What would a well-selling book of poetry even look like?
Like, how could a harry potter level of cash poetry book exist?
>>7334813
Like The Odyssey.
>>7334813
Maybe shitty teen love poetry but written with enough depth that it takes a small amount of effort to understand.
The form would have to be simple.
It would have to maintain its musicality (or whatever) when read both aloud and individually.
A vague political message that doesn't take too many risks but looks like it does.
Weirdness for the sake of weirdness is a must.
Incorporate social media in some way. I don't even know how. But you're gonna look hip as fuck if you post enigmatic tweets about your book.
Basically, it would be awful.
This isn't historically how popular poetry looks, but this is how it might look now.
>>7334814
i mean like modern homie
>>7334823
the thing i can't even remember or think about the last time i heard about a book of bestselling poetry, even one that fits your descrption
>>7334828
I was just guessing. I don't know.
>>7334813
A rap album.
>>7334825
Shakespeare then.
>>7334839
This.
Rap carries the torch of the oral poetic tradition that arguably began with Homer into the modern world.
tumblr
>>7334849
Shoo shoo high school English teacher
>>7334813
Christian poetry for overwrought young women and housewives from Alabama. Jesus has a pretty lucrative brand going.
>>7334849
Pretty much. Poetry isn't dead, it's doing fine.
>>7334844
Like published recently
>>7334828
Apparently it happens which is ridiculous
http://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases/books/10248/
Also pic related
>>7334849
Bullshit. Oral poetry died for a reason, the medium of sound is just unfit for complicated poetry. There are very few rap songs that can be called good poetry, maybe 10.
Rap is more of a component in hip hop music than any form of poetry.
>>7334873
check out "lil ugly mane - grave within a grave" and tell me that's not poetry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ubawvRtpOY
From the inside of my corpse, 30 seconds is like a century
Imprisoned in necrotic flesh
Cognizant beyond my death
Paralyzed and frozen in this carnal penitentiary
Lucidly projecting hellish spectres
Ghoulish architecture, enveloped
In a darkness far beyond my mind can measure
Suffocating violent pressure
It just goes on forever, are these electro-
Magnetic hallucinations?
Is this everybody's afterlife or something I've created?
Abandoned and dismissed in a flaccid
Impotence with the cold illumination that I no longer exist
In a grave within a grave
It was the first time I prayed, no one
There to tell me that I shouldn't be afraid
Falling endlessly deeper, yet immobile and still
In this infinite aethyr washing over
My filth, neither angels or reapers or ghosts were fulfilled
Just a cavity to soak up my guilt
In my depravity, the flowers
Up above me wilting down so they can laugh at me
To think we spend our lives
Convinced we understand agony, a familiar
Voice: "He's finally at peace"
Shrieking through the silence to remind me I'm deceased
I tried to answer but the dead can't
Speak, the biggest prison in the world's underground six feet
>>7334849
>rapwithoutbeatbehind it.wmv
>>7334828
what's wrong with that
poetry requires less passivity than other forms of art
people are passive
people can't sit down and tear apart 20 lines of poetry for half a dozen hours until they get more out of it than online essays can give them
people therefore don't read poetry and defend rap which isn't poetry
I'm fine with poetry being a niche, it means that I don't have to write garbage or tell people that Ginsberg or O'Hara or Dylan Thomas is actual poetry to get everyone onboard
actual poetry will always have a readership, stop whining
>>7334849
rap isn't poetry
>>7334871
>Like published recently
reprints of Allen Memesburg
>>7334873
>Oral poetry died for a reason, the medium of sound is just unfit for complicated poetry.
kek
> There are very few rap songs that can be called good poetry, maybe 10.
maybe 0
>>7334878
sounds like something PB Shelley would have written at the age of 9 or 10 and promptly burned so that it wouldn't be catalogued as juvenilia
>>7334887
show me better, faggot, you could never write something as good as this, it's hardly juvenile.
>>7334898
no, I have written better, and in fact I'd say I've written better poems than most of PB Shelley's short-lyric output
I don't feel like proving it to a retard on 4chan who thinks rap is poetry so feel free to pretend I'm lying
>>7334904
It does classify as poetry though. Let me see your poetry. I'm not even going to critique it. I just want to see it because I know that you are one of those really pretentious people that probably listen to Richard Wagner and give a grandpa interpretation of hip-hop.
>>7334813
It wouldn't ever exist.
The popularity of Harry Potter is only possible due to its accessibility, although its quality is at least passing.
Poetry could only be called poetry if it met a minimum standard of quality, but which is precluded by the necessity of being accessible to the same number of people.
Already exists
2pac's poems
>>7334905
>Let me see your poetry.
Well, just read the short lyrics of PB shelley, roll your eyes back a bit, and imagine something a bit better. Wa La, dinner!
I'm not posting poetry on lit you mong
> It does classify as poetry though.
read some poetry for a year, actually open a book, and then read ugly man's lyrics again. It's good fun but it's not poetry
>>7334904
Rap is a level above poetry, since it’s not just about the words. It’s also about the rhythm that the words are arranged into, which most of the time is more intricate than any conventional poem"
Rap is poetry - Rakim
>only 90 pages long or some shit so normies don't get bored too quick
>only like 8 lines on a page
>illustrations to go with each poem
>topics are about how much of a unique special snowflake you are, filled with quotes ripe for instagram and tumblr
There. I'd like check in the mail now please.
>>7334914
Why not? haha, your arrogrance is a result of your insecurities I see.
>>7334914
It definitely is poetry and good too, clearly, look at the meaning behind it, "the flowers up above me wilting down so they can laugh at me, to think we live our lives convinced we understand agony" for example.
just show me anything you wrote or just send me something that you consider better
>>7334919
>just show me anything you wrote or just send me something that you consider better
http://www.bartleby.com/122/70.html
>>7334929
that's definitely better, I bet you didn't even read what I sent you.
>>7334932
well you sent me the miraculously unburnt juvenilia of 9 year old PB Shelley so it didn't take too many brain cells to read
>>7334934
http://genius.com/Lil-ugly-mane-persistence-lyrics here is another example
please explain how it's juvenile? it's extremely meaningful
>>7334934
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSbtkLA3GrY
Les Fables de La Fontaine should be your model I think. Something somewhat accessible and didactic.
>>7334873
>Oral poetry died for a reason, the medium of sound is just unfit for complicated poetry.
What a load of shit.
>>7334873
>There are very few rap songs that can be called good poetry, maybe 10.
I'm willing to bet that you haven't even heard more than 10 rap songs in your entire life.
>>7334878
funny one
>>7334887
What can the "oral" part add to poetry to make it more significant than written poetry? Assuming accessibility isn't depth,.
>>7334978
same
>>7334995
I'm willing to bet I listened to more rap songs than you ever did, and therefore I can appreciate the art for what it really is - rap. Not oral poetry. When not trying desperately to be what it's not, rap can have quite some significance.
>>7334813
Tumblr search "poetry" for the direction its heading now. The image now of a poet isnt some artsy fartsy type clad in black, its a broken hearted teenage girl posting semi nudes and reblogging pics about weed.
>>7334995
I think he meant that there is a very little percentage of rap songs that are poetic, which would me more true
Check the rise of Instagram poetry http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/business/media/web-poets-society-new-breed-succeeds-in-taking-verse-viral.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
>>7335231
you're stupid
>>7334813
Beau Taplin, Rupi Kaur, etc all do well enough.
Poets like Carol Ann Duffy are doing well for themselves.
Mei Mei Berssenbrugge and Cathy Hong are decent living poets, and there are many others.
The whole Steve Roggenbuck/Mira Gonzalez inspired internet poetry scene is doing well, and they publish books that sell decently, and go on reading tours and the like.
But really, most people enjoy the slight immersion of an uncomplicated novel more than any complex literature or the less gratifying (without thinking about it experience of a short story or a poem. which is such a shame.
