TEACH ME - SHOW ME HOW

mikimoondancer said:I like your idea here to teach and improve writing but to me it's a reminder of college writing courses and homework, Peace -I will try your next one :-)

Miki
That is my background...I may have made a mistake in posting this competition....I will have to ask Webmistress if I can just cancel this....
Competitions should be seen as fun, not work
So I hope this can just be cancelled
Thank you for your feedback
Kitty

I WROTE THE FOLLOWING EMAIL TO THE WEBMISTRESS/ADMIN
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MAY I CANCEL A COMPETITION?   Written on 19th May 2012 9:43am
I posted a competition which seems to be a bad idea
It was called TEACH ME
Nobody has really liked it
or wanted to submit to it.
I made a mistake.
Can I just cancel it?
Kindly advise me at to what I should do
Thank you for considering my request
Kitty

I will surely enter this with my two old posts today and a new poem next week if it stays. It is among the most worthwhile concepts for a competition that I have seen. I don't understand that somebody thought it was fun and easy to write a poem, but they don't have the ability to point out what they did. It's not a chore, it's an honor to have someone ask you to explain your work.

I was looking forward to reading and learning from this.

Well .... the initial response was SO NEGATIVE....that I thought I had made a MISTAKE.....
Most compared it to an assignment in school or college...which is my background as a teacher
So maybe I overdid it....but my motive was to have the good poets on DUP teach me by showing me how...
I have tried to learn poetry from lots of books...and fallen asleep....so I just wanted to
have people try and show me what they do to make their poetry so good....I will leave this up to the majority....I have gotten so many mixed messages...that I cannot tell who will actually post anything
COMPLETELY BEWILDERED
Kitty

DON'T DELETE THE COMP! The idea is good, challenging and I'm sure people will submit. For a comp like this, one week or ever two weeks isn't enough time. A comp like this would work best in either a one or two month time frame.

Personally I'm not formally educated, never finished high school. What I know about grammar, punctuation and writing I've learnt from reading, reading and more reading, novels, poetry, short stories, magazines, non fiction anything I could get my hands on. I very much considered entering, but trying to get my head around the technicalities of writing gives me a brain strain. Maybe I should know this stuff, but I don't.

Indie said:DON'T DELETE THE COMP! The idea is good, challenging and I'm sure people will submit. For a comp like this, one week or ever two weeks isn't enough time. A comp like this would work best in either a one or two month time frame.

Personally I'm not formally educated, never finished high school. What I know about grammar, punctuation and writing I've learnt from reading, reading and more reading, novels, poetry, short stories, magazines, non fiction anything I could get my hands on. I very much considered entering, but trying to get my head around the technicalities of writing gives me a brain strain. Maybe I should know this stuff, but I don't.

Hi Indie
For not finishing high school and not knowing about grammar, punctuation and writing....(THERE IS A FORUM THREAD dealing with this....) you are an excellent poet.  Obviously this shows that you have taught yourself effectively...which brings joy to my heart...as a SCIENTIST....I am science all the way...so I can write a scientific paper with citations more easily that point out which poetic device I am using without knowing that I did it...But one poet with 20 + trophies to her name who is respected here....mentioned the word poetic devices in trying to help me...then when I went to look at the sheer number and read poetry books.....I FREAKED OUT...now I just write with my own style
not knowing if I have or have not used a POETIC DEVICE...
so it is MY INSECURITY which brought me to ask others to TEACH ME
Thank you for your valuable input
Kitty

I know about grammar and punctuation, I get how it works, the terminology is what does my head in. I've been writing for 14 years and have been reading much longer than that. I've been a part of 5 writing groups, both in real life and online. I have more trouble with tense in short stories than I do with grammar and punctuation, though I've been told I need to lay off the commas. I dropped out of high school because it bored me. It doesn't make me uneducated, it just makes me not formally educated.

The best way to learn isn't by knowing the names of things, it's by reading the works of other writers who are respected and who write well. Even if you just practice imitating their style or incorporating parts of their style into your own, it's a start. I can name half a dozen DUP poets who've helped me refine my own style, just by reading their works and being inspired by them.

OK this is a relatively easy one to start with. I had actually broken it down below the original post.

Fog

He emerges
ascending the flattened field  
in the rain  
cradling a rifle  
retreating  
in my passenger window.  
I turn back ahead to nothing.
Sunset breaks the blind fog,  
empty train whistle,  
hollow sound inside a bell.


Original explanation:
"It is more about not knowing. I was driving in a thick fog and I passed a man with a gun heading up a pasture toward the woods. Always when we see someone with a gun our mind tries to fill in a back story. Obviously he intends to kill something. I could make up all sorts of elaborate stories about the man who's father had died so he's going to kill himself, or the man is going after a young guy he's just chased from his daughter's room, or a hunter representing generations of human struggle against nature.... but all of that is just projection. I just wanted to lay it down without judging it precisely to put the reader where I was. We don't know where he's going. It is a mystery. We drive in a fog. Certainly there is an action that follows, but we are touched by it only indirectly, like a distant whistle, or the sound of a bell. I literally wanted emptiness to resonate. There is no answer or "real" meaning regarding the gun for the reader."

New:
The style I attempted was Imagism where I show without telling. There is a primary actor who moves and me as the observer. I use one action for personification. The sunset breaks through the fog. This personifies the act of the reader coming to some literal "enlightenment" through the poem. This parallels the observer (me) in the poem who learns from the situation by observing the emerging image.

There is gratuitous alliteration in the second line.

Two metaphors finish the poem, as simile is usually a tacky no-no in Imagism. They are both auditory and imply three things: 1) What is happening here is an indirect action that we perceive remotely like the pealing bell or the whistle. 2) What is presented to us reinforces the solitude of both the observer(me) and the reader in relation to understanding the movement of the man with the gun. 3) It finally implies that something audible has or will happen with the gun.

That the poem is so short, we have to assume that everything, gun, car, fog, rain... etc is there for a reason. There is room for no accidents in such a small poem. Even the verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are deliberately "weak." The field is flattened, the movement of the man with a gun retreats. The only word on the plus side of neutral is "cradling." The only care is directed by the man toward his device of cruelty. Something must die at the hands of this gun. That is why it was made, both in the real world and in the poetic.

Thus they all combine to be symbolism... of our relative ignorance of each other, of our violence and isolation from each other, of our inferences regarding each other that we take from our brief inexpiable encounters, and of how incompletely we come to understand a life that we merely drive through, as though we were in a fog.

ok - THANK YOU STEVE...for going first....this is what I was thinking of
Let the competition begin.....AGAIN
KITTY

Here is a second old one. I'll try to get a new one in before this ends.

Gravity

Attraction is
a provability
the tether
the strange force at a distance
that holds all together
as it falls disparate
and tangent
to the ground
to the moon
to the sun.
This sets-up the chief metaphor in the poem. Physical attraction is going to be compared to gravity.

Strangely attracted children The first science reference used for humor. A strange attractor is a term from Chaos Theory that indicates an unseen organizing principle.
hear and infer
the ice cream truck
by its song and its route
because space is curved Reference to general relativity
by desire. Desire here replaces attraction and explains the specific way it will relate to gravity.

We sit at the edge "We" so we have two characters to act this out.
of a tree line
within the faint arc of porch light
watching cold blacknight warped
into warm galactic flows.
Though we each began as separate stars
our paths at last approached and circled
as they have since countless times
and yet they never wed. With relativity we have the concept that matter and energy are interchangeable. These two people began as energy from separate stars and have come into some relationship that seems to imply a mutual destiny, implied in the word "wed." This is again a metaphor.

I have known you
since you were lightning and I the air you parted,
since we were water and the wind drew us in,
since you were sunlight and I sealed in amber,
you were jasmine and I the fallen dew.
We teased, we courted, we played unhurried.
We seeped among the leaves.
We rose to our adjacent clouds.
We lay in wait in the abyssal hills.  
We died and bloomed and crystallized
but were always released anew from the fire.
This again is a series of metaphors specifically lined up to imply the passage of great amounts of time, while still implying the mutual transmutability of mass/energy. It is styled after a dance between two partners. Thus it qualifies as personification.

I cannot watch you pass again this time Our protagonist has a protest here.
cannot release you back to the flow that washed us
finally here
cannot stay silent, cannot stop shaking, cannot find words or thoughts for anyone but you and yet you make it clear
I cannot have you. This long run-on sentence implies that the emotion that has been restrained up to this point breaks through the cold science of gravity and moves into the human realm of desire. Also the love poem turns to a spurned-love poem which prompts the emotion.
You have no memory of this passionate force
that binds me
close but never reaching.
My petitions carry no such weight
in your center
trapped here by the burden
of my own gravity.

Though worlds may pass
and new be built ten thousand times
before we get this chance again
each alive with voice and passion,
still you and I will rise from here
and as I’ve always known
you’ll return to that perpetual path Personification again and metaphor. Her lack of mutual romantic feeling is compared to the impersonal motion of a particle which moves according to its own inertia unless acted upon by our hero, who has no such power over her.

out
away from my side.






Since the poem was long this time I tried to keep the exposition short. I used alliteration quite a bit throughout, but didn't get very specific with the comments.

Danm, i have a headache.
i have enough with my nephew classes.
not to be dis respectfull, you know is kind off complicated
SENA

braggman said:Here is a second old one. I'll try to get a new one in before this ends.

Gravity

Attraction is
a provability
the tether
the strange force at a distance
that holds all together
as it falls disparate
and tangent
to the ground
to the moon
to the sun.
This sets-up the chief metaphor in the poem. Physical attraction is going to be compared to gravity.

Strangely attracted children The first science reference used for humor. A strange attractor is a term from Chaos Theory that indicates an unseen organizing principle.
hear and infer
the ice cream truck
by its song and its route
because space is curved Reference to general relativity
by desire. Desire here replaces attraction and explains the specific way it will relate to gravity.

We sit at the edge "We" so we have two characters to act this out.
of a tree line
within the faint arc of porch light
watching cold blacknight warped
into warm galactic flows.
Though we each began as separate stars
our paths at last approached and circled
as they have since countless times
and yet they never wed. With relativity we have the concept that matter and energy are interchangeable. These two people began as energy from separate stars and have come into some relationship that seems to imply a mutual destiny, implied in the word "wed." This is again a metaphor.

I have known you
since you were lightning and I the air you parted,
since we were water and the wind drew us in,
since you were sunlight and I sealed in amber,
you were jasmine and I the fallen dew.
We teased, we courted, we played unhurried.
We seeped among the leaves.
We rose to our adjacent clouds.
We lay in wait in the abyssal hills.  
We died and bloomed and crystallized
but were always released anew from the fire.
This again is a series of metaphors specifically lined up to imply the passage of great amounts of time, while still implying the mutual transmutability of mass/energy. It is styled after a dance between two partners. Thus it qualifies as personification.

I cannot watch you pass again this time Our protagonist has a protest here.
cannot release you back to the flow that washed us
finally here
cannot stay silent, cannot stop shaking, cannot find words or thoughts for anyone but you and yet you make it clear
I cannot have you. This long run-on sentence implies that the emotion that has been restrained up to this point breaks through the cold science of gravity and moves into the human realm of desire. Also the love poem turns to a spurned-love poem which prompts the emotion.
You have no memory of this passionate force
that binds me
close but never reaching.
My petitions carry no such weight
in your center
trapped here by the burden
of my own gravity.

Though worlds may pass
and new be built ten thousand times
before we get this chance again
each alive with voice and passion,
still you and I will rise from here
and as I’ve always known
you’ll return to that perpetual path Personification again and metaphor. Her lack of mutual romantic feeling is compared to the impersonal motion of a particle which moves according to its own inertia unless acted upon by our hero, who has no such power over her.

out
away from my side.






Since the poem was long this time I tried to keep the exposition short. I used alliteration quite a bit throughout, but didn't get very specific with the comments.

I found the use of colour to be very good
Thank you for submitting this

RSena said:Danm, i have a headache.
i have enough with my nephew classes.
not to be dis respectfull, you know is kind off complicated
SENA

That is why I am having trouble with it.....
HELP!!!!!!!!!

From May 21 until May 27....no comments or submissions...this competition does not attract entries...it should be closed down......