Learn to enjoy poetry. There is so much of great poetry in English, but I think it is not being read and appreciated enough. It is a kind of mental challenge like doing a puzzle, to unlock the full vivid meaning.
Also reading fiction, though how exactly it helps one is beyond me, but it offers glimpses into other worlds. For example I read recently 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', I doubt its richness of detail, and evocation of place and time, etc can ever be captured in a film or even a miniseries, and on top of it is choc-full of tid-bits of information.
I've been trying the same and each time I failed miserably. I just don't get it and certainly can't enjoy it. Can someone recomend good poetry sutable for highly analytical mind or a book about apreciating poetry?
I would recommend 'Understanding Poetry' by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, as a good introduction, it also includes a reasonable collection of poems from various poets to appreciate.
I would also suggest getting an anthology like 'The Golden Treasury' or Anthony Quiller-Couch or Robert Penn Warren (Six Centuries of British Poetry) or G B Harrison. They are available often in small pocket editions, which one can carry around with one.
I've been reading "Sleeping on the Wing" on and off recently -- I think it's meant more as an intro for older school kids but I've never read poetry outside of school and it's been an interesting overview of different poets and styles.
I am not very fond of poetry (except some specific poems), but there is one book of english poetry which I think you may enjoy: the Spoon River Anthology[0].
It's a collection of epitaphs for the cemetery of a fictional town, and each one basically tells a story. Fiddler Jones[1] and Blind Jack[2] (coincidentally, both about fiddlers) contain a few of my favourite verses in all literature.
Maybe try reading poems by poets who write mostly in plain English. For example Charles Bukowski, Philip Larkin and Stephen Dunn. I don't generally like "flowery" poetry but I do enjoy many of the poems written by these writers.
I personally am pretty into William Carlos Willams for a few reasons:
- intense dedication to imagery
- his poem Danse Russe, which to me us just about the silly things we do in privacy where no one is around
- the fact he was a doctor and churning out an insane quantity of poetry
WCW inspired me to write my own poetry mainly because of that last point. I struggle to describe software engineering in that format, sadly!
Rather like music theory, having a highly analytical mind is a boon...eventually. It's so easy to dig into the mathematical structure of it all and not deal with the actual thing. So start with the rollicking and absurd, and read it aloud!. Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, for example. I have yet to meet someone that doesn't get a grin out of that. Isherwood, 'The Common Cormorant'. These are poems that beat you over the head with their structure and meter. Limericks, doggerel, songs from Shakespare plays...and pay attention to where it seems to stutter or skip, where it doesn't work. That is the beginning of training your ear, and recovering the ability to feel and enjoy the sound, making that part of the reading experience. Technical prose has trained that out of us as a matter of self defense because so much technical prose is only tolerable with your ear firmly swathed in cotton wool and stored carefully away.
When you get past the level of limericks and children's poems level, suddenly you have interpretive choices to make because the precise flow and timing of sounds can work different ways and some work better than others, and as a reader you have to bring an interpretive faculty to these works. When you get to something like John Donne's poetry, you're now deep in "every bit of timing and inflection matters."
For children's poetry to get started, Belloc's 'The Bad Child's Book of Beasts' or the Looking Glass Book of Verse are high quality collections. Then it's worth getting something like a Norton Anthology of Poetry as a way of reading very widely very quickly to find out what appeals to you right now, and explore that further.
Many people recommend the Oxford Book of English Verse. I don't, because I think Quiller-Couch had insipid taste and his editing ranges from the uninspired to the positively atrocious (what he did to John Donne's 'The Ecstasy' is horrid). I have found Garrison Keillor's 'Good Poems' to be particularly approachable, high quality collection of verse. I also suggest Ezra Pound's 'ABCs of Reading', though you shouldn't take what he writes about Chinese as anything other than a metaphor for his topic at hand.
Spend time with Shakespeare, of course. I recommend the Oxford complete works. I do not recommend the Yale complete works. Did my wife and I have a tiff about that? Yes, we did. Was I able to demonstrate by reference to passages that I was right? Yes. Do we only have the Oxford in the house now? Yes.
Robert Frost's complete works are cheaply had and a necessity for someone studying modern poetry. Two or three poems of his are butchered in every school class, and the full range of what he worked on is generally ignored, because it can require a very finely tuned ear to hear and interpret the force that his longer, narrative poems can produce.
But really, once your ear starts to come together, dig through the Norton anthology and use it as pointers to further things to read.
Some stuff that reads weird to me is quite beautiful when spoken appropriately, my internal voice/reading speed needs to be adjusted or is not good for this. Off the top of my head the best example might be cheating but it's when Ann Dowd recites a bit of Yeats in The Leftovers.
An easy way to get started is the YouTube channel Ours Poetica[1]. It's kinda like Audible but for poems (and free). Produced in collaboration with The Poetry Foundation.
Totally agree with you. Recently started moving from non-fiction to poetry and picked up "The Gift", Poems by Hafiz. It refreshing to see how much one can say with a few words.
Agreed. It's a magnificent translation of magnificent work. My family has adopted the Nowruz custom of opening Hafiz randomly and reading what we find as an annual ritual.
Is there any evidence that poems have meaning? I could easily imagine a world where poets fool themselves into thinking the words they wrote contained their intentions, while readers fooled themselves into thinking they had uncovered those intentions.
Poetry has no more and no less meaning than language itself. The popular HN definition of a "hacker" is someone who digs deep into a system, understanding it and pushing its capabilities beyond what is commonly understood. Poets hack language. Sometimes the product is buggy, but sometimes it's an elegant hack.
The meaning to the reader who believes this is, that poetry can fool and likely in interesting ways. I don't believe 'poetry is meaningless' as a interpretative structure, though the format has the capacity to convey that.
I prefer Tolkein's applicability of art over auteur theory and allegory. A work of Art applies in many different meanings. Allegory and auteur theory exist as a valid interpretation and are too limited to see the whole picture of what art can do. An artist can intend to write a meaningful poem that conveys love and sadness, an audience member can see that as a foolish endeavor. Both are right, when the poem is executed in a manner that provides fuel for both flames.
So why do people tend to shit on fine art of hacker news, but whenever they discuss writers there’s a certain love attached to it?
Especially concerning self-help books: aren’t most of these books written for those who simply don’t have enough courage to listen to their own common sense?
It takes a while to understand what fine art is about because it's almost completely removed from education and cultural relevance for most of the populace. Fine art is a great art form and you need to be in a mental space that's open to interpreting it. Movies and games have superseded fine art's ability to excite the self. Paintbrush technology doesn't have many real world applications and does not excite HN. The construction skills that go into fine art and what it means to build a great piece of art is now something you have to seek out, rather than be taught or find in popular culture. Movies and computer games in particular are on the bleeding edge of what we can do. They are more exciting and more able to keep the viewer up to date on the current culture, technology and stories.
There is room for a minor hypocrisy in your average criticism of high concept fine art that seeks to express an idea that pushes the field forward despite it not being a complete, popular or useful product. Programmers are doing the same all the time in hobby projects and sometimes they blow up to a massive scale, the same in fine art.
Self help books hit multiple marks, it depends how broadly you see common sense. They help keep a very self-focused individual up to date with the culture and provide extra insight into common problems people can have. They can be used by the reader to explore a thought that is related to what is being read. They can be used as a reference point in a relationship. They can be a starting for point for people with psychological issues to begin the climb back up to a healthy state. They provide a window into another person's perspective on the world and that can be entertaining in itself.
This board is highly focused towards a certain set of goals and a certain set of outcomes. There are a bunch of perspectives that get trimmed in the comments, which is inline with the stated objective of this place as a technology incubator. Any derision or negativity to fields that don't have an immediate application in the tech field are going to be given more leniency than other windows into negativity, like flat-earthers, religious comments and lazy criticism of tech from other fields. That's part of what makes HN what it is. Independence in commenting (and content) has become a limited phenomena online.
Even in that world, I would dare say that poems have meaning. Just one that is personal to the beholder. As a lover of the sciences and mathematics, it used to really bother me, the 'subjectiveness' of there being no "right" answer - but I think an important aspect of that subjectivity is that while there are not necessarily knowably correct answers, it is quite possible for an interpretation to fail to map. What makes many a poem beautiful is how many 'correct' (and often mutually exclusive) interpretations simultaneously contain, i.e. interpretations that are not contradicted by the poem itself. That aspect of containing multitudes is now one of the may things I have come to really appreciate about poetry, and the arts more generally.
"Is there any evidence that tweets have meaning? I could easily imagine a world where posters fool themselves into thinking the words they wrote contained their intentions, while readers fooled themselves into thinking they had uncovered those intentions."
As with all natural language, production and interpretation of poems is subjective. Poetry is just an attempt to use natural language without the constraints of prose, in order to accomplish things that are not possible with prose.
Some poets may have a goal to convey a particular idea or emotion. Others may just want to create something moves the reader. Still others may not care about the reader at all. All of these things are okay.
Actually, that speculation about tweets sounds pretty realistic to me...
But seriously, I think we can all agree that among the literary arts, poetry is the most likely to be accidentally uninterpretable. Due to its cultural context it is also the area where uninterpretability is the most likely to be accepted. This creates an environment where you run a serious risk of developing a culture of meaninglessness.
Some poetry serves the "higher" meaning of discussing political ideas like Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric.
Some poetry is made to make you laugh like Billy Collins' Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun in the House.
Some poetry is purposefully inscrutable and difficult because the author wants you to work to understand them. A good example of this might be r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r by E.E. Cummings.
Each of these examples is meaningful in its own different way. I think trying to decide what has meaning is hard because you might automatically discard a work of art that is "just for fun". Isn't play meaningful?
as everybody else in Italy, I had to study the Divine Comedy (which is an incredible work, and I'm glad I had to), and part of doing that is learning multiple interpretations of a single line, variations of people who have read and re-read the work over centuries. It really easily convinces you that, if the art itself can have a given meaning, still many interpretations are bonkers and there might be no hidden meaning at all.
I am sure the same applies, to e.g. William Blake.
If you try reading poetry and get something out of so reading, does it matter whether they "have meaning"? It's the practice, and its effect on you, that matters. Like Zen. You've missed the point if you think there's anything valuable to be found, something concrete you can dig up and take hold of, that when you find it you have it and someone gave it to you.
"Meaning" may be present but is irrelevant if the experience is the same—what evidence do you want? Getting something out of poetry? Many people clearly do, if that's the test.
I'm faintly appalled by the glibness of this comment. I'm not sure what kind of poetry you have in mind, but spending even a little time with the classics will reveal that they "have meaning".
You might as well ask "does music have meaning?" Poetry is many things, but at the root it's about the beauty of words themselves, their sound and shape and feeling and even taste.
Read the 'right' poetry, you'll find the evidence for yourself.
For me the first piece that spoke to me is When the Frost is on the Punkin by James Whitcomb Riley, that we had to memorize in 7th grade (he's buried here in Indy).
The first line:
>When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,
This immediately triggers fall in my brain. The smell of damp hay and decaying leaves. The morning chill and moisture in the air as the frost begins to quickly melt as the sun comes up.
The second line:
>And you hear the kyouck and the gobble of the struttin' turkey-cock,
If you've ever seen a turkey in person, and heard it start making a fuss, it's a pretty unique sound. They can also be quite flamboyant and arrogant as they strut around a field. I immediately think of that sound, the herky-jerky movements, them posturing to challenge you before they charge.
Later:
>They's somethin kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere
>When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is here
Those first few days when fall really sets in, when you start to get that frost and the leaves are falling and you have that wonderful musky aroma of their decay, there's something almost magical about it and you just stand there drinking it in. This takes me there.
A bit later:
>But the air's so appetizin'; and the landscape through the haze
>Of a crisp and sunny monring of the airly autumn days
>Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock -
>When the frost is on the punkin and fodder's in the shock.
Again, the smells and chill of that crisp and often damp air with all of those aromas starting to rise as the sun comes up. The beautiful reds and oranges and browns and champagne yellows of the leaves of the changing trees
>The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
There's something about wind blowing through standing corn that is almost ready to harvest, I read this and I hear that, 'rusty russel of the tossels' is a perfect description.
>And the raspin' of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn;
As the laves have started to fall in great numbers and you traipse through them they do make a rasping sound mixed with this every so slightly wet sound as mositure trapped between them makes them peel and tangle.
>Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps
>Is poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps;
>And your cider-makin's over, and your wimmern-folks is through
I can almost feel that fuzzy, sweet, crisp taste of warm cider lighting my mouth up and warming me.
>With their mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and sausage, too!
Boom! Always makes me feel the cool air, catch a hint of memory of the smells of fall and want some warm biscuits slathered in apple butter and the wonderful porky-vinegar magic that is souse.
Definitely no argument there. It's not a competition between art and science to see who is more pointless, it's about humanity striving for point-fulness.
This book[1] compares poetry to music. There are many genres and styles of music, and it is likely that you don't like all genres. Enjoying poetry is about trying to find the "genre" of poetry that moves you.
[1] Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems - Stephanie Burt
Also reading fiction, though how exactly it helps one is beyond me, but it offers glimpses into other worlds. For example I read recently 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', I doubt its richness of detail, and evocation of place and time, etc can ever be captured in a film or even a miniseries, and on top of it is choc-full of tid-bits of information.