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10/11/2019 5:33:13 PM Jack Webster Posts: 255	This gets really abstract. The use of second person adds to the confusion: is the ‘you’ intended to be the reader, a third party, and if so what is the relationship of the ‘you’ to the persona that is speaking? Is it even a human? Could it be a pet? Writing in second person well is tricky. ‘You’ should only be the reader, but the poem should never use second person to make a puppet of the reader. The reader is not a mannequin for the author to pose. It’s really not clear what is going on at. Is the author trying to convey the sensation of being deceased; is it describing the apparition of someone/ something departed? The seems to appeal to the kinesthetic sense, which can be a powerful style, but of all the senses, the kinesthtic sense is the most concrete. There are a lot of fill words, mostly adverbs and adjectives - that have been inserted to convey things the poem doesn’t convey on its own. An exercise would be to rewrite it entirely without adjectives and adverbs, attempting to convey all the things the adjectives and adverbs intend while only using nouns and verbs etc... for instance the word ‘elegantly’ jumps out What makes it elegant? Is the brisk shell left behind like a nest that has finished its duty; is it leaving behind the brisk shell like the curling ghost of frankincense tears swirling up from a burning brass brazier; is it leaving behind the brisk shell like a book in the arms of someone leaving a library forced to close its doors? Perhaps they go into their demise like a honeybee washing the dust from its eyes, full of honey and flying off into the light. When you use words like ‘elegant’ it’s often a flag that you want to create a feeling, so treat it like the tip of an iceberg and dive down deep and find something more full bodied.
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10/15/2019 6:48:44 PM Laine Lubar Posts: 4	Why not change the "you" to it to relate it more to the bubble? Elegantly sticks out to me, too, but what if the bubble just elegantly shakes off the brisk shell of being, instead of going into its demise before that. I think shaking off the brisk shell of being implies demise.
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10/18/2019 12:47:54 PM Jack Webster Posts: 255	You could change the title to ‘The Bubble’. The death aspect of the poem has the most clarity in the body. Simply titling it The Bubble won’t obscure any kind of extended metaphor the bubble might represent in the body.
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10/18/2019 7:09:14 PM keith osborne Posts: 59	I wouldn't change a thing! How one can not identify that your subject was a bubble escapes my intellect. Sometimes the most intelligent among us have a difficult time not reading too much into a poem. If you were to change the title(not my recommendation though)what about "Morning Bubbles" as a play on the word. Readers then think it is about bubbles in the morning, upon reading they discover that you are mourning the bubble's extinction. If you are talking to the energy condensed to a slow vibration that is the bubble, then, to me, it makes sense to use the pronoun you. When I talk to my dog I say "you are handsome" not "hey boy, it is handsome". That just doesn't make sense to me. My HUMBLE opinion is that it should stay as written.
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10/18/2019 7:14:53 PM keith osborne Posts: 59	Also, I believe this could be viewed as a metaphor for a life's cycle. Maybe missing the middle of life, but could be for life's beginning and ending. A little work could fill the in between ages and you have a different poem about life.
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