Creating the Best Darkly Gothic Poem Possible
You might wonder how such anguished and artistic individuals pen such magnificently dark epics, where they got their expressive noms de plume, 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. Then choose an appropriate subject from the page of poems, and the Goth-O-MaticTM will help you express your inner angst!
Darkly Gothic Tip 1: DarkRaven's probably already taken
Choose an appropriate gothic moniker by which you wish to be addressed. Feel free to juxtapose a pair of appropriately dark and wicked words 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 a notable entity in your favorite mythological underworld.
Darkly Gothic Tip 2: Choose an appropriate subject
Concepts such as darkness, loss, pain, grief, madness, obsession, 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, or that ducking Autocorrect.
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 a moody state for better creativity. You don't want to entertain suicidal thoughts (we love you and want you to stay with the living), but merely convey that nothing matters. Nothing is intellectually or spiritually stimulating, so there is nothing but to lie upon the swooning couch and gaze out the window at the dim gray.
Oh, and never be that person who goes to schools and guns down innocents. Those people have bad coping mechanisms or weird revenge complexes, and they never write good poetry.
Darkly Gothic Tip 5: Don't create Darkly Gothic Poems at 2:15 on a sunny Friday afternoon in a hip artsy coffee house drinking an oat cappuccino
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 after only twenty words or so. Meter be damned.
Darkly Gothic Tip 7: Yeah, yeah, dark, blood, heard that one before
Grab that thesaurus and ravage it. The more methods you employ to say the same word will mightily ameliorate your wordsmithing. Using lesser known words like 'eidolon,' 'inexorable,' 'vitae' or 'etiolated' will grant you depths which not-so-darkly gothic poets will envy.
Better yet? Go visit the Goth-O-Matic's demon sister, Gothic Ipsum, a dreadful Lorem Ipsum generator. It shall deliver unto thee a whelming cacophony of conceits.
Darkly Gothic Tip 8: Blow it way out of proportion
Go off about that personal angst. Rant in a dismally deep way about the heartless one who left you alone and barren because you were too dismally 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 site, or any goth site 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 half-melted candles, so much the better. (Skip the dripping blood animated GIFs and spinning ankhs, though.)
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 (or occasional arterial) block. Be creative!
Go 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. Sneer and squint against the sun when you are escorted out of the cemetery.
Lock yourself in a darkened room and read H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James and Sheridan Le Fanu stories to yourself until you sob with lonely horror. 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 the recorder on. Practice saying everything in Vincent Price's voice.
Music, as well, will draw forth your caliginous sorrows. Step softly into the Dead Lounge ballroom and select something appropriately crepuscular.
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. Leaf through that great medieval literature, the ever-popular Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Use names like Ethelred, Morgoth and Vincegatorix for darkly powerful supernatural entities. 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 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. Keep your dignity about you.