Young Writers Society

Just like it says on the tin! Thought I'd post this thread to force myself to do *something* before NaPo hits. I might do some of the Ice Cream hashtags in here if that's okay, too.

Comments welcome

NaPo thread: Nothing Like the Sun

Pieces of inspo collected: 23

Index

Shakespeare's Sonnets


NaPo Deep Dive


Other

Sonnets 1-17

Note: I know from some reading around that I've done for Poetry Throughout the Ages that these are called the Procreation sonnets. With my modern sensibilities, I definitely found some of the ideas behind them quite weird. (Just something to keep in mind if you decide to look these sonnets up - I think they're worth reading, but they do have certain ideas about I guess lineage/ bloodline and successorship that may be uncomfortable.) Shakespeare also tends to allude to mature themes and sexuality in some of the sonnets, so that's also worth noting - though I won't put anything about that in this scrapbook.

I'm trying not to do too much of a deep thematic and contextual analysis here because I don't really have time for that, so these will probably not be super informed opinions. These are just a running list of impressions and patterns I noticed by looking at the text and my pre-existing knowledge of their context (plus a poet's acquisitive view on what techniques would be fun to play with in my NaPo).

- Shakespeare seems to enjoy having his speaker slander old age and nighttime at at once. Here are some quotes:

Sonnet 15: “Then the conceit of this inconstant stay / Sets you most rich in youth before my sight, / Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay / To change your day of youth to sullied night;”

Sonnet 12: “When I do count the clock that tells the time/ And see the brave day sunk in hideous night, . . . Then of thy beauty do I question make”

Sonnet 7: “So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon,/ Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son.”

- The ageing process is compared to the passing of time throughout a single day. This image of time passing from day to night gives something concrete to visualise his portrayal of ageing and mortality as something that comes quick (like the next day!) and is to be dreaded, and I think that's a good move for him to make to convey his ideas. (Though I wouldn't necessarily agree with the connotations he emphasises with ageing.)

- Something I might use: the 'passing of the day' as a metaphor for something. There is technically a continuity there but we divide it into segments: dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, evening, dusk, night, midnight . . . I could also do something contrary to the sonnets here and use old age/ night with a positive tone rather than a negative one

- Sonnet 17 surprised me - I thought it was interesting so I'm actually planning to do my next Poetry Windows article on it. It seems to depict poetry as something dead, unreliable and antiquated (unless 'confirmed' by a living thing). What I liked structurally about Sonnet 17 is how unified/ cohesive all the lines are. It never feels like he strays from the central point he is trying to make.

- Another idea that comes into play is contrasting the artificial with the organic, like in Sonnet 17 mentioned above. I think the relationship between artificial and organic is interesting to explore.

- Sonnet 12 also had good progression and a lot of symmetry in structure that was interesting to see. The regularity of meter and alliteration creates a consistent, insistent rhythm, reminiscent of time’s continuous march, but also reflects the speaker’s insistent tone.

-The whole sonnet is syntactically a run-on sentence, emphasising the inevitability of time taking beauty away, and only the last line proposes a solution – which makes it seem like the *only* solution.

- There was heavy alliteration within lines here, e.g. line 8 is full of 'b' and line 7 'g'. Where the alliteration doesn't carry through the whole line, it does within a phrase, such as "count the clock" "tells the time".

I tried imitating the alliteration and the run-on structure based on Sonnet 12 and ended up with this snippet:

If only I could own an ornament
distracting from this disillusionment,
glowing through the grumbling gears and grime,
and tempering this torrid Christmas time.

^ Would be nice if this could be done with shorter words than "disillusionment" but I guess that's my bad for going with "ornament" in the first line.

Summary of what I might use:

- Theme: artificial-natural/organic
- Challenge: make a claim and support it with a good metaphor
- Be contrary: do some wordplay and creative imagery use to compare old age to nighttime in a flattering way
- Structure: run-on sentence -- use this to present something as inevitable
- Challenge: can you use a run-on sentence for something open-ended?
- Structure: alliteration -- use alliteration within the line . . . for the aesthetic?

Sonnet 18

The famous "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" poem.

What I noticed:

- The addressee is never described directly, and I think that is a recurring pattern in many of the sonnets I've read so far. (Might have put that in as a point in Sonnets 1-17 too, now that I think about it.) Instead, Shakespeare describes how "summer" or the temporary summer season pales in comparison to the addressee and praises them in this indirect way. The addressee is only given a direct reference towards the end where Shakespeare compares them to an "eternal summer".

- Sonnet 18 seems to convey the opposite message to Sonnet 17 based on the following lines:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I interpret the "this" in "lives this" as being the "eternal lines" or the very sonnet Shakespeare has written. The message seems to be that the speaker's verse immortalises the addressee and "gives life" to them. (Which directly contrasts the thought in Sonnet 17 that the verse about the addressee will only bring life to them if the addressee has a living child that resembles them.)

What I might use:

- Challenge myself to write indirectly about a subject. It's really not my favourite thing to do - I much prefer direct descriptions and cutting to the chase - but this NaPo is for experiments and hopefully some improvement, so that's what I'm going to take away from this poem.

Sonnet 23 Blackout Poem Exercise

Sonnet 23 - William Shakespeare (from Folger edition)

As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;
So I for fear of trust forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ.
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.


My edited Blackout Poem version

An actor onstage
his part
fierce - replete - too much
abundance weakens.
I fear trust
and mine own strength
burden of mine,
love's might.
The eloquence
plead for love and recompense
more than more.
What silent love,
to hear with eyes.

What I notice:

-- This reduction of the poem shows that the words in between are needed to (legibly) carry over much of the meaning I got from reading the original poem.
- This is a kind of modernist - leave it all up to guessing energy (modernist or perhaps Japanese? since the Modernist poets I'm thinking of like Ezra Pound borrowed many of their ideas from Japanese poets).
-- What makes the blackout version sound good is that the original *was* written in iambic pentameter, so you still get the mostly regular rhythm in places such as "What silent love/ to hear with eyes" and "I fear trust/ and mine own strength" and "plead for love and recompense".

What I might use

- Practice writing in iambic pentameter first and then scrambling it.
- Try writing based on the lines:
- "I fear trust/ and mine own strength/ burden of mine,/ love's might."
-"What silent love/ to hear with eyes."

Sonnet 23 A second observation

As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;

So I for fear of trust forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might.

O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.

What I might use:

Focusing each quatrain (or any other grouping of lines) on a topic -- the bolded phrase is the topic of each quatrain / grammatical subject, if that can be applied here. This could be a good way to structure the four quatrains in a sonnet. (or to structure any other poem, really.)

#napodeepdive

2020

Age, Life, Situation

I was 18 when I did this one and trying to complete my pre-university assessments while in lockdown. I think what I wanted to do at uni was very much on my mind and I was clinging onto that in a somewhat naive way to avoid dealing with . . . everything else. That also explains why the title sounds like it could be the title of a textbook! I was still new to YWS at the time, and this was the event that got me more active on the site and hanging out with more people, especially @alliyah via NaPo Buddies.

Thread Name

Language and the Human Race

Interesting Observations

- The imagery and ideas in these poems are very dense. For one of the poems 'Talking to Shop-keep in his own Language' I seem to be trying to squeeze in: language barriers, service encounter dynamics, nation vs family (?) and technology all into 16 lines.

- I also seem a lot happier than I am now to let one unrelated image bleed into another, or to put a whole bunch of unusual images into one short poem without really allowing them room to breathe. Reading these poems is kind of headachey to me.

Example: Here are two lines from a sonnet:

The [lamp is yawning] [empty] [while refueled];
The father [perches] high on [ladder stairs];

- Just in two lines, there is a personification of the lamp, a zoomorphism of the father (perching), an additional descriptor for the lamp which is 'empty', a passive construction (refueled by who? the father) and an unusual noun phrase 'ladder stairs'.

- I made a lot of comments about Linguistics that are super funny in hindsight, because I really didn't know what I was saying (or thought I was saying something else with some of these) but a reinterpretation of poems like my Broca and Wernicke one makes them seem to be about some big debates in the field.

- There is just the hint of my background reading Romantic/Victorian era poets as my 'start' to poetry with some of the word choices and choice to use exclamation marks in places. I don't think that has carried over much to my later poems. (Though I might prove myself wrong, lol.)

- Recurring motifs: mazes, patterns, butter (for some reason), food, glass, paths/movement

- Recurring themes: searching/ seeking/ hunting,
inability to communicate, indeterminacy/ uncertainty, entrapment/ constraints

I hadn't expected to see any continuity there. I thought this was a sort of miscellaneous challenge thread, but it turned out to be more cohesive than I remembered.

Best Lines

Lyric lines are stretching truths across the desert gravel,
Long mirages slowly shore their blue by one drop more.

I’ve been running low on a limited tank of love
Never reaching bottoms, always squeezing one drop more.

--'One drop more'

I trace the mother of my favourite word.

I seek the father of my special sound.

A silence travels between then and now.
Dusty desert paths are swift unfurling.

--Paradelle for the word ‘Lacuna’

Five – remember how the fingers of your hand
tremble with all the joy and terror
of being lifted off the land.

Living and Dying together with light
receding and rippling out of your sight.

--Things to Remember about Living and Dying

I'm also just going to dump the entirety of Subversive and Exotic here, because it's short and I still think it holds up.

Connections to Other Poetry

The 'language' theme here turns out to be a lot about miscommunication or failure to connect/ communicate, which is also a recurring thing in my 2021 NaPo. Meanwhile searching/ seeking/ hunting is something I wrote about more recently in some of my poetry outside of YWS, so it's kind of surprising and nice to find it here, like it was hiding in my work all along.

Overall Ranking

Hard to rank it without looking at the other threads first, but I'll give a preemptive 7/10.

__

What I might use:

- I might try to simplify and/or rewrite 'Talking to Shop-keep in his own Language', just because I like the idea behind it and think the execution could be much improved. I won't use the pantoum structure though.
- I could use this as a springboard to write a new, more Shakespeare-inspired sonnet.
- Try to revive some of the more dynamic imagery here -- like truth being stretched a long way or the water level in a tank slowly draining out, or light receding, or someone trying to walk up a hill

Random side-note: I don't know why most times I have sat down to write a sonnet, I've tried to use it to describe something or tell a story when the sonnets I've read are all about argumentation. Do I have nothing to argue? Anyway, if I do go for writing actual sonnets a couple of times this April I'm going to try and make it an argumentative/ rhetorical one.

Sonnet 24

- I like the way the metaphor and the thing described by the metaphor are weaved together. It feels like he keeps referring back to the thing described, which helps maintain the sense of cohesion in the poem, for example:

Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled
Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart;

These are the first two lines.

Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art:
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

These are the last two lines.

- I also like the lines in the second and third quatrains, which play with the idea of "gaze". I'm not sure how I might try to work with that in a poem. Maybe I'll try to write a few sets of lines where the grammatical object of one becomes the grammatical subject of the next line? "Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me / Are windows . . ." is not quite this, but the general idea is there.

Attempt at writing indirectly

I wouldn’t call them my universe.
The stars are far from me, in space,
in time, in verse – those ghostly lights.
The pinks and reds, the greens and blues
may spill across the galaxies, but spill
in broad bulbous blobs which take no form.
They must be known, more so than realms
above, which screen themselves in black. [contradictory with above?]
Surrounding me, I know their faces, hands
the way they walk, and where I stand
among them.

Stars – distant
Galaxies – formless, unstable

__
I didn't quite like this one, so I'm putting it here as a scrap to be expanded on / worked with in the future rather than as a NaPo entry. (It's also got some notes on the side I realise haha.)

Sonnet 26

Tone: deferential

Definitely written to a "lord", or is positioning the speaker as a vassal/ someone lower in rank.

Cool wordplay with "duty" and "wit(ness)":

Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage
To witness duty, not to show my wit;
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul’s thought, all naked, will bestow it

Makes me want to try writing something with a 'deferential' tone.

#napodeepdive

2021

Age, Life, Situation

I was 19, in my first year of university. I spent most of my time online and was doing my courses by distance. One of my many distractions was scrolling through gifs of cyberpunk movies people put up on Pinterest. I think this was also the year I decided to finish watching Serial Experiments Lain (psychological thriller? with pretty heavy mature content - look up warnings or the Wikipedia article before watching, if you're curious). Unlike the previous year, this thread came out of me consciously fusing together themes from different media I liked plus stuff I was brooding about at the time. I used the forms of the sonnet and tanka as a scaffold for some of the poems, but there was also some list poetry, free verse and prose poetry. It's very 'stylish' compared to most of my other threads - while there is a story or theme to the poems, there are also a lot of choices in formatting and punctuation I made simply for the aesthetic c:

Thread Name
<<_ you know it means so much_ >>

Interesting Observations

Is there an issue or topic that means
enough to you? Packing peanuts spilling
your words -- the phrases you've heard - (time-filling?)
A sloping crimson graph line that leans
towards the dramatic, nodes exploding,
rope-strings of hot powerlines lassoing
hyperlinks between -- whatever you've seen.

- So like, except for the packing peanuts, these are all images to do with lines but they’re from all over the place - statistics, physical materials like rope, electronics, digital ‘lines’ between stuff (hyperlinks). I guess the link to packing peanuts is that electronics you’ve just bought often come with them??? There’s quite a bit of a jump with the metaphors and images here, just like in the 2020 thread.

- I feel like I was really trying to portray characters through the speaker’s voice, and not just any characters, but ones the audience was supposed to see with a critical lens. Sometimes it looks too overbearing though. The sense of rhythm and unity isn’t really present with some of the poems in here, though there are exceptions, especially unexpected rhyming for a ‘wham’ line.

- The main thing about the sonnets I wrote here is that they’re mostly written by syllable count (10 syllables per line) and not by stress pattern/ meter (5 iambs per line). I think that doesn’t work as well as the recent ones I’ve been writing that do use the meter.

I read, I re-read your words like a map
that was getting me lost, and not at all
the familiar puppet strings for a doll,
no wire-wisdom through a bottle cap.

From [can we really blame each other?]

Rewritten with iambs:

Re-reading words you wrote me like a map,
I find myself unshackled and so lost
without my puppet strings, or raffia ties,
no wire-wisdom through a bottle cap.

Not sure if that’s a lot better, actually, but it is a different way of doing it. It does feel less cluttered to read.

- Recurring themes: ill-effects of social media (like farce, difficulty in forming ‘real’ connections), hostility?, lying, lack of communication, overwhelm, connections

- There are a fair bit of colour words here compared to the last thread! Especially red and orange: “red and yellow roses” “Orange-light hallway”, “A sloping crimson graph”, “these bright red strokes of pixel paint”, “a dull orange shape, round and bulbous” “orange light on glass” -> orange light appears again “pixel rainfall explodes red”, “red crabs”, “red fungus” . . . “greyish” and “grey” also appear a few times, and so does “blue”.

- Other recurring motifs: food (mostly sweet food, outside of the one grilled cheese), lines and anything string-like (and related images: network nodes, severance)

Best Lines

8. songs while muting a poetry slam

[(play)lists]

We're too happy to be sinking, but it's fine to love the sea. If you knew what I was thinking, would you still talk to me?

[dead bots tell no tales]

down below, the night-time city, where each little neon sign is trying to stake a claim to their space --

(i wonder if each has a face?)

[lightshow war]

However soft intentions are designed,
we are wolves, and the pixel moon will bay.

[love (dis)interest]

But we were marketed as an epic,
crimson ribbons strapped us fast to our seats,
pulled so tight they broke our self-reflection.

[Status Updates are false advertising]

(I also like the whole octave of this one - almost every line is end-stopped and a query of its own, which makes it more frantic than an ordinary sonnet.)

We were connections between edges
and we were unfulfilled dreams,

we trojan horses [waiting for a sign].

[ego]


Connections to Other Poetry

Honestly 2021 is a bit of a weird one. I think I did write standalone poems throughout the year with the same energy: beyond, the storms are fizzy dust was the predecessor to the NaPo thread and [Headlines] has the sort of pessimistic worldview many of the poems in the NaPo thread have. (And as mentioned in the 2020 entry there is a shared theme of communication failure.) But I guess the connection to poetry that came after that is that towards the end of 2021 and 2022 onwards I decided to go the opposite direction in mood and tone.


Overall Ranking

I know a lot of people like this one, and it's definitely got a lot of plus sides to it, but within my personal context of poetry-writing it gets 6/10 - I don’t *dis*like it, but there’s less unexpected delight compared to my 2020 thread which got a 7.

What I might use:

- The lesson that complex metaphors need room to *breathe*. Challenge? Write a longer poem that uses just one extended metaphor.
- Colour terms! But not the ones I used a lot here: make a list of shades of green, yellow and blue and try using those in poetry.
- Return to the theme of communication failure.
- Write a speaker the audience is meant to disagree with.
- Practice some Shakespeare techniques with the poem message being based on "If you knew what I was thinking, would you still talk to me?"
- Poetry subjects: neon signs, futuristic cities, virtual environments

(Under Construction) Poetic Devices to Work on

Extended metaphor

Alliteration
- See: Sonnet 12

Quatrains, or how to make the most of them

Double meaning
- Tried this with 'Buck' and 'The Act of Holding'

Cumulative sentence

Run-on sentence? Doesn't sound like the official name of a poetic device, but Shakespeare uses it in Sonnet 12

Parallelism, or some variation of parallelism