Poetry Forum

superlativedeleted - all messages by user

1/27/2020 2:02:50 PM
Death, Spirituality	Love it! Favorite line is “shaped to kill, and shed”. Lovely regularity of stress; lovely symmetry of the “sh” sound; fun transposition of of vowel sounds from “a” to “e”, and “pd” to “d”; creates a very pleasurable sense of completeness within the line. I think your three strongest images are the charcoal bones, the moon as cocaine, the distant plum red throb. Unexpected images, attention grabbing, unique enough to convey a sense of communicating an authentic experience or perception. I think the first stanza needs to be stronger. It feels like you were exploring a way to enter the poem, but don’t really hit it till charcoal bones. It’s not clear if the sketch is literal or figurative. Your poem has a wonderful ommision of first person language, and this is one of the strongest aspects of its voice, however you could insert a first person moment in the first stanza simply to enter the poem, then drop first person once the poem is entered: I sketch the shades... I would suggest changing ‘webbed trees’ to ‘web of trees’. Literally, webbed trees would like duck’s feet, but you’re literally describing a web, a web that happens to be made of trees. If you diagram the phrase, the way you have it originally ‘trees’ is the noun, with webbed hanging as the adjective; the proposed change makes web the noun, with a little prepositional jaunt. I would change ‘colored and as potent’ to ‘white and potent’, the brevity and severity of the line and the color white being synergistic with its potency. I think the phrase that begins with ‘Their silhouettes...’ needs parenthetical commas around ‘... ,absorbed... night, ...’ to avoid ‘night clasp’ from reading as a compound noun. (I was confused was a ‘night clasp’ was, and for a moment thought the clause had no verb.) I would switch your placements for ‘planet’ and ‘world’, both for thematic reasons and sonic reasons. A world can be something figurative as well as literal; a world colliding with earth could mean someone else’s world colliding with the persona’s Earth, which subtlety ties into to the idea of cocaine and escaping trauma. Also the vowel sound in world has a nice assonance with earth, whereas planet has a nice consonance with pushes. Microcosm might be literally correct to what you intended to mean, but also experiment with using the word macrocosm. The imagery you are using is very much larger than life; an existential scale. Macrocosm might be ironic when speaking about the life of one person, but it is not ironic to the theme that is larger than one person. You might also consider kenning macrocosm and mortal and moving flesh up a line: ... the diabolical planet pushes against our mortal macrocosm-mold flesh, within the cloak shaped to kill... Puissance and Zoetic I have mixed feelings about. Good vocabulary words, but just make sure they are in keeping with your intended audience. I would remove the last stanza. Hope my feedback was helpful. Good luck!
1/27/2020 2:07:43 PM
R.I.P... No hold bars what do you think.	Pretend you’re a journalist observing the daughter, recording the sights and sounds of her play, of her day. Contrast the reality with what the deceased person would be doing if they were there, or what they used to do when they were there. In the final stanza stop writing as a journalist and write from first person showing how you play with the daughter.
1/27/2020 2:12:54 PM
Poppy's Moon - Please critique	Excellent way to approach grief without being cloying or maudlin. Very well done. Good attention to meter. Take more time to explore punctuation. I would put a period after mirror.
1/27/2020 2:15:22 PM
How does this sound	Good beginning. Let it grow some more.
1/27/2020 2:35:41 PM
Lasciviousness	Little clown, In the English language, a ponce is either a pimp, or a homosexual. The accent mark in Ponce de León goes over the ‘o’. Ponce de León is Spanish... not English. Castillano pronounces every vowel, as matter of course. It is unnecessary to use an accent mark to indicate a vowel should be pronounced, as in French. Accent marks in Spanish indicate placement of stress. Normally stress would go on the first vowel sound, but the accent in León indicates it is placed on the second syllable. PON-se de le-ON. If you mean to have Ponce de León make a cameo in your poem as a literal figure or as a metaphor, you need to use his full name to disambiguate it from the English word ‘ponce’.
2/1/2020 12:02:16 AM
High Wire	Have you considered using the image of Flying Trapeze instead of High Wire?
2/1/2020 11:28:31 PM
Lasciviousness	Seriously, dude. You’re a cherry on the end of a cigarette so certain he’s a ruby he’s offended when his careless ashes singe well discerning skin.
2/1/2020 11:31:22 PM
Lasciviousness	I can only imagine your gaslighting is a tender shade that interposes itself between you and all of your days, and all the daring eyes that dare rest upon you until the cold wind of your certainty disturbs them like a frost filled wind chasing away a butterfly into the pallid field of chaff. edited by superlativedeleted on 2/1/2020
2/6/2020 10:33:14 PM
Dreaming Drunk - Please Critique	I think “Teeth grind...” is a really strong opening. I would cut the line at the end of ‘grind’. It’s extremely direct, it’s kinesthetic, the spondee is very tense, the ‘t’ in ‘teeth’ is a sudden release of tension that immediately plunges the reader into the poem. The way the work is presented here there is a larger than life scale: the weight of time, demons, alluding to angels/heaven/God/paradise/happiness. The scale adds a sense of artistic and aesthetic drama, but I think the poem would be stronger if you stick with, or include more of the kinesthetic sense, that you instinctively reach for in the first line. My hunch is that the sense of epic scale perhaps a fear that the suffering itself doesn’t contain its own artistry or scale, so the demon/angel device is used to construct something aesthetically artificial (in a technical sense, not a critical sense - in a critical sense the demon/ angel motif could work; the line of thought I’m offering is merely to suggest a different point of view for the sake of experimentation. It’s always nice to have options) For instance you talk about the passage through grime - but you completely abandon the opportunity to offer the reader a way into the grime. Is the room dark? Is it hot? Is every pore of your skin trying to ooze out the poison? Do the bedsheets cling to your sweating skin like a mistake that can’t be removed? Does the alcohol burn your stomach like a demonic fire you can’t put out? Is the skin stained with dirt from the road - from the crossroads, the crossroads of life? I would really focus on the tactile and physical aspects of the ugliness of the passage through grime - get some grime on the reader too; take them on the passage with you. Find ways to describe the physical details that reflect your theme of hellishness, agony, a struggle. Do the aluminum blinds sound like demonic laughter as the dark wind knocks them against the open window? I think you’ll find the epic scale can still be preserved in the sense that every detail contains some part of the agony, represents some part of the struggle, life itself has stained and infused everything in the room like sulphur. Just my two cents. Good luck! edited by superlativedeleted on 2/6/2020
2/13/2020 10:39:27 AM
Please give me feedback	Ananda, now, all searching done, has only reached the beginning, yet still a self that finds or fails leaves all the cycles spinning. A heap of snow beneath the sky is still a gathered heap, even if the sky’s not named with ordinary speech. Triumphant self, still yet to melt and vanish on the wind. No victor left to find or fail; Into with the sky reblend. Ananda, now, all searching done, anatta, anatta, anatta.
2/20/2020 10:54:56 PM
It Happened Again	I love its uncontrived depth. I imagine you are a devotee of sonnets as your volta is very strong even in free verse. I recently heard a talk by a Buddhist teacher distinguishing the difference between excitement and happiness. Your poem was really such a strong illustration of that; the fact that excitement is built on impermenant things that jazz us up in the moment, but dont really give us a sense of purpose or a feeling of fulfillment the way altruism can. I think the line “years go by” is redundant, because your sensory descriptions of the changes in the face show and imply the passage of time, as does the line about others stopping the weekend ritual. There is so much truth in this dukkha. I think it would fun to turn it into a journey, a series of poems, embraccing the reality of that dissatisfaction Sometimes the thought that maybe i havent partied enough or had enough excitement in my life haunts me, so there is actually some comfort for me in this poem, that it might have added some color to my life but that happiness isnt dependent on having it or having had it. Its so easy for our confusions and attachments to torment us, but at the end of the day an open heart is more powerful than where we’ve been or where we think we’re headed. There’s so much truth in the dukkha expressed in this poem. It would be fun to see it turned into a series of poems, a journey, an exercise in mindfulness of the disatisfaction - not wallowing, just self-journalism, watching, feeling, recording; embracing the disatisfaction by making a space that wants a happiness that is here to stay
3/3/2020 6:16:56 PM
What is it about words	What is it about words that seems to make death safe that seems to make grief sacred? Can one imagine a gallery of paintings all of them self portraits of artists hanging themselves from beams their brains blown out like paint on canvass bobbing and bloated in the cerulean and lapis sea? Can one even imagine an artfair like this, scene after scene of weeping, life ending, not taken but tossed violently back into the sun. Can one even imagine regrigerators covered with computer paper and crayon of children jumping into sapphire blue? What is it about words that invites death, that makes authors bold to leave grief on a stranger’s doorstep an ice cold life swaddled in words asking them to nurse it because it cannot be burried?
3/6/2020 12:01:48 AM
Please look at my The Essence of Nightmares poem!	I think the title offers a worthy topic of poetic investigation: what is the essential quality of a nightmare? It is a question that can be explored in terms of sensory detail; it can be explored situationally, being trapped in sleep unable to wake; it can be explored existentially, trapped by the utter comviction of the reality of the horror; and, other ways. You briefly touch on each possibility; in the first stanza, all three; in the second all but the former. Here is an excerpt from Edgar Allen Poe’s essay “The Poetic Principle”, which is readily available online and easily obtained through a Google search. The excerpt comes after a section critisizing poems of great length (such as Paradise Lost, the Illiad, and others), which he feels are so cumbersome in length they break the state of poetic elevation which he declares is the fundamental essential quality of a poem. The excerpt addresses the other possibility, a poem that is too brief: “On the other hand, it is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.” Your use of the refrain “Wake up! Wake up!” and the first line of the second stanza, I think attest that your instinct is that the reader shpuld come away from each stanza feeling as though they themselves had been lost in a dream, immersed in the images, happenings, and reactions, that when the refrain “Wake up! Wake up!” comes, there is a sense of being cut lose from the stanza, and the dream. I think it is an excellent artistic goal, but it calls for longer stanzas that offer the opportunity for the reader to invest themselves. As they are now, they are so brief it is like closing one’s eyes and being shook awake before sleep takes hold. The emmersive quality of a poem can be obtained through various methods, that command the attention of the reader - (intellectual) rhetorical speculation/examination, riddle, (sensual) beauty, ugliness (prosodic) artful use of sound. But, all rely on the fundamental quality of clarity. “The entice of gunshots”, “... the common reminiscence”, “...the test of slumber.” are all instances where the comcept was not clear to me as a reader. Entice is a verb, so especially using it as a noun “the entice” is grammatically confusing to me; conceptually, I’m not sure how gunshots are enticing. The common reminiscence is just a blank for me. The test of slumber is an exciting idea, so i hope you will develop it more and give it more clarity: how does sleep test something, in what ways are peace and perile subjects of such a test, and what is the consequence of either passing or failing the test of slumber. You get a trophy for the word ‘parlous’; had to look that one up. I think it would be better to use the word perile instead, both because it is more commonly understood and it is also a noun, the way peace is (parlous is an adjective). Also, passing the test of slumber is sort of a seperate question from: what is the essential quality of a nightmare. If perile and peace are competing in the test of slumber, we need to have at least one stanza devoted to each, peace, and perile (you must treat them like characters that require their own exposition). It is possible your poem is actually two seperate poems: what is the essence of nightmares, the battle between peace and perile in sleep. The first invites immersing the reader; the latter asks the reader to bear witness, and maybe decide a battle. They are different artistic goals, ultimately, thpugh perhaps possible to blend. Overall I think ot’s a promising start. I think your main focus on the next draft should be making stanzas one and two much longer with a rich flow of dream imagery/ situations - dont get too wild, there still needs to be a sense of orientation and groundedness within the dreams to be frightened by them - if it just turns into a kaleidoscope of random details, it might begin to lose power because there is no momentum between the images. Think of your poem as it is now as a keyhole that lets you look into where you are going. Time to open the door and make it real. Good luck! Hope something was helpful.
3/6/2020 2:01:30 AM
Night vom	Lick a bar of steel. Did I need to say it was cold? Did I need to say the tongue twanged with a metallic twinge? Did I need to describe the grey? The way the moonlight lit the fibers of the grain? Should I should have said I felt tense, or dull, bored? Mildly masochistic? Was it enough to say ‘lick a bar of steel’? Did the memory of the taste make you recoil, ever so softly in your mind? Did your lip begin to cringe? Did you think “why do that?” Did it leave you bewildered? Was it like tasting life?
3/6/2020 1:04:22 PM
The Texture of the Wall	Laying on the floor beneath the window, staring up at the painted plaster, little cracks run through the goosebumps in the paint. I can read where the wall is hollow where it is brick, by running the tips of my nails across its gibberish braille. In certain spots, the paint is almost smooth and slightly darker, polished by years of rough feet, the action of the mattress trying to remove the braille. To the left there is a stain running down the wall. It is easy to imagine a tomato slammed there like a bird flying into a pane of glass, and not breaking through, slid to the floor, but the truth is, it was a can of soup, the kind with a pop top, unheated, drunk straight from the can, that spilled and would not come clean. edited by superlativedeleted on 3/6/2020
3/8/2020 3:23:44 PM
Depressive Nostalgia	It all remains very abstract. It’s not usually explained this way in academic settings, but the reason using concrete details is so powerful is because it gives the reader something to imagine: scientific studies have shown that the body is unable to distinguish between what is imagined and actually happening. This is why we react to daydream/fantasies, movies, night dreams (the body actually has a mechanism to paralize itself so it doesn't act out what it is dreaming, why people that have ptsd flashbacks physically react to the images and memories playing in their mind’s eye. Concrete details, especially visual, are a powerful way to guide/ invite the reader’s imagination, to create the opportunity for them to physically enter the space of the poem. The longer you are able to entrance the imagination of the reader, the more likely the emotional content of your poem will resonate in the reader’s body as an authentic reaction/ response to the details being presented. Not merely a moment of intellectual sympathy, but a full-bodied moment of empathy. You use alliteration well. “Well wasted” “younger years” “sentimental sadness” (though this last one, you might reconsider, as a line, because it is an overt statement of emotion). However, the more exciting alliteration happens farther apart in runs across several lines “days, crave, today, same, age”, and “spent, sentimental, spent, existential” - their subtlety makes them exciting, and the fact the alliteration is used to highlight key thematic words makes them exciting. The climax of the poem is the headache. Though the poem isnt designed to evoke the sense of pain in the reader, it could be a great spot to unify both alliterative runs together in a unifying expression, where both the craving for days and the reality they are spent intersect: Mind rent, eyes glaze. Thank you so much for sharing. Will be exciting to see future drafts if you decide to share. Hope something was helpful. edited by superlativedeleted on 3/8/2020
3/8/2020 4:00:52 PM
Night vom	Thank you, Acher! The actual space to enter the poem is pretty minimal. It’s a singular concrete detail. The rest of it is pretty heady, though I try to cheat a little in stanza two. Would it have worked simply as a one line poem, or are the other stanzas necessary to fit the reader through the keyhole, and if they are necessary, is the intellectual unpacking of a single concrete detail satisfying enough that the absence of other concrete details over such length of lines forgivable?
3/9/2020 2:12:36 AM
Sigils	Pencil moves across the pages; graphite on the paper blazes; letters, join, and come together, now. Floating on the mind like feathers, sigils writ in light on aether, melt upon the warmth of empty space. Nothing left but empty mind, forgetting words, and sigil signs, they’ve sunk beyond where nothing has a face. Nothing there but unseen dreams that move about with simple ease, and bring results as quickly as they please. Moving like an iron cog that changes time on ivory clocks although no one can see the sturdy wheels. Who will make or mend the train of whirling dreams that slowly drain? and who will wind the mighty, silver spring? And who will wear the key? edited by superlativedeleted on 3/9/2020
3/11/2020 12:01:02 PM
Please look at my The Essence of Nightmares poem!	Solo Man wrote: Hi am new here. Can someone teach me how to navigate? Normally the poster is supposed to include their poem in the post so people dont have to hunt for it. Unfortunately there is no direct path to the poem from this page. If you are using a desktop, you can click on the poster’s handle that will you take you to a page with their name. Then you have to use the search bar to find them on the site. Once you find them, then you have to look for the poem through their list of poems —- this is why posters normally put the poem in the critique request post, so people dont have to do this. If ypu’re using a cellphone, like me, you actually have to request the desktop version of the site because the cellphone version doesnt even get you to the point you have the author’s name to search for. Requestingthe desktop version is like an extra two steps, unless ypu have to look up how to do it... edited by superlativedeleted on 3/11/2020 edited by superlativedeleted on 3/11/2020
3/18/2020 1:05:06 PM
Baudrillardian Echo by Louis A G W	(*caveat author*) A) yes, qualifies as a poem B) yes, has merit C) yes, the style is abstract; wether or not a message is discernible will be directly dependent on the capacity of the reader to penetrate the abstraction D) not sure what you mean about a clear direction of time; the scene appears to be non linear. Also not sure what you mean by coherent continuity; it feels like one poem, and doesnt seem to be disjointed. “Was that the end?” - i found the final stanza to be the most compelling. It seemed to end just when it really got started. I think it would do to point out the distinction between abstraction and impressionism, the latter still possessing a quality of clarity and imagism. Your poem offers the reader two spaces, the canvas and outside the frame. The frame is a poetic boundary that divides the world of the canvas from the world of the gallery. I would segregate the content of your poem similarly - when we are in the canvas, let it be only images, color, motion, space, impressions of people and places; outside the canvas, the grey gravitas of abstract thoughts. There is the potential to lend these thoughts a quality of hyperrealism, though there are no images. Your poem only flirts with true images, and its strength is really more a journalistic observation of human nature. Keep what images you have crystal clear, make them synnergistic to the thoughts. Let the poem’s sense of abstraction come from the ideological narration that creates the context for the images. At the moment you have an admixture of abstraction in your canvas section. Structurally, your anaphora “to live, to desire, to groom, to metamorphose” is very sound, and pleasing; however, each starts off the stanza in the abstract. It labors the sensual clarity of the stanza - it puts the mind in intellect-mode, so when the stanza transitions to sensory-mode, it has to make a little leap to switch tracks. These thoughts might be better at the end of the stanzas or outside the canvas beyond the frame altogether. Because your poem is very thought oriented, I would pay special attention to how you present your images: ‘The canvas sets the scene of of rolling hills from back to foreground untouched...’ ‘The canvas sets the scene...’ interposes itself between the reader and directly experiencing the image ‘rolling hill’, and is also redundanf because your colon at the end of the previous stanza indicates we are entering the canvas. In this line the canvas is the subject, and sets is the verb - it is not possible to imagine a canvas setting anything, not in a concrete way - it is an idea, an abstraction, almost a personification. Compare to: Hills roll from back to foreground Here the subject is the hills, the imagination goes right to them; rolls is the verb - while hills cannot literally roll, the physicality can be seen and felt in a concrete and sensous way. With the words back and foreground, it is perfectly clear we have entered the world of the canvas. Verbs are the most powerful part of a line. Adjectives are, usually, the weakest part of the line. It is possible to write an entirely profound poem without adjectives; not so without verbs. Verbs are activity, verbs express the will, the want, the yearning of a thing, its spirit, its essence. Adjectives can be debased as the author micromanaging the perception of the reader, though sometimes they are absolutely necessary for the sake of clarity. Saying ‘hills roll’, ever so subtly gives them a will, makes them a spirit, ever so softly suggests they are seeking something, are not satisfied with being still. ‘Rolling hills’ is simply a tableau, telling the reader they are; in a rather counter intuitive way, it is an objectification. Saying ‘... untouched, except gaze.’ seems to be emphasizing something of particular significance, as it is natural that only gaze could touch the hills. It’s not clear to me what it signifies though. You have an intriguing affinity for alliteration that I cant discern to be deliberate or accidental. In particular you seem fond of long a sounds, especially in the final word of phrases: Painting, exploitation, profane, nature, gaze, rays, restrained, grapes, playful, elation, natures, days, lay, frame, shade, orchestration, ways, daydreaming, days, away, frame, frayed, away, astray. In stanza 1 you have an interesting run of k sounds, p sounds, that all converge with the long a in the word ‘exploitation’ K - awoke, Baroque, consequence, conscience, quicker, contortion, explotation, sacred P - profound, painting, upon, put, pen, painting, exploitation, profane A - painting, exploitation, sacred, profane K and p are essentially the same action of the vocal tract, but k is pronounced in the throat and p is pronounced with the lips; they’re both unvoiced consonants. So, all in all my main suggestion is to allow the frame to have a geuine force as a boundary between imagery and abstract thought. The frame has no reality as a physical structure, but it can be given the illusion of reality as a geuine poetic structure. Good luck. Hope something was useful. Take all with a grain of salt. Loved the thoughts in the last stanza; i think it shows your voice off best. You would make a great existential-journalist/ poet. Trust your strengths; craddle your flaws.
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