Poem rec: Taking, and what's your idea of poetic?

[crowroad3]

Title: Taking
Poet: laughablelament
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Wincest
Tags/Warnings/Spoilers: incest kink
Prompt: "Taking some 'we' time." - Dean, 10.04 (Paper Moon)

Look at this sexy thing laughablelament posted at spnapo!  And by 'sexy' I don't mean the line breaks. (OK that too.)

We'd love some prompts or poems/poem-like things/lyrical drabbles/images/self-contained bits of fic/

Comments

[throwingbella]

GOOD

[lennelle]

Thanks for mentioning me! :)
I'm tempted to join the spnapo fun but I'm a little intimidated by poetry. Well, I'll never know unless I try.

[crowroad3]

Would love it so much if you came and joined the spnapo fun. I think the spirit of napo is meant to work against poetry as an intimidating or restrictive form/genre/space...and really anything goes: prose poem? art that expresses a metaphor or just an image you like? thing that uses white space or lines or structure a little differently than straight-up narrative? other? <3

[z_publicizes]

I started writing Higher Learning as poetry, couldn't get the lines to break organically, and so revised it into prose. I'm delighted that it still reads as poem-like to you, since I love structural hybrids.

As for what reads as poetry to me, subjectively? Well, huh. Kind of fumbling here. I suppose it's all in the prosody, a greater emphasis placed on rhythm--greater than what exactly I find harder to answer. I think most good prose has a sense of rhythm, but it's generally more diluted by other concerns.

With poetry, when I first look at the text on the page, the first thing I take in is the line groupings, how the lines break; I get a sense of the meter just from that first visual. A prose-poem doesn't make that same first impression; it's only as I'm reading it that I experience the rhythm and respond to it as poetry. I think that might be part of what I like about it--it sneaks up on you.

Here's an excerpt from Colum McCann's Transatlantic--"A strong wind arrives from the west in uneven gusts. They are twelve hours late

[crowroad3]

"I started writing Higher Learning as poetry, couldn't get the lines to break organically, and so revised it into prose. I'm delighted that it still reads as poem-like to you, since I love structural hybrids.": I think I could hear/feel that in HL, the way it turns around an image, even in the way it breaks

[caranfindel]

I'm not worthy of being on this list - my writing is so prosaic that I've actually included bulleted lists in my fic. Okay, not literal bulleted lists, but I have a habit of having characters rattle off numbered lists. I can't help it; I'm a technical writer by training. Ordered lists are a good thing.

Anyway. What is poetry? I can't describe it but I know it when I see it. I really need to do a better job of keeping track of things I love, because I can't provide examples! Everything you write, obviously. Most works by kalliel and indiachick. Over on AO3, there's "The Choir of Principalities" by deadlybride, which I find fascinating and beautiful.

[z_publicizes]

I love lists! If you wrote a story entirely in list form I'd surely be enthralled. : )

Thank you for pointing me to the choir of principalities--that was awesome in the biblical sense.

steeplechasers/askance is another writer of experimental prose/poetry that you'd probably enjoy in case you haven't already.

[crowroad3]

Am also a big, big fan of lists.

[caranfindel]

I remembered I actually have one list-based fic but y'all have given me an idea for how to do something that was already churning in my head...

[laughablelament]

Higher Learning! Thank You! Good chance I'd have missed that.

Nodding here at Z's concept of greater, yes! I keep thinking (to mangle one of your favorite metaphors), poetry is when the vehicle is more important than the destination? Or maybe, equally important. Sometimes. :p

Poetic:

Linden's "Unraveling" -- which is the kind of smut I aspire too, whoo boy. This passage:[NSFW, so...]Sam’s other hand was stroking calloused and warm up his leg, over his hip, along the taut, jumping muscles of his stomach, and Dean didn’t-he’d been fucked before, for fun and for money, but Christ on a crutch no one else had ever looked at him like this; no one else had ever touched him like this while they’d opened him up, idle and possessive and familiar, like they knew him, like they loved him, and it was cracking something open in his chest that he wasn’t certain he could afford to break.
All one sentence, for a start. Liquid, long clauses split with lists. Stuck in my head for weeks.

I also loved Nisaki's "Dear Owner," for the first-person, clever and

[crowroad3]

Aw, please talk more shit, heh. Because yes: the two-lane. The double Lincoln (s), the play, the offbeat, the liquid, the lists, the drive, the drive. (One reason I'm sorta not a spoilerphobe: care more about the drive than the destination.) Writer in the driver's seat, I know; hope I don't wear that one out, heh.

Poetry is seeing it slant; I dunno, all the small stories clicking around in the cracks in the second layer of paint under the spare tire in the trunk on a cold Sunday in Indiana. And the vast sky above.

Poetry is talking shit, ( ;