#TheSimulacrum

Keep your verse terse

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The Simulacrum is a group dedicated to excellence in short verse poetry. We are not adverse to any style, form, or content as long as it meets the standards of brevity and quality of art as defined by the group.

Super Group
Until Sep 12, 2013

Founded 1 Year ago
Sep 12, 2011

Location
Global

Group Focus
Art Creation

Media Type
Literature

120 Members
127 Watchers
9,905 Pageviews

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`YouInventedMe - Co-Founders
Joined 2 days, 22 hours ago
=EclecticQuill
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~dumbshine
Joined Apr 22, 2013, 11:21:43 AM
~fiction-writing
Joined Feb 7, 2013, 4:21:18 PM
~Solilska
Joined Jan 29, 2013, 9:17:22 AM

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*rlkirkland
33 Deviations
Featured: Dozing
*beeinthebottle
26 Deviations
Featured: Transubstantiate
=deinktvis
25 Deviations
Featured: heavy as mountains
`jade-pandora
23 Deviations
Featured: Lunar
`YouInventedMe
22 Deviations
Featured: Horror Stories
*AlecBell
19 Deviations
Featured: Hebe
`thetaoofchaos
17 Deviations
Featured: rhetoric
*jimfleming
15 Deviations
Featured: SOMETHING
~pseudometry
11 Deviations
Featured: 7.34mm
*toxic-nebulae
11 Deviations
Featured: stomached

The Simulacrum

Welcome.

The Simulacrum is a library dedicated to the creators of, and appreciators of, snapshot poetry. Poetry that, in no more than ten lines, expresses and captures the blink of an essence.

Rules:

1) Submissions are limited to one per day, and will be judged on their uniqueness and quality before being accepted.

2) Submissions must be 10 lines, or less, in length.

3) A high, grammatical, standard is required.

4) Poetic 'quality' must be superior.

5) We do not offer critique or any literary prompts.

6) We do not accept prose.

7) Poems must be submitted by their author. Third-party submissions, with or without the consent of the author, will not be accepted.

Recent Journal Entries

Feb 5, 2012 Short Verse Poetry
Sep 21, 2011 Visual Poetry

Affiliates

Short Verse Poetry

Journal Entry: Sun Feb 5, 2012, 10:28 AM

Excellent short verse is like one bite of the best chocolate. Complex and rich and very often just enough. - *riparii

is a group dedicated to the short form of verse. While the concept of short verse has many applications, our group has settled on a simple definition: poetry that is 10 lines or less in length. I would like to take this opportunity to say a few things about short verse poetry and feature some prominent examples.

Short verse, or ‘snapshot poetry’ is a familiar, let underutilized and sometimes even unappreciated poetic form. At its best, short verse can encapsulate lifetimes or illimitable moments in just a few pregnant lines. The scarcity of words forces the reader to find even greater depth and context from the few that are presented, magnifying their importance and impact. Also, there is less time to formulate the audible æsthetics in a short verse poem; there may not even be more than one stanza or strophe. The poem must be either pool comfortably in the air as a self-contained sound, one revolution of a rhythm, or it must establish a quick and easy to discern pattern; neither of which is an easy task.

Short verse poems often take the likeness of a declaration, or a spontaneous thought traveling at the wicked speeds of an epiphanic revelation. The space between the words become chasmal, inviting the reader to search for comprehension within their own experience to an even greater degree than with longer poems. Poets that understand this are faced with the challenge of providing a mechanism to allow for travel between the words, from one image to the next, from one spotlit metaphor to another, without either creating so much space that the reader falls through a broken bridge or doing all the thinking for the reader, leaving no room for self-discovery. The latter can produce the ‘so what’ effect. Because there are less words on the page, the artistry and depth must be communicated in a timely, let patient fashion. If the reader is made to spend too much time searching for one or the other, the piece becomes nothing more than a vagary, a snippet of prose that holds no great interest. Likewise, if the artistry is present but the meaning and imagery are force fed down the readers throat, their appreciation for its poetic characteristics will be affected, and again, they will be left wanting. The line between profundity and ‘so what’ becomes finer and less definable the shorter the verse. To achieve the perfect balance is what writers of short verse aspire.

Please enjoy these examples of what I feel are great short verse poems from the gallery of

walking home on fall afternoonicesnow in the palm of my hand
squeeze it

my fist is Spring. Chrysalis.there is a boy who
doesn't exist

he has green eyes
and does not
speak of love
for months Vacant
They have departed,
their intimacy dissolves,
leaving empty space.

They will celebrate nearness
in a more intimate place.

In the heart
In the heart, doubts

In the doubts, a small room

In the small room, a table

On the table, a map being soaked by rain

On the table

In the small room

In the doubts

In the heart BottomI know I'm near the ledge now
where the heart gives up on conceiving:
The parlous break of eye and ear's parley.

I need the legion of null-things now
to enter through the lesion on our pain,
the glitter to blink and wink
to obscure the abyss all of our bodies
are falling for. 7.34mmA simple measurement
can make a man
lose himself; a blurring, no more
than a grainy smudge

a scant 7.34mm long
this rice-grain, seven weeks old
with one hundred and twenty nine
heartbeats per minute

—all this, from a mere sesame-seed of a heart

CLVnew moon -
so much more to learn
about faith

FragmentationThey sent the figments away so
I could see the leftover everything -we own nothing-
The sun rises; we become slaves. Blue moon, or SadismYou would hang me from the belfry,
Coil my hair into a noose.

My hands would jerk and shudder,
My neck would snap clean

I'd dangle in wind furls,
A bloated cornflower:

You'd watch me from a distance,
Your once in a blue moon.

mercyyou incite no mercy,
honourless thing:
I swallow your horror
like fruit. As yet, untitledI swept out the corners of my mind today
In short shallow strokes
Not knowing if the dust disturbed my life
Or if my life disturbed the dust. Sydney AirportTo hover/ in your medicine cabinet/ first-aid, French-doors/ all the words have been taken/ from me/ to explain to you – that I’m not here anymore.

Santa FeWe circled the bustling square,
bought the silver belt buckle,
Navajo-etched for fertility.

I made a painting of the blue bowl,
Cafe Pasqual's, glass in the sun,
truth from those unripe symmetries
sliding along our tongues with
salty shivers, icy, like hope.

You bought the bleached cow skull
so I could be Georgia in my mind. 3Gauge your days by
who runs through your house,
by the flags they carry there,
the words they leave on your rug,
by the color of the smoke you inhale after
their tomes stop burning roseyou mime a rose
with hands I can't see
but
I can see
your rose

bones 9even the wind in the waves
could not hold his question
and gave it to the gulls

they circled the coast
with it heavy in their beaks
and lost it on purpose RawIt's like thirst, but not-
it's worse; it hurts to swallow
your indifference.
53at Delphi
I ask
her name little stirrings XX: moments
Your chaste sun-tipped fingers,
the blinding of your eyes-
how is it I never knew you before?

The moon-flecked range of your sound
from deep within caves
reverberates the ribs of shipwrecks.

I tread the curves of night
that wash ashore each hour,
the moments like seaweed in the shallows. Crows"Crows," I whisper and she flies,
brown arrow shot
from the bowstring of a word.

_{`thetaoofchaos}
#TheSimulacrum

33 Comments

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of course you doi remember the
trees evading liquid swords,
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of jolly hordes, and
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like rubies buried
under years, and lengthy beards,
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humanwatchingpeople are made of little more than water and phobia,
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Comments

`tmpst24myst Mar 19, 2013 Student Writer

I can't wait until I get good at this! Thanks for the examples and definition, it really helped to help me understand in not so much fully, but more than I did before as well as slightly more than I expected to understand for the starting.
Dae