Poetry Forum

Aley - all messages by user

3/29/2016 12:17:50 AM
Newbie	Hi everyone, I'm new to PoetrySoup, but not new to poetry. I've been on YoungWritersSociety for a long time writing and reviewing poetry there so I'm hoping to find more people who are like minded and like reviews, because I like giving them. I hope that people here will be able to help improve my poetry beyond what YWS could do.
4/27/2016 9:12:24 AM
Problems with poem's final stanza, ending.	Hey BigTone066, So I can see why you're having a problem with the last stanza of this poem. It's not a different tone of voice, it's just different content. What you do well in the poem is keeping the same syncopation and following through with that all the way to the end. Despite adding, taking away, adding stanzas, I can't really see that while reading the poem. That means you're good at editing your poetry too. As for the challenge of the stanza, try taking it out of a questioning tone for the last line. In general practice it's my opinion that if you want people to question you, then give them a declarative sentence and let them come back saying "No! You're not right, what about --" and I think that'll give you the reaction you're looking for without feeding them a question themselves. I think there might be some other things you could work on in this poem too though, and I think if you worked on those things you might find a better way to end it, so I'm going to include them in the review. First off, I think you got off topic near the middle of the poem, either that or your topic switched. You call this "The Illusion of Free-Will" but is that really what this poem is trying to say? I feel like your poem, in the end, came together talking about the falsehood of God in day to day life and the way the government has replaced God for many people. That being said, I don't think you ever really get into an argument about how free will is an illusion. You talk about how destiny is a creation of government, but if they're creating destiny then that is the illusion, not free will, so which is it? Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't really see free will vs destiny a continuum between the two. There are some that might argue that even within destiny there is a little bit of free will about how you get there, but in the end, the same things are going to happen but that's an accepted part of what destiny means. You also talk about chance and fate. Those two things basically mean destiny to me in their own ways. Chance provides the room for free will, when destiny leaves things up to chance, but fate is basically saying it'll happen how it was supposed to happen, which, put together, makes destiny. So, I'm not exactly sure what you're arguing for here because you seem to be arguing against Free Will in the title, and the first stanza, but destiny later. That makes the poem a little more confusing and hard to summarize because I don't think the poem ever really draws out a solid point. The last thing I'd like to point out is that you're writing this from a very detached perspective. There's a lot of animosity here that I can feel when I read the words, but they're put into the poem in such a way that I'm not exactly sympathizing with it. Because you don't go into details or show examples, even though you have this very essay-oriented poem [which I like that style], you're losing me as an audience to my own thoughts and arguments. The heavy biases in this poem make it difficult to really get into understanding what is being argued against and what is just disliked through the narrative. Suggestions about how to fix it will follow. Basically, I think you're going to have to start with deciding what you really want to argue here. If you want to say free will is nonexistent, then don't talk about destiny being a creation of the government. I'm getting that from the third stanza by the way. Once that's taken out or made the main point of your argument, you'll have to do some rebuilding and actually speak positively about the other choice. Either that, or make that third choice, the one you/your speaker believe(s) to be true, obvious and that should be your concluding stanza. I think if you do that, you're going to have a poem that really starts to get a bit of a polish, but you're still going to have some work to do. After that, I think the only thing that's left is to decide about style for presentation, but that's not what you're asking about, so I'l just leave it as is. I really hope this helps you see what I'm seeing. If it doesn't, feel free to drop me a line or ask me, and I'll try again.
4/28/2016 7:31:08 PM
Lend Me Your Ear, Nightingale.	Hello DanielCarter, I think one of the major problems in this poem is you're going for a singsongy tone using rhyme, which is making your words awkward, for instance the use of hail/fail pine/fine etc. What you do well is the beat of the poem, but you don't need a rhyme scheme to do that. I think it's coming naturally to you for that beat, and a beat alone can carry a poem without the rhymes. You just don't need them and that'll give you a better frame from which to work towards actually exploring what you want to say. That being said, I think one of the things this poem is sort of lacking is what it wants to say. You talk a lot about Nightingales but what're we really trying to talk about here? If it was about the bird, then it wouldn't really include the mythlore. I feel like you're doing a bit of namedropping and that's what you want to look at, how the Nightingale is used, not really the actual bird, so if you divest yourself from the rhyme, and rewrite this poem, I think you might find it easier to get at that issue. Also, having the constant periods or commas at the ends of lines really feels unnecessary with how well you wrote the beat. So overall, I really think you should play with allowing the poem to flow because that's what you're really doing well here, and work away from a rhyme scheme towards something more, stable and less, caught up in using the right word.
5/1/2016 12:41:18 PM
Critiques Request	Hello, I'd like it if someone could give me an in depth critique/review of my poem here /poem/together_in_the_stars_783622 either in this forum or as a comment. Preferably in this forum so that the character limit isn't an issue. I'd like to know if the poetic tools used in my poem created different feelings, and what sort of qualities they had.
5/1/2016 1:01:52 PM
Would like some feedback	Hello Lukas, So I'm going to guess that this is actually a prose poetry because I don't see any indication of exactly what you want reviewed. That being said, I'll treat this as such. Overall I think the use of alliteration was a little heavy handed because you tended to put them in sets of two that were always right next to one another and that took away from the effects I felt of the words. It made them sound more difficult to wrap around for an explanation and clarity because they were often moving forward so fast. There wasn't much time to "drift down to the earth on embers of freedom." It just kept going. I think if you allowed yourself to be looser with your alliteration, adding words in between the alliterated words, you'd find it more enjoyable to write with and it would have a better affect. Right now, it's too heavy handed, especially since the whole poem is ABCD etc, aside from the noticeable exceptions where you were persuaded by language itself to avoid such extreme words as xylophone and x-ray in a poem. I like the show of vocabulary, but really it feels like all this really is at this point because of the heavy-handed nature of the writing. Alliteration doesn't need to be right next to one another and it doesn't need to only bet two, so I think if you explore those aspects of writing, you'll be pleasantly surprised.
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