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James Merrill’s “Christmas Tree”. Tried to post this comment with a link, but RUclips ate it.

The human brain is a judgment engine. That's how it works, what it does. When I encounter someone who wants to deny that, or wants to try to function without acknowledging or utilizing that core operation of their own brain, the very thing that makes humans such uniquely powerful parsers of experience, I just shake my head and move on. But HOW should one judge? By what criteria? Aye, there's the rub. Is objectivity just subjectivity wearing a fancy hat? Often I think it is, in fact. But not always. Not always. And learning to discern the subtleties, the nuances, within the ambiguity seems to me a perfect project for a poet.

The sonnet I refer to at the end is "Ebbtide at Sundown" (defenceofpoesie.blogspot.com/2011/07/ebbtide-at-sundown-michael-field.html)

It almost seems like Hope in this case also has resonances with the Lacanian concept of Desire (which is basically constituted by the impossibility of its own fulfillment)

thank you for your great work, and great journey to explore all the essential concepts for the book.

Miss your content, Max! Hope all is well :)

this is a great video:)

really great work and effort in bringing these ideas to the surface. the stuff under the Reclamations timestap is so insightful to me!

Loved this format; found myself at first pausing at each poem to read through them on my own, glossing over the purpose in the slideshow of poems you chose to present them. I really liked this “found poem” style of video, running through various interconnections of poems on first glance seemingly unrelated. E: How did you go about composing this?! What was the initial, “fuck yeah why not” that led you reading through poem after poem to find a sequence that suited your needs?

It must be said that language as a medium for communication is imperfect. There are no pure pigments with which to represent experience and hence we wander, as poets, between the concrete and the abstract. Is it even possible to render say"grief" or "love", which are both abstractions, realistically without relying on further abstraction through image? Over and over again we seek to ground the intangible through the tangible. I don't think it matters what era or school the poem is birthed in, the dilemma remains, which is to not express one's own experience, but to engender in another thoughts on their own experience. And yes, it is difficult.

Great video, Max! What do you think of Robert Creeley's work in this regard?

As an aside, I know of at least one journal out there that specifically states in their guidelines that they want no formatting in works submitted that cannot picked up aurally. Clearly there are camps. The question for me is where is there room to advance the craft that is not superficial. Certainly, making a poem appealing to the eye as an attempt at elevating the experience is laudable to a degree, and I am quite guilty of it, but let's be real. The aural landscape of poetry must take primacy regardless of its appearance on the page.

The new yorker took two years to reject my submission, lol.

It is also possible that these markets simply "mass reject" once they've curated their upcoming issues. It would be inefficient from a process standpoint to reject individually given the sheer volume of submissions these markets receive.

Wish I had a You in my pocket that I could roast all of pieces with. As a complete amateur it is priceless to see this kind of dissection of what works and what doesn’t.

Recently changed jobs and I am having some difficulty, due to schedule changes, with establishing a new slot for my practice. Just where is that distraction free time. Mary Oliver was known for walking her local woods with her notebook in hand. Williams jotted down notes on a prescription pad between appointments. What seems to be occurring, given that I can no longer visit the page at 4 AM in the morning, is the juices begin flowing while washing dishes. Getting the hands busy with the mundane certainly helps.

I enter a liminal language space by taking long walks, then find a quiet spot on a tree stump somewhere and tap away at phone notes. Sometimes it’s just fragments. Raw material that I can eventually pull into a poem. I should start bringing a physical notebook though.

The major topic in this video I’m exploring for myself is the idea of the “flicking on the lights” and the techniques to return our selves to our self. For me, I need to come to understand what balance between mindfulness and rumination is beneficial for me in the day to day (and I believe there is no hard, right answer; one day may be a 20:80 ratio, another may be a 5:95). I also get to work on the awareness of, “okay I’ve been on my phone the past hour distracting myself from both the ruminations and the mindfulness, so maybe I need to spend at least 15 minutes just sitting with myself doing nothing but listening to the scribbles in a notebook.

This video reminds me of the G.K Chesterton quote "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly", honestly I think perfectionism and self-judgement create so much mental noise it can be difficult to even want to begin writing. I particularly like the advice about using a pen to keep things moving, I'll have to polish my handwriting because at this point it would be more of an abstract art piece rather than a poem.

Poetry offers a connection, a brief moment when the insurmountable gap between consciences is bridged and people can resonate with a sense of understanding. I can't say that is the only purpose of poetry, but I do think humans are social creatures and intrinsically experience a psychological reward when feeling connected to something. Which might explain why even poems that elicit feelings of repulsion and horror can still be pleasurable in the sense that it evokes a shared experience between the author and the reader.

I hope you realize that you look like a madman in the thumbnail, max 😂 At the root of the misunderstanding here is the difference between pleasure and happiness. If I wanted to feel pleasant, I'd go jack off-I wouldn't read a poem. Nor is poetry pleasant to write. It's difficult, but it makes me happy. What is happiness? It is not, as Gluck says, complacence; if I thought mere peace was happiness, I'd take a sedative. I've said before that the aim of poetry is to sing of the meaning of life. When we understand the meanings of our lives, and we see the world around us in all its beauty, we find happiness. Yet there is not only beauty, but horror. It's silly to say that poetry can only give pleasure, when the world is burning around us. In a world with female genital mutilation, transphobia and religious terrorism, why should I write about flowers and cake? None of the above are pleasant topics, but they are necessary, and I can never be happy without working toward a solution, and changing the world for the better. Poetry is well able to be part of this effort; it's poets who would rather lock themselves in ivory towers. If you said your answer to the question, I don't remember hearing it; what do you believe your poetry should do? also I've been calling gluck cluck in my head for like three years 🤦, so thanks.

Should poetry be pleasurable? Should it please? The first answer is yes, if only to save it from the abuse of bad practitioners. Seriously though, if pleasure is not derived from the creation and consumption of the expressive arts, why bother with it at all. The question is whether or not “pleasure” must be the impetus or sole result of this interaction, when the only purpose of the tool, language, is to communicate. It becomes then, “what must it communicate if pleasure is the goal?” The same tool is employed in every auto repair manual to great pleasure, most times, to the do-it-yourself mechanic, barring a few shredded knuckles. So the question then is moot and resolves to “what is poetry’s role in the commerce of human affairs”, what is exchanged, is it transactional. Clearly, very few poets ever earn a living at the craft, so, remuneration of effort is off the table as far as that’s concerned. But just as clearly, pleasure exists between the poet and reader, and one can only surmise that the terms of the contract are “here’s what I see for a few precious minutes of your time.”

Jackson Mac Low, in his essay Poetry and Pleasure argues for a poetry focused not only on an aesthetic pleasure between the writer/poem and reader, but as an ethical-aesthetic relationship between performers and the script, which is always expressed differently.

very informative. Thanks, Kristian, for demystifying this stuff.

Beautiful. Learning more about this artist. Was she a contemporary of Georgia Okeefe?

I’ve found that the line between prose poem and flash fiction is not much of a line and for online publishing flash is the easiest. I think lit mags aren’t clear about what poetry they went and get too many and the internet isn’t friendly to 5k - 7k word short stories. So flash is a better route if you want to get acceptance, but poems and short stories are more rewarding if you’re writing for yourself. Still building my skills before my novel 😊

As someone who studied and worked in all three of these types of writing simultaneously in college, I must say that each impacts the other. Essay writing will bring a degree of logic to your poetry, and obviously, fiction focuses the narrative arch. In return, poetry can lend its voice and music to either. Another great episode, Max. Diversification of effort-sound advice.

Books reviews are something I plan on doing this summer. Great way to get involved in publishing and writing communities, but, for the longest time, I felt I didn’t have something to say in reviews. I think r/OCPoetry is a perfect place to build that skill and confidence if you can’t do University or local workshops.

I found the deNoird poem on the poetry foundation site, you got me with the hip hop analogy.

It's nice to see the talent that exists in our present literary journals, but I can't help but feel that the average American would read these and get absolutely nothing out of them. No wonder rupi makes a killing. Pastoral constructions is my favorite.

Personally, I snort sunshine every morning.

Great idea for a video. If it's boring but correct, it's a chat poem, from my limited experience. The format also gives it away; from what I've seen, it's always rhyming quatrains. Here's a little sample: Write me a unique and creative free verse poem Here is a free verse poem I created for you: The city is a canvas, a blank slate Waiting for life to be painted on its face It's a symphony of sounds and sights A cacophony of colors and lights do you fucking know what free verse means? Yes, I do know what free verse means. Free verse is a type of poetry that doesn't follow a specific rhyme scheme or metrical pattern. It's free from traditional constraints and allows for more creative expression through the use of line breaks, varying rhythms, and other literary devices. The poem I created for you is an example of free verse poetry. I apologize if my previous response didn't fully capture the essence of free verse. 🤦‍♀ I've seen comments elsewhere on reddit exclaiming how surprisingly great the poems chat writes are, lmao. I think this rhyming, regular scheme is the developers' idea of poetry. If an AI could write a good poem, it would be alive.

Curious if you saw the recent New York Times Op-Ed By Drs Chomsky, Roberts, and Watumull RE: ChatGPT? A lot of interesting/relevant stuff: "Such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case, and what will be the case -- that's description and prediction -- but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence... "...But ChatGPT and and similar programs are, by design... incapable of distinguishing the possible from the impossible... True intelligence is demonstrated in the ability to to think and express improbable but insightful things. True intelligence is also capable of moral thinking... for all the seemingly sophisticated thought and language, [ChatGPT displays] moral indifference born of unintelligence." While the article focuses on ChatGPT's limited usefulness to science due to its lack of explanatory reasoning, and makes no mention of the arts, the broader thrust of the article is that not only can ChatGPT currently not contribute anything interesting or new to say -- the design of current "neural network" AI algorithms is fundamentally deficient in that they will *never* be capable of expressing anything worth saying, which is to say anything which requires real "thought." Dr. Chomsky in particular has referred elsewhere to ChatGPT as a new form of "high powered plagiarism." I think there's a thought lurking somewhere about what it means that my inexperienced brain had a hard time distinguishing these poems, but maybe I'll leave that thought for autocomplete to finish. :P At any rate, I always find these videos fun and useful, and this one was particularly fun. I'm still a total rookie when it comes to poetry, so it's always nice to just see some criticism in action, helps get a better feel of what's going on in my own paltry collection, what I like, what I don't like, and how it might be improved. Little by little, inch by inch...

Fun format.

This is why I see the advantages of reddit...I feel like literary magazines are in the first place an inefficient method to gather knowledge, because they're so fragmented. If only there was a single platform that was easy to access and sorted by quality, and could recommend you poems the way youtube recommends music, so that you could at any time see the best poems from, say, 2018, on the topic of cats, or whatever, or search by a particular poet. Too bad copyright exists.

So much, Melissa.❤

Amen. Im always putting in that I’m an unpublished poet. My author bio is one sentence long. One tiny bit of validation would go a long way. I sometimes wonder if these editors and agents appreciate the power they have

i thought you hated dungeons and dragons

Good to see you back!

It is really emotionally expensive 🥲 wish there was medicine for the fear of rejection

Thanks for this video and thanks for the nice words about my piece! (Just fyi, my last name is pronounced "Tuck," like Tuck Everlasting. No big deal at all. People mispronounce it all the time. Just letting you know for any future reference. :)

Solid advice. Wish I had seen this before dropping a few hundred bucks on reading fees at the outset of this journey.

I like fugitive ice, without black. Always admirable to see someone composing on the fly.

Tbh, with my impossibly high standards, I don't often find poems I like in literary magazines. Sure they're higher quality than reddit, but they're also purposefully obscure. In any case, if you think of poetry quality as a pyramid, I think it's a good thing that there's a place for the base, rather than having only the tip of the iceberg visible.

Hey max, I’m digging this villanelle. What about getting even crazier with the refrain and bringing out more of the surrounding landscape, like this tree you mention. …if I were your painter of jagged branches shielding the hallowed church Something like that. It also gives the poem a more devotional aspect, if that’s something you were interested in bringing out-an adherence to traditional feelings of the beloved as one to be protected or sanctified. I also think you can easily change “cussed” to “cursed” and get some pleasing assonance with, search, early, and converge. What do you think about “prepare yourself for Persephone’s torch”? It might carry unwanted associations but I think it works well because she’s associated with both spring and torches. I’m working on editing up some stuff to send to the Pierian soon, so steel yourselves :)

I think it's a testament to your skill and practice to come up with something compelling within constraints on the spot. I like it!

The problems with the oc are just the problems with poetry in America. For centuries, literature was the realm of the elite. Now everyone in America can read and write. That doesn't mean they can read and write well. But I'm frankly happy that they're writing at all. I do not think the oc is is a failure. I think the state of American education is complete shit, and that's on purpose-a stupid populace is easily ruled, as Laozi said. 民之难治，以其智多。 Bad poetry gets hate in a way that no other art form does, because our expectations are so high. Chips and soda are hardly haute cuisine, but aren't they the food of the ordinary people? The goal of almost every oc redditor is not to become a poet. Poetry is stress relief, or therapy, or whatever. I don't think they need to become great poets. I'm glad that they're considering poetry as a way of expression, and thinking just a little deeper and more spiritually than usual, however shallow that is. This is the beginning, not the end, and we shouldn't be comparing the flawed complexity of the teeming masses to the ideal. There's a long way in between. I think the oc is an important step forward for poetry. Poetry must be connected to the heart of the people, or it cannot survive. The way forward for reddit is the way forward for American poetry. I've seen how the ivory tower has lost its driving force, and I'm glad for our new blood. As for populism-that's America's problem, isn't it? Reddit has all the flaws of a democracy. We'll see how the American project changes and grows, not only in poetry.

As I sort OCPoetry by “new,” these trauma poems and suicide poems seem to be getting more and more common. The quality of the writing is taking a nosedive while the melodrama is skyrocketing. I really wish I could filter them out sometimes. More often than not the writers are seeking solidarity over feedback. The subject matter of the poem is the focus, not the poem itself. Those points aside though…it’s just exhausting for every other poem to be about this stuff. It’s become a slog to try and sift through them to get to any decent writing from folks willing to take critique

I studied poetry/creative writing in college, basically hardly wrote for 15 years, and recently started writing again. Wanting feedback (but honestly, mostly just wanting to be read) I spent several months publishing on AllPoetry before losing patience and abandoning it as trash. Then I published a couple pieces on r/OCPoetry, found it a bit better, but ultimately ended up in the same place-like Max says, it's basically a cesspool. I felt good that several people liked my poems, but ultimately the praise rang hollow because frankly, it was clear that most of my audience didn't really know what "good poetry" was-at least, not in any way that was meaningful to me. And I sure as hell didn't want to LEARN from this audience, so critical feedback was out of the question. I agree IN PART with Squim's comment below: the problem with r/OCPoetry is a lack of desire to improve, but also a lack of familiarity with the most basic conventions of how to think about poetry formally-that is, in terms other than "I liked it" or "I didn't like it." Many of the authors publishing on OCP explicitly welcome feedback and perform a desire to improve, but when you hit them with the real stuff, from the perspective of an actual poetry-knower, they respond as Max described: "you're elitist, you're a snob, go away." Good art gets made in spaces built on a foundation of paradox. If you put too much faith in the academy, you get flaccid, tepid art that basically amounts to high-quality photocopy. If you are too fundamentally distrusting of the academy, you get haphazard, arbitrary crap that might have flashes of quality, but has about the same relationship to its ostensible subject that a jug of spoiled milk has to cheese. There are lots of ways to make very good art. People tend to confuse or overextend this idea to "there is no wrong way to make art." Actually, there are lots and lots of wrong ways, far more than the good ways. Most art is not very successful. Most art by BRILLIANT ARTISTS is not very successful. Yet when it comes to poetry in particular, people want to get together and say that there's real poetic value in the unconsidered product of some dude who felt sad because his girlfriend left him and wrote "your texts coil around my neck like barbed wire/I sunk so low for you, now all I want to do is get higher" one night when he was feeling extra sorry for himself and ran out of weed. It's a hopeless environment, one which-I agree with Max-there's little point in trying to repair. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink, especially if the horse thinks a bucket of piss with a few half-eaten strawberries in it tastes as good as rosé. But how do we promote a culture that's more conducive of good writing, or at least, more capable of properly assessing what is good and what sucks? I think poetry has a very particular problem here, one that's largely of its own making. Because I don't like 99% of the stuff published on OCP, but I also don't like 99% of the stuff published in Ploughshares or The New Yorker or Kenyon Review. People are sick of poetry because most of it sucks, and has for a while now. I've never forgotten this shitty poem by Julie Sheehan, "Chives," that was published in the New Yorker in 2014. I do not exaggerate, seeing this thing published in one of the most prominent forums almost singlehandedly made me quit writing for a decade. If this is what was going to be lauded, why try? Such masturbatory, hyper-academic-posing-as-colloquial language, such a derivative formal approach to the "Deep Musing On Everyday Object." Puke! No wonder the public is tired of the experts. Often they genuinely seem to have little more idea what good poetry is than "the rest of us." They can identify what SOUNDS more like "good poetry" in terms of a shared use of deliberately stilted syntax like "you pinch spent bloom" and such, or Approved Topics for Rumination, but they're not much better than funkkypoetkitty69 at actually identifying what will strike to the core of both the reader in the tower and the reader in the street and evoke the "aesthetic shudder" we all crave. Idk, I have lots more to say but this rant is way too long for a YT comment already. Thanks for starting the discussion, Max!

3:00 "Arnold saw that his fellow citizens were obsessed with piety flexing and church one-upmanship. They spent all their time dissing each other's religious beliefs and they spent all their energy invested in making arguments and having meetings and basically evangelizing very aggressively against one another." Doesn't that sound like a very lively, active culture of self improvement and care for your community though? Which is what I think you are advocating for? How is pointing out the weakness in opposing theologies different from the criticism of poetry -- finding flaws in each other's work, for the purpose of improvement and development? (Genuine question, not rhetorical). I feel like you (or maybe Arnold) haven't quite hit on the problem with r/OCPoetry. The issue isn't disunity or pluralism of ideas. It's a lack of desire to improve. If anything, it's a failure of gatekeeping (in that, there is none, no barrier to entry). But that's also why I kind of like the place -- my favorite poems are the ones that get ratio'd to hell and then also get awards. I'm a sucker for controversy like that, I love shit that sparks discussion.