the touch untranslatable

Do you know that my beloved jasmine
When be in my arms will make river dry
Her fiery wish will burn me in pure green
She will take my life and make my soul fly

Love is a metaphor, simile or metonymy
With different shades ,indifferent blades
It touches heart travels in alleys blindly
It maintains its color and never ever fades  

My sweetheart in your pure white robe
You have changed my darkness into light
Love remains colorful ,colorblind on globe
In darkness it makes surroundings bright

Col Muhammad Khalid Khan
Copyright 2016 Golden Glow

In my 7th grade English class, we spent half the year analyzing the works of Emily Dickinson because "poetry is Gods gift to the voiceless".

Two years later I would meet a girl who cried verse
and bled syllables
whose notebooks were filled with melancholy metonymy
and she was Gods gift but I have never heard anything louder than the graphite screams etchedin her words.
Poetry is Gods gift to the voiceless but I didn't know.
I didn't know people could be
flesh and blood
and bone and
poetry.
I didn't know she would wring metaphors from my lungs,
snap my bones into line breaks.
I didn't know she would slow my heart to keep time or scatter my middle name when she couldn't find the right letter and I didn't know she, with her scarred fingertips and scabby lips would turn me into
poetry.

light scrunched, a crouched shadow.
eyes discern heaviness of
ordinary places into various flows
   of gutted fish.

this world gives away a weathered image:
its wraith comes unannounced

lovelessly drags the stooping gait
of walls, obscenely expires
   a small clearing

this mundane home gives way
to a restless flow of other dimensions.

bird of the afternoon
reaches far beyond extensions.
discombobulated tendril of light
   flashes its fullness
to a bedrock of reality.

the kitchenwares start to falter
but all for the way, where once
gray hair graced this table,
her vividly tremulous hand steadies
  a fixed touch on bedspread —

on the wet back of freshly bathed fruits,
  a metonymy that continues to bruise.

morning's watery hands part to meet
the mist of departures;

quietly as we all are, seldom imposed
an overhung dark, and as quiet as you,

                                                do not go.

He couldn’t take his eyes off of his living room’s mirror.
His own reflection was staring back at him.

Mesmerized by his self’s own image-re-presentation as he was.
Wanting to see himself through an-other’s perspective.
Desiring to be seen as somebody else.
He went on to become one with the famous imago.

In an endless arms race, an endless metonymy, drifting as it is called,
He tried to achieve the unachievable.
He tried to attempt the impossible.
He wanted to do the non-doable.

Always, from a young age, feeling inadequate and insecure.
Because he deemed himself incapable of stretching his own existence,
To make it fit with the family’s ideals.

So he spent the rest of his life trying to be recognized as something.
As something which he wasn’t at all? Yes. (How tragic. How sad.)
That left him with nothing but rage, hopelessness and despair.
A bipolar marionette of somebody Else’s deadly painful pleasure.

Powerless as he was, he went on living while construing ******* solutions.
So that he could just "get by". A coward hiding behind somebody Else’s wants.
And then one day having said to everybody, everything that made him upset, he left this place.
He never came back.

I'm talking in poems,
Not taking out loans.

Should I stop?
Listen to rhyme cops?

Limbic brain knows
As expression flows;

Alliteration assignations,
Word associations.

Autonomic metonymy
Brings out the best of me.

Brilliant, brilliant, Synecdoche,
Child of Sorrow you hide me.
I’m here, beneath,
Name, Employment, Relationship,
Wealth, Assets, Social Alphabet,
Because it’s better than seeing bare
A spirit flayed with heirloom silverware.
Inheritance lopped off from a branch
Of a tree I hate wholeheartedly
I’d rather shrivel in the grass,
Far from kinship’s rootedness.
If I were alone and completely so
Less of a case would be
For all this arid metonymy.
I am flowing with blood and water
And are not surmised by a part of the whole
Nor by the whole for a part.
Call me child of sorrow.
Not me, not me, Synecdoche.

I am a direct metaphor.
I am simple compared to simile.
Buzzing noisily with onomatopoeia.
I am much harder than the irony.
Awfully repetitive like alliteration.
More hyper than the hyperbole.
Non-living but I live by personification.
I am litotes, full of negativity.
I am the antithesis of the antithesis.
Partly whole like synecdoche.
I am confusing and messy like paradox.
I use "handsome" as my name. Metonymy.

If you can't understand the pun,
it's because I am
the "*****" in the oxymoron.

The Lion’s den- Dookwon Iswamaf.      Autobiography of the poet.                      

Born in Mali, year 2006 December 22 grew up with his father after the tragic death of his mum. Then at age five (5), travel to Sierra Leone upon the call of the mission of the unification church, where he faced a lot of tremendous challenges and obstacles as a result of the ugly damage of the organization.                
       The poet attended the Evenly’s Royal Academy for his primary level and continued his secondary studies in the Dr David Arnold high school, then finally sat his WASSCE exams at the ST. Ambrose Academy.                                                                

Dookwon’s motive for writing this poem is to systematically appeal about the past sufferings and struggling that mankind ****** at his face, and the gain of once achievements after going through deadly hardships in a chaotic environment.         Soon in odds of these request, on the 1st of October 2024 at age 17, he made a resolution of writing this poem.                    
                  

The Lion’s den.  

Stilled in the land of war,  
Built with shadows and darkness,  
Dressed with narrows and thorny paths.  

Trials and tests are no fail.  
Oh you stubborn boy, Malian born.  
Rains and sun-rays strike from plants;  
Warriors grieved  
Their own swords.  
The cloudy night and dangerous storms  
Far from over.  
Peace and love are far from reality.  
Oh you stubborn boy, Malian born.  

The den clothed in the Red Sea,  
Painful laughter and cries are known for us.  
The fearless monks appeal for bloodshed;  
Smiles the tyrannic’s impure dance.  
The last days we await.  
No more.  
Oh you stubborn boy, Malian born.  

The white doves are fierce fighters,  
The underdogs.  
And as for the plants on the sad height,  
The sun rays will come,  
And the wounded fruits will tell  
On the battle of the fists.  
Oh you stubborn boy, Malian born.  



Contexts analysis  

The background of the poem revolves around an unacceptable agony raining in a certain environment. To the extent,  the poet registered a note of protest where by the entire area of land is view as having been drowned into a great disaster called the Red Sea as illustrated in line 13 of the poem.   However, the protagonist serves as a voice of laments and regrets against the the unfairness and injustice behaviors manifested in this awful environment.                          
     So therefore in claim of these ugly satire, and negative metamorphic images like “blood shed”, shadows and darkness”,red sea”, cloudy night and dangerous storms”,are all effective and strong enough to show the protagonist believability in comparing its to the “Lion’s den “.
              EVIL AND SUFFOCATION
The poem thematically reveals the ruthless actions of the tyrannic towards his  surbodinents, and how will it’s affect the sphere of the environment and thereafter.                    
        Furthermore, these evil practices and painful cries inflicted, were used to suppress and torture the lives of these prospective victims who are in pain and agony.          The Lion here demonstrated his evil and suffocating plans through the use of spiritual powers which makes him faroushed  and untouchable despite his evil nature. In this case, the people or masses of that land suffered fearful events, such as the death of honest blood, the delay of prominent destines, the decline of future generations, and the introduction of malefic objects in product of sebeh , charms and hamelets, witches pots etc in order to create more disasters and suffering than ever before.                            
         As mentioned earlier in the third stanza of the poem that....” The den clothed into the Red Sea, painful laughters and cries are known for us, The fearless monks appeals for blood shed, Smiles the tyrannic’s impure dance. The last days we awaits, No more”. The above quotations reminds us about how perishable and evil the environment looks like in an actual face especially with the lead of a ferocious and selfish actor.                    To continue, the poet further expresses his anger and frustration on the emotional anguish suffered by these innocent people in request of their bubbling dreams.  In other words, it is rather unfortunate that these ungodly and acquit scenarios played a vital role to the submission and degrading lives of these faithful servants, making the tyrannic too powerful and threat-full to  the successful reach of their flaming fate.                                                                
      So as a result, of this calamentical avenues the environment becomes miserable and perishable in an actual face, no sign of progress is seen in reality all we know are pathetic circumstances and detorating  features appearing our ways, leaving us to grieve in fear and to wait for the “last days “ as illustrated in stanza (3).                              
      THE EXPERIENCE OF BAD LEADERSHIP.                
Leadership is not a bed for roses, but should be a field of sacrifices. The ugly experience that goes with the gandeur of power is clearly illustrated in the poem.   As a result of missues and misrule of power a cleaver call is made for a major theme capture in the poem.             There fore, the protagonist further exposes the negative impacts played by this tyrants rule to the disadvantage of all sphere of life and the environment as a whole.                
      Historically,this tyrants lion exercises his superiority and dominance over these faithful servants through evil practices, dictatorship and authoritarianism.   Thus, major aftermaths of the tyrannical governance over this entire environment, is a horror of awful and shameful experiences in the venom of its regime. Effectively, the poet further re-established his sorrow and grieve on the “shadows and darkness “ encountered by these surbodinents in provocation of their golden dreams.
As a matter of facts, their longing goals were drawned into the “Red Sea” , leaving them to perish in pain and despair through evil manipulation in result of absolute power.                                                                Unfortunately though,they have seen and witnessed their lives, reputations, futures, and stars been destroyed under the alter of selfishness and greed, the poetic personnel theologically expresses the horrible and unacceptable agony pouring on this deadly zone, terrorizing the request for success and progress in the society.   This was clearly captured in the second stanza of the poem which reads” rains and sun rays strike from plants, warriors grieved, their own swords, (lines 6,7,8).                                     The above quotations also bring light to the horrific punishment injected in the lives of these members who where discriminated, deprived, bullied, and even depressed by this tyrannic lead.               The predicaments and sufferings (shadows) undergone by these loosing servants in the hands of this worthless and ruthless being has its infinetic consequences unto today’s era. This can also observe the probability of members loosing their faith, and also creating the use of violence and disharmony as it was logically proposed that “peace and love is far from reality”.                
       Despite these ungodly experiences, the poet also regards this part of the poem as a test for these brave warriors to persevere, endure and maintain faith for the “last days” to answer their tearful prayers.                  
In sincerity, these vibrants mens before the catastrophe were aiming for prosperity and development in the land, society, and nation as a whole, breaking through their lives endeavors . The speaker nervously confirms that these imperishable hopes should remain at the corner of their bleeding hearts, for the day to achieve freedom and succeed as it was proclaimed “ And as for the plants on the sad height, the sun rays will come”.                                          Another consequence of this chaotic scenarios is dictatorship and authoritarianism. The poem is a protest poem chronicling the peak of terrors by which members with the environment were wantonly abused, spoiled and exploited by this ironic lead. The background of the poem is drowned from the 2012 change of Leadership in the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification in Sierra Leone, which set up the heat for members to be arranged in hierarchal form with their leaders in each regions of Heavenly Africa. This part therefore serves as a voice of reason and condemnation against the injustice and unfair treatment meted against these members, by this superiors. The poet executively proclaims that, the entire area of land is viewed as terrifically deadly and destroyed when he reveals that “stilled in the land of war”, describing the Kind of hardships and obstacles designed in the midst of its atmosphere including all sort of discriminations and fake documentaries pasted on the lives of these members, in protection of this communist failure’s “impure dance”. To the extent, bribery and corruption to some higher ranks of this organization created an oath for embezzlement and self interest crucially detecting  a lead to failure and crisis in the land.
            Finally, as a result of this upsetting circumstances, the poet justifies the uses of trials and tests in the poem as a course of this failing actor bringing life to all sarcastic events in the “ den” which chases prosperity and development far away from human imaginations as a result of its deadly and chaotic nature.
                THE STRONG DESIRE FOR SUCCESS.    
Despite these disgusting scenarios suffered by these inferiors in the hands of this communist monster, the poet emphasizes on a sign of courage that these members will greatly succeed through this horrific conditions and they will do so in memories of those affliction in which their innocent blood is shed for the sake of growth and development: as it was impressed in stanza 3”The den clothed into the Red sea,painful laughters and cries are known for us, the fearless monks appeals for blood shed”(line 14 and15).                                                      
         As introduced earlier in the second theme that, these innocent victims before the disaster were living in a strong desire for greatness guided by progress of purpose through their lives endeavors. The speaker further confirms that these miserable servants of that land will emerge as a great personalities that can help greatly in Our “Heavenly Parents” providence in the future and will attain there golden dreams as he describes them as “plants” in the poem meaning prominent individuals.
         The poem continuously surveys the dotted amount of redemption left in the consciousness of these honest bloods and further prescribe that” And as for the plants on the sad height”, the sun rays will come”( line 22 and 23). The protagonist then continued to raise a claim on the torture and emotional anguish which he feels about this pathetic land and it’s intolerable situation which is vividly evident in the burning tears of the poem.                
   In the poem’s concluding stanza, Dookwon reiterates these helpless slaves will that they should conquer the obstacles through this dead zone and wait for the right moments called the “last days “.
    IMAGERIES AND SYMBOLISM.
So as it identify in the poem, lines (1-5) can be considered as the poet introductory paragraph and lines (6-21) as the narrative, and finally lines (22-25) is the poet’s end of speech.                                                      For example, “stilled in the land of war” create a definate precision about this environment deadly aspect and struggles about it’s life sphere. And the second phrase says “ Built of shadows and darkness” symbolizes the sufferings and struggles implanted in these humble servants avenues and the unfortunate outcomes for their agonistic paths.
           Another important imagery is “rains and sun rays are strike from plants, The cloudy night and dangerous storms, Far from over” lines (6,9-10). The above rewards the shocking caious displayed by this tyrants rule in order to cease all success and progress in hand of this prominent( plants) as he taniches their reputations to the HQ of it’s movement.
         Anxiously, the significant must be mentioned as (line 13,14,15-16) that delivers the chaotic and unbearable calamities befallen the land, as a result of the tyrannic’s impure dance implied in the “den”.(“The den clothed into the Red Sea, Painful laughters and cries know for us, The fearless monks appeals for blood shed, Smiles the tyrannic impure dance”).
    According to the poetic views of it’s concluding stanza, a minimum amount of hope is detected in the bleeding grasses of this chaotic land for the “ last days “ to bring in the light that chases the darkness through a trapping tunnel as it’s precisely says”And as for the plants on the sad height, the sun rays will come, And the wounded fruits will tell on the battle of the fists”( line 22,23-24).
            DICTIONS OF WORDS
This part of the poem reminds us about the choice of words used to express the grief the poet. In addition, the form of the poet is pathetic in nature.
Moreover, the poet’s expression and choice of words used to describe the environmental catastrophe is sensitively declared through these choices of words:
Darkness- sufferings
Shadows - struggles
Rains - progress      
Sun rays- success
Plants- prominent individuals
Warriors- ordinary masses
Swords- hope                            Cloudy night- discrimination
Dangerous storms- criticism
Red Sea - Disasters
Painful laughters- Evil mockeries
Fearless monks- Elders
Blood shed- Evil sacrifices
Impure dance- malefic games           The last days- The ultimate change   The white doves- The corruptive leaders
The underdogs-The underrates
Wounded fruits - unborn generation
Battle of the fists- The story.
      TONE OR MOOD OF WRITER
The protagonist’s mood in writing this poem is dearly testified by the poem’s drastic metaphors, causing the poet to become mourning , sorrowful, and hopeful in writing this poem.
       SETTINGS AND STRUCTURE OF THE POEM.
“The Lion’s Den” was set in Sierra Leone, Freetown at night by 20:00(GMT) in the rainy season
Date:1st October 2024.
          STRUCTURE OF THE POEM
The poem is made up of 4 stanzas with 25 lines. The first stanza is a quintet which includes five lines. The second is a septet, which is also for the third stanza. And the last stanza consist of six lines which is called a sextet, the poem is also consist of epic proportions and inward rhymes creating a tension of despair in this context. Eventually, the poem is known as an ugly satire because of it’s pathetic nature.
       POETIC DEVICES
Alliteration:this is found within the first line of the poem showing the reputation of the sound of”w”showing the weight of war.Alliteration is also find in line (4) which says “Trials and Test are no fail” emphasizing the use of “t”.         Finally line(10) collect the repetition of “f” by declaring far from over.          Metaphor:is found in the second, thirteen and twenty second lines in the poem which detect “ built of shadows and darkness,the den clothed into the redsea, the sun rays will come “.        
Symbolism:line 3__”dressed with narrows and throny paths”.                  
Paradox:as unsealed in line(4) of the poem with the words “trials and tests” describing the inevitable challenges in that landscape.                    
Personification:in the various lines it’s has been examined of personification things and places giving human qualities in order to create a most intense and pathetic atmosphere starting with lines:6,16
and 24 which says that “rains and sun rays are strike from plants, smiles the tyrannic’s impure dance,and the wounded fruits will tell on the battle of the fists”.
Imagery:invoked in the first,third, seventh,ninth,twenty-third, and twenty fouth lines of the poem symbolizing a forbidden atmosphere in that entire land scape.
Metonymy:found in line (8) of the poem as it’s reads “their own swords” symbolizing war in a form of lies against innocents souls.
Juxtaposition:”peace and love is far from reality,The fearless monks appeals for blood shed”...( line 11-15). Showing the contradiction of the writer’s world.
Contrast:The juxtaposition of(rains and sun rays coming together implies the duality of hope as noted in line 7.
Oxymoron:this is juxtaposed in line 14 which appeals that “painful laughters and cries are known for us”. This creates joy and sorrow at the same time in the poem.
Ambiguity:
In line 17 we can see that both the end of sufferings and finality is aimed for in the phrase as it’s claims that”The last days we awaits “ suggesting a ******.
Irony: in terms of this figurative device we clearly observe such in line 20 where in the protagonist uses the white doves as an irony in order to manifest the contracting actions of these corrupt leaders who hereby contribute greatly to the destruction of the providence.
Characterization: these is updated from line 21 which creates an oppressive tone uploaded on the lives of these members making them to feel rejected and worthless as the poet declared them as “underdogs”.
Repetition: Declared in line (5,12,19,25) giving a deadly impression about an entire landscape who sounds been in a great explosion as he repeatedly sounds his identity and nationality in sign of regrets.

       POEM’S RESOLUTION

This story peaks out the saying that “After the tunnels is the sunshine”i.e In all stages of life, there’s no success without tears.