Tips for writing dark poetry

[Sick_Angel13]

Courtesy of http://www.deadlounge.com/

You're probably wondering how such tormented and artistic individuals pen such magnificently dark epics, where they got their expressive names, and how you can crank out the same self-pitying drivel, uh, create your own shadowed and unearthly opus. Read this list of handy tips for the proper creation of Darkly Gothic Poems.


Darkly Gothic Tip 1: DarkRaven's probably already taken
Choose an appropriate gothic moniker by which you wish to be addressed. Feel free to throw a couple of appropriately dark and wicked words together to form something mysterious with which to impress your nonpoetic friends. Adding a color to a predatory bird is still reasonably popular, as is naming yourself after one or two of the notable entities in Hell.


Darkly Gothic Tip 2: Choose an appropriate subject
Things such as darkness, loss, pain, grief, madness, death, night, and the bloodthirsty undead make good topics for darkly gothic poems. You cannot create a darkly gothic emotional abyss about how hard your Spanish class is, or how Mom gives you grief for wearing black eye liner.


Darkly Gothic Tip 3: Read Edgar Allan Poe
If you don't know Poe...

Darkly Gothic Tip 4: Feel free to hurt!
Go ahead and let that emotional turmoil draw you into depression. It makes you create better. You can always pull out of it, right? You don't want to commit suicide, but you want to make everyone think you do. Oh, and don't be that person that goes to schools and starts gunning down innocents; those people have some sort of weird revenge or God complex, and they never write good poetry.


Darkly Gothic Tip 5: Don't try to create a darkly gothic poem at 2:15 on a sunny Friday afternoon in a hip artsy coffee house drinking a decaf mocha espresso
Enough said.


Darkly Gothic Tip 6: Go ahead and chop it up
Don't worry about how short the lines of your darkly gothic poem are. Feel free to devote every line to a scant few words or even a single word. Remember, solitude makes something stand out by itself, um, well, by definition. Consider the following:

'Falling ever darkly into
the ebon abyss of feral eyes,
screaming against
the groping fingers of your
black obsessive passion,
torment.'

...Wow! Did you feel that torment at the end? We know we did. Hey, entire outpourings of tormented souls have been contained within a couple of fingerspans on the left. The best poems will make you scroll down a Web page after only twenty words or so.


Darkly Gothic Tip 7: Yeah, yeah, dark, blood, heard that one before
Grab that thesaurus and rape it. The more methods you have of saying the same word over again will vastly increase your wordsmithing. Using little-known words like 'eidolon,' 'inexorable,' 'vitae' or 'etiolated' will give you a depth which not-so-darkly gothic poets will envy.


Darkly Gothic Tip 8: Blow it way out of proportion
Go off about that personal angst. Rant in a depressingly deep way about the heartless one who left you alone and barren in the world because you were too depressingly deep. Describe the vision of the ethereal path you have chosen; make sure there's dark fog wisping through it. Display your broken and tattered soul for all to see. Occasionally stopping and reaching your arms out in the stigmata position helps stretch those creative muscles. Take minor everyday objects (a clock) and make them looming and malicious (a stark, cruel reminder of inevitable mortality, blank and accusing, every second drawing inexorably closer to oblivion).


Darkly Gothic Tip 9: Use those bleak images!
If you're building a poetry Web page, or any goth page for that matter, it is imperative that you include any picture of an angel statue or gravemarker you can find. Those weeping Mary ones, or angels with heads bowed, make your poetry that much more painful to read. Ah, I mean convey your pain all the more. If you can combine it with images of dead roses and a few spinning-ankh bars, so much the better.


Darkly Gothic Tip 10: Get inspired!
Of course, one can't always be at one's utmost ghoulish. Sometimes, even the undead can get that pesky writer's block (let alone the occasional artery block). Be creative! Go out to a local cemetery and read the tombstones. Find a large flat one and lie down upon it, reveling in your closeness to the dead. Lock yourself in a darkened room and read H.P. Lovecraft stories to yourself until you sob with horror. Got that feeling that needs creative writer's block healing? The brave even move toward ancient Celtic, or even Runic manuscripts for that special surge of dark energy. Feel free to go to European cathedrals and sit through those Latin choir hymnals with a tape recorder. Practice saying everything in Vincent Price's voice.


Darkly Gothic Tip 11: Get classy with some regional interest
For a special esoteric flavour that leaves the reader aching, er, moved to their centre, go ahead and spell using the Queen's English. Go check out that great medieval literature, the ever-popular Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Use names like Ethelred, Morgoth and Vincegatorix for darkly powerful supernatural beings. Check out a medieval book from the library and write a poem about the torment of translating Middle English while blinking from the blood dripping into your eyes. Let your imbalanced humours bleakly shine!


Darkly Gothic Tip 12: Don't be (that) afraid of sunlight
Every Darkly Gothic Poem need not be written about distant fogs rolling through twilight graveyards (but boy, do those poems taste good). Let the sun bring to light in your poetry your horrible guilt, your significant other's hypocrisy, and your self-absorbed pity, I mean, your hidden meekness. Let that eye-searing daystar expose your naked insignificance, burning you to your angst-ridden soul.


Darkly Gothic Tip 13: Have fun with it!
Wait... no, forget that, I'm sorry. Don't have fun with it. This isn't about fun.

[Tybalt]

Always helping the goth community for a better tomorrow huh. lol.

[Sick_Angel13]

I provide help and show them how to find more darkness and obscurities for their works. I know I'm good.

[thefang1]

I find those tips to be helpful and interesting, but, I'm sorry to say, anyone who's gothic and depressed probably doesn't need any of them.  IN fact, a lot of those could be really detrimental to one's mental health, and add little or nothing to one's poetry skills.  Bu that's dependent on the person.  I know that i, for one, don't need to be told to hole myself up and read HP Lovecraft until I weep in terror when I get depressed.  Doing so would probably result in... bad, bad things.  Just throwing it out there that people should use their better judgment when it comes to some of the personal issue ones.  I've found that over-exaggerating in my poetry on something that is bugging me but not necessarily making me depressed can sometimes blow it to a a proportion that actually gets me beyond depressed.  Sometimes, it's better to wait till AFTER it passes and write what you remember.  This may not have the same results (it usually does for me, but I can't speak for anyone else), but it's better for your mental health.

[Moloch]

Heh, I need no tips. I write what I want, when I want. But then I'm not a Goth, or an Emo, or anything like that. If anything, I'm a Freak, or a God, maybe both. But those last two are the only labels aside from the usual 'psycho', 'asshole', 'sadist', etc., that most folks sling my way.

[Petling]

Too... Much... Ego... Can't... ... ... Breathe... *Suffocates to death.*

[Moloch]

I hope someone was filming that. It would be our very first snuff film here at Monstrous. 

[Petling]

Oh, & you just know it's sooo sexy!!!

[Spade]

Heh, I need no tips. I write what I want, when I want. But then I'm not a Goth, or an Emo, or anything like that. If anything, I'm a Freak, or a God, maybe both. But those last two are the only labels aside from the usual 'psycho', 'asshole', 'sadist', etc., that most folks sling my way.

Yo, same here dawg. I iz what I iz, yo.

Eh.. Tips are really needed. Just write what's inside of you.. Which is typically red and goey.

[Moloch]

Actually, human flesh, raw, torn open, flesh; looks more like blueberry jelly. I'm sure I could find some videos of some stuff like this for everyone to watch if they'd like?

[Spade]

Actually, human flesh, raw, torn open, flesh; looks more like blueberry jelly. I'm sure I could find some videos of some stuff like this for everyone to watch if they'd like?

hellz yea