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3/18/2020 4:04:45 PM
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I would really appreciate an feedback: Baudrillard
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It’s good. Focus on clarity.
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3/23/2020 2:50:50 AM
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Baudrillardian Echo by Louis A G W
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Note:
It seems I’ve misused the word alliteration. It seems the correct terms would be consonance and assonance.
No worries. All of it is just food for thought. You might try it out and decide you like the original better. Just ideas to play with. Have fun!
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3/26/2020 8:16:33 PM
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Twilight - critique welcome
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The sky is stained with grass.
The moon is just a sliver
as if light poured out from a circular door left ajar.
I peer in, attempting to see whoever left it open,
but whoever it was
long gone
footsteps washed away in the wind.
Is there a keyhole somewhere in the sky
a little hole shaped like an hour glass?
And, how did they find it?
Is the key as long and invisible as patience
the edges of its teeth as crisp as determination?
Is there a sound when the latch lets loose?
Can you push the moon open with one finger,
this door with no hinges?
And, where does the light come from,
beyond the wall of night?
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4/12/2020 11:16:39 AM
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Pint Glass
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I would start a new stanza at the end of liquor. The line breaks in this section are a really great way to evoke the halting, stumbling sensation of intoxication. I would push it even further:
My in-
fatuation
is a dimly lit
faded
blurred
bar shelf
stocked
with beautiful bottles of
liquor.
The image of the labels dripping into your eyes wins points for originality, but personally I’m having having trouble connecting with the fantastical nature of the image. Perhaps you could say something like: ‘my pupils fill with foam as the bartender fills my glass’ so you’re still getting that surreal quality but still using a literal image of the reflection of the filling glass in his eyes.
The double T in ‘tight t shirts’ works well for evoking the taughtness.
At the end i would change smoother to smooth. In smoother the TH kinda gets stuck as the onset of the second syllable smoo-ther, where as in smooth it is the coda of the closed syllable. Smoother and smooth take about the same amount of time to pronounce, but with smooth all the time is devoted to a single syllable, which makes it feel long.
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4/21/2020 10:22:57 PM
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Hello Heart
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Poems like these are often cathartic for the writer, and therein the majority of the value lies.
In terms of poetry that has some value for the earnest reader, there isnt too much to offer. Or, perhaps put more gently, it is not clear who your intended audience is.
The first two lines are jolting. Although, I imagine this was intentional, so in terms of craft, one can say well done.
Put bluntly, there is nothing about the persona in the poem that makes me want to lean in to what the poem has to say. In terms of being cathartic for the author, this point is not relevant. This particular point is only relevant is the author wishes the persona to have a fundamental charisma that has some small degree of intimacy with the reader.
The poem captures the frustration, anger, vehemence, bitterness, well, but why make a vessel to immortalize these spirits? What is the value of giving them a body to linger on in, the value of sending them out into the world?
Personally, I dont want my heart (what little left there is) to be dead and gone. Why would i find pleasure as a reader drinking from a vessel filled with a liquor so strongly distilled to bid the heart be dead and gone?
Even poets the likes of Poe, Sexton, Dickinson, the perduringly dark Plath, or even the wild Ai, have never bid the heart be dead and gone. They may sing its angst, let its darkness ooze out, but they’ve never bid it die.
As a joe schmo, I get it; as a poet and a reader looking for a little light, I find it repelling.
Again, if the poems just for your benefit, none of the above has any ground to stand on.
Good luck
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5/3/2020 7:45:25 PM
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Along the shore
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14 lines, ababcdcdefefgg, impure iambic pentameter; Shakespearean sonnet
You demonstrate some lovely alchemy of sounds: ‘sifting, shifting’ ‘... flies emerge for the birds to feast’ (who knew flies and birds feasting on them could be so pretty!)
The double ionic in line three is fun to see. Begining some lines with trochees is fun to see. Line four reads well, and the extra metric syllable thematically fits with the idea of a further place.
Something to be mindful of, you spend the first word of your lines on prepositions and conjuctions. While grammtically reasonable for the phrasing, something to explore in revision might be finding phrases that also put content words at the beginning of the lines to make them richer.
Take note that line nine only has 9 syllables. Im not sure this was intentional as in line four having 11 syllables to match the idea of something further away. Not necessarily necessary to fix as the line reads wel, but i think you’ve dropped an unstressed syllable between ‘between’ and ‘high’. Im sure there is a term for this, but it’s slipped my mind. I’m sure it’s a metrically valid ommission, but just make sure it was deliberate.
A fun read. Love to see meter get some love, especially from one familiar the rules of the dance.
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5/5/2020 10:39:13 PM
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not even a wave
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“Farewell,” I bid thee, Boundless Sea.
It’s wordless depths stare back at me,
well a-day! I am mournful as can be,
for the oceans, too, care not for me.
—
Short; sweet; well versed. Perfect length for the topic. Reminds me of Dickinson.
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5/16/2020 3:17:30 PM
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in this together
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Really good draft. Very good attention to meter.
Like that line 20 repeats the line 1; great way to foreshadow the conclusion of the poem. Like that line 24 is a foot short, a fun way to finish; however my ear tripped over the missing foot, especially since the meter has been so regular to that point. I would try making the phrase in line 23 five feet long, to alert the ear the meter is changing before the final line (sort of like a scythe reeling back before it cuts something off...); you cpuld simply add the word ‘appear’
And so again that day will be
With promise new of destiny
Till thundered hooves of blackened steed appear.
The reaper comes again.
I think the extra foot, makes the last line feel more finished.
Though the meter’s good, there are phrases with inversion in the phrasing that make the some lines feel unnecessarily forced.
Line six in stanza 2 isn’t really an inversion, but the preposition is oddly placed, or carelessly chosen perhaps. Avoid using prepositions to fill meter: ‘impending’ is much richer in terms of vocabulary than “of pending”:
The sickle scythes impending death...
(Also, “last lived” could become “final” which tidies up both phrasing and meter)
Lines 7 and 8 could be reworked to avoid the inversion in 8:
With slackened reins the reaper flies
his closing gait will shut our eyes.
Switching “changing” to “closing” is a fun way to play with implied metaphor, the closing gait of the horse also being a closing gate on the life of the lives being reaped. If the reader gets that far in the association, they may find the legs of the steed magically transforming into scissors that cut something off. “Flies” admittedly is more dramatic than “rides”, but it works with “eyes”.
The phrasing in line 9 is a bit rough in terms of being comprehensible. It’s sort of like filler just to get through the meter. The first four words can be condensed into “today” which leaves two beats for something, maybe a pronoun and verb:
Today he stalks on random ground
Or
Stalking now on random ground
(ommits the first syllable in the meter, but sort of plunges the reader directly into the word and threat of stalking; it flies in the reader’s face)
Would consider changing “laid us down” to “mowed us down” as the word mow is more in keeping with the use of a sickle.
In line 16, “soon now” would be more simply phrased as “will soon”.
Line 17 needs a preposition instead of an article
Till silence falls on fields around...
(‘the’ sounds nicer, but the grammar doesn’t work. If you wish to keep ‘the’, you must put a comma after falls and use “the fields” as the subject or direct object of passive construction in an independent clause; ‘til silence falls, the fields around...”)
To be honest, i think in line 17 “around” is wasted meter. Fields give a sense of space, but it doesn’t imply people; it more certainly implies animals than persons, but both are uncertain. If you switch “around” to “and town”, then its much clearer people are implied:
Till silence falls on field and town...
(Admittedly it makes a slant rhyme with ground, but I think it’s stronger to keep the readers eye on the people than their ear on a perfect rhyme)
Line 18 would be better begun with “the” instead of “and”, I think. “Make white” could be replaced with something like “embalm” which implies a kind of whiteness and also death, and fits the meter.
You could also switch “till... /and...” to “His.../ as...”:
His silence falls on field and town
as winter snow embalms the ground
(The pronoun fits the Reaper into line 17)
Or even...
Till silence falls on field and town
the winter snow embalms the ground
(Sort of an embalmed alive motif)
In line 20 it would be smoother to change “anew” to “new life”.
The first two lines of the last stanza could be strengthened and tiedied a bit.
Overall, really enjoyed it! Hope we’ll get to see subsequent drafts.
edited by superlativedeleted on 5/16/2020
edited by superlativedeleted on 5/16/2020
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7/2/2020 9:45:57 AM
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Cast Shadows
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The scene is coherent and concrete, which is good.
Revising for complete sentences would make it stronger grammatically.
Poetically the theme hasn’t been fully developed. There is death, there is yearning, there is an awareness of mortality, but these elements of theme are presented without a deeper significance. It either would benefit from being made more specific, like cues that identify it as a specific moment in history like Trail of Tears, the Holocaust, etc... or if it is left unspecified the concrete details need to be assigned a metaphor identity, is the burning sun the ever watchful eye of facism, the wrath of an unforgiving deity, the indifference of people in power, the indifference of supernatural forces that life cant do without but are unbidable? Are the different aged people all different parts of the same person expiring as they move through phases of life. Even if it is not a specific historical moment, the Death must be given an identity, a nature. You are describing actions as if it is prose — poetry allows you to REVEAL the story that the details represent, poetry allows you to turn the concrete details into jewels that have depth, light and shadow. The images are a language unto themselves, and the riddle they convey must be made clear.
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9/11/2020 6:25:19 AM
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my first attempt at a sonnet.
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Looks like you’re adapting the English/Shakespearean sonnet form.
The line structure is good; 14 lines/ three quatrains followed by a couplet. Your syllabic lines are nearly perfect; it seems all but line 13 have 10 syllables.
The rhyme scheme deviates from the classical shakespearean form; your first and third quatrains follow the traditional rhyme scheme for English/ Shakespearean sonnet, however the second quatrain is composed of two couplets.
Compare traditional: ababcdcdefef gg
to
your adaptation: ababccddefef gg
It’s not necessarily a problem, as the structure is still very deliberate, but for those that are anticipating a more traditional rhyme scheme might be confused momentarily by the deviation. The use of the couplet at the end adds a sense of finality because it breaks the rhyme scheme of the quatrains by having the rhymes back to back; it’s a cue to the ear. When your adaptation places the rhymes back to back in the second quatrain it alters the nonverbal message the rhyme scheme structure gives the ear. For the casual listener or reader, it will likely go unnoticed.
The petrarchan/italian sonnet structure has rhymes back to back in the octave before the volta abbaabba(volta)cdcdcd, however it does not conclude with a couplet — it uses the alternating rhymes and change of mood/image to signal the close of the poem. It’s a different type of song.
Choosing to observe the 10 syllables per line in addition to the line and rhyme structure is really fantastic for a first attempt at a sonnet; many just do 14 lines with the rhyme scheme their first time.
As you’re most likely already aware, you’re not using iambic pentameter — I would say omitting iambic pentameter is (sadly) very common for contemporary sonnets. We haven’t grown up with an ear for iambs or metric poetry, so writing in meter seems difficult and foreign to us — merely by lack of familiarity. Walt Whitman’s nationalistic predilection for free verse circumcised or body literature of its metric inheritance.
Interestingly though, your ear seems to lean in the direction of anapests and dactyls, also tetrameter (in various acrobatic variations - catalectic, hypercatalectic). An shaky argument could be made that some of the lines that have 5 or more stressed syllables are written in very spirited lines of iambic pentameter with a great number of trochee and spondee substitutions, however it is a difficult argument to make since the first line is in tetrameter (dactylic or anapestic catalectic), and sets the ear up to expect tetrameter in the subsequent lines. But, of no consequence if using meter is not a goal.
In terms of content, the reader isn’t really invited into the happenings of the poem. It reminds me a bit of the times I've gone to a new therapist and trust hasn’t been established yet but I want to talk about how I feel without really talking about what has happened. It’s like a locked box, or a locked room — will come out and talk about how we feel about what is inside, but the people outside are never really allowed to share what is inside, or invited inside. Seeks sympathy, but withholds the opportunity for empathy, because sharing it requires vulnerability.
For instance, if I were to say I would cry when my parents left me at daycare, that might provoke sympathy, but if I were to describe my little body being pressed into blue nylon weave of my napping cot as a three hundred pound caretaker crushed the air from my lungs until I went to sleep, it takes the listener to a completely different level than mere ritualistic sympathy for someone that is sad.
Details matter. They let the reader/ listener in — it allows them to have an authentic reaction, not simply a reaction to your reaction.
Food for thought.
Good luck! Hope something was helpful.
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9/11/2020 8:12:46 PM
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my first attempt at a sonnet.
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If meter is of interest to you, Mary Oliver’s book “Rules for the Dance” is a very enjoyable and thorough read, and also explains meter in a way that allows it to be fluid and living instead of rigid and absolute.
Meter can take some time for the ear to acquire. Sometimes the emphasis certain syllables receive take precedence over the stress as marked in a dictionary. Also, the ear intuitively hears the length of syllables, sometimes the weight of a syllable is mistaken for stress (this was a particular obstacle for me in the beginning. This kind of quantitative meter is not commonly used in english poetry, but is very common in old world languages like greek, latin, sanskrit, persian, and so on). Oliver’s book focuses on the lexical meter most commonly used in english language poetry.
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9/17/2020 11:19:24 AM
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Blindfold
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Love the metaphor of the blindfold. Hope you will consider expanding it, deepening it, developing it
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9/17/2020 11:20:48 AM
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Computer
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Love the well timed line break at the end of line one
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9/17/2020 11:25:01 AM
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Timeless Sleep
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Many people do use poetry as a cathartic way to express feelings or memories. Remember poems can also be a way to create a vessel to immortalize precious things that feed your soul — it can give them form, a kind of body. Sometimes they can even become like talismans.
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10/2/2020 1:54:29 PM
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Love Lament
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I think there is a lot of potential in relating the experience of transient love, fear/ uncertainty with the pebble, pond and reflection.
I think the piece would benefit from further contemplation on how the interaction between the concrete elements could more vividly, or more accurately express the experience.
I think the piece would benefit from rewriting it to exclude the words “love” and “tears”.
Simply saying something to the effect of “Standing by our pond, I think of you” invites the reader into the poem, by giving them clues and cues to understand that the speaker is talking about a loved one, and that the love is probably in the past - the key words being “our” and “think”. It’s like whispering to make someone lean in both physically and mentally to hear what you have to say.
You use a simile to attach the concept of love to the pebble, but if the word “love” is removed, attaching the concept of love to the pebble must be done in a different way. Perhaps the colors of the pebble remind the speaker of the blush of the loved one’s cheeks, or contains a favorite color of the person being remembered. Maybe the pebble has veins running through it like the blue cheese that was eaten together on an anniversary or by the side of a fireplace on a romantic evening. Perhaps at first the smoothness of the pebble reminds the speaker of the loved one’s skin, but then perhaps the coldness and hardness reminds the speaker of when things turned bad — you can tell the entire story of love and loss in describing the pebble — it is much more powerful than a simile.
I think you might consider the action of the speaker dropping the pebble in the pond. The way your poem is now, the pebble enters the pond in an abstract way. Having the person drop the pebble makes it a personal act instead of something abstract, it nonverbally communicates something inside of the speaker.
I think you’ve missed the opportunity to explore the significance of the pebble moving through the face, the water ripping it apart. The verbs used to describe how the ripples interact with the face could be very evocative (all without using the word “tears”) Your poem only talks about the reflection afterward.
These are the things I would explore more, if it were my piece. I would really explore the image more, exhaust all the possibilities the way the image might connect to the feeling, then choose which options you think are the strongest. Leave no stone unturned.
Good luck. Hope something was useful.
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10/2/2020 2:09:42 PM
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Love Lament
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There might be a fun word play between ripple and rip
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12/27/2020 3:51:00 PM
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The Old Man
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👍
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12/28/2020 8:14:36 PM
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A 100 year old rosewood door.
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You have a lot of good artistic elements going on. You have a single subject/ image that unifies the piece. you strive to make the rosewood door a metonym to represent a feeling within the persona of the poem, a relationship between the persona of the poem and an experience or element that added to the quality of the persona’s experience of the human condition. You develop this intangible experience without overt statement of emotion, but successfully convey it by describing the qualities of the door, it’s relationship to the community, and it’s significance to the shop. once you have developed and evoked its significance you juxtapose it with loss, by using concrete situations to illustrate how it’s relationship to the community has changed, even though it’s relationship to the persona remains the same,
I’m on the fence about the use of mono rhyme. I also feel the phrasing is awkward in some portions. I would rewrite the first few lines as:
A hundred-year-old rosewood door,
was imported from Brazil.
It was hung before the civil war
according to local folklore.
It breaks the mono rhyme but it sounds both more conversational and more measured in terms of meter. Though not in strict metric feet, it follows a pattern of 4,3,4,3 stressed syllables per line, allowing an arbitrary number of stressed syllables between the stressed syllables. This is idea of counting stressed syllables and allowing an arbitrary number of stressed syllables comes from Welsh meter, though they used hemistitches, so using it this way for your poem, is somewhat novel — borrowing the 4,3,4,3 pattern from the ballade stanzas of English verse and hymnal verse (which is more strict in the number of unstressed syllables).
I’m feeling iffy about the phrase “reddish brown wood door”, mostly because it’s redundant. You’ve already said it’s rosewood. Spelling out the color of the door could come across as spoon feeding the reader. It might be useful for readers that don’t know what rosewood looks like, and don’t want to do a little investigation on their own. If you really want to keep the over5 statement of color in, I would drop the wood door portion which just makes it feel like you’re saying rosewood door again but just substitution reddish brown for the word rose:
It was an impressive reddish brown.
In the next line, I would switch That for It and a for the. It, because the sentence needs a proper subject, and the because your line about local folklore establishes the liquor store as being in a specific community. Actually, instead of the, you might want to get really specific and give the liquor store a name — if the door was so memorable as to enter folklore, surely it made this one store stand apart from the others in a way that the entire community would know the name of the store. Making it a specific store ads to the power of the folklore and to the power of the door that it could make one place so memorable.
It was an impressive reddish brown.
It belonged to (insert name of liquor store)
I would tighten up the line about the women, for brevity:
Unhinged they ripped down that...
The immediacy adds intensity and power.
The phrase eyesore might be confusing. Is it being used because the women see the store, or the door, as an eyesore, or is this line to mean the persona was being ironic when describing the door in beautiful terms?
All in all I thinks it’s a really good draft, and I’d keep developing it,
edited by superlativedeleted on 12/28/2020
edited by superlativedeleted on 12/28/2020
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4/23/2021 4:38:53 PM
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I would love some feedback on 'Babyliss in Acid'!
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Food for thought
Stylistically, i think the poem would have a stronger voice if it were narrating to the reader, treating the poem as a moment of conversational intimacy with the reader. At a meta level, there are really only two people present during the poem: the author/persona, and the reader. When second person is used in a poem, and it is not referring to the reader, the conversational intimacy between the author and reader evaporates and renders the reader a voyeur looking in on a piece of writing written for someone else; the reader becomes a third wheel to the author/ persona and the “you” they are addressing. An exception to this is when “you” is being used in a general way that is stating some sort of truism that includes the reader. Just as a convention, the reader should always feel comfortable presuming the “you” in the poem refers to them.
In terms of mechanics hanging “you” to “he”, “she”, etc... in the first line establishes immediately to the reader the universal theme being addressed is in the context of an interpersonal relationship. Beginning with the word “you” leaves the reader trying to figure out if the author is really addressing the reader or if it is going to be a voyeuristic poem — it takes the reader a few lines to find their seat while the poem is already rolling. Using third person allows the reader to find their seat immediately and give their undivided attention to the narrative the persona is relating to them.
I think the images wander away from their images to much, or present the images in a way that is more abstract than concrete (even for a surrealist poem).
Let’s take the second stanza as an example; the image is hair being set on fire by the straightener. The first line of the stanza should have an expository quality for the new image (also, it is confusing to use the word douse, or perhaps too early to use the word douse. Douse can be used to describe soaking something, but it also means putting something out, and the fire hasnt started yet. I would suggest sticking with soak, as it is more direct in action and avoids mixed messages in terms of creating the psychic space of the stanza). The first line might be rewritten as:
I soak my hair in Argan oil and
set myself on fire...
The reader probably won’t know what Argan oil is, but in the back of their mind the fact that oil is flammable will be there, and soaking the hair with oil doesn’t serve a practical purpose, and soaking things with flammable substances does have a different kind of purpose, so it creates a subtle tension that sets up the second line. In addition to the word douse being associated with stopping or preventing fires, in terms of toiletry and hygiene, dousing oneself with a liquid usually refers to a small quantity of something, a little too much perfume, aftershave, etc... Soaking conveys a larger quantity of oil, a dangerous quantity of oil.
Would respond more, but gotta run. Good luck!
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4/24/2021 6:43:09 PM
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Spring Has Sprung
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Two Cents, Food for Thought
The tone feels terribly solemn, as if Autumn is reporting the death of Winter.
The first line is extremely dense, in terms of sound. I’ll admit, words, like colors, change character depending on the context they are placed it, but in the first line they have no context and not only stand naked but set the tone for the lines to come.
Fragrant is not a particularly “fragrant” word; its syllables are not particularly light or sweet. The first syllable contains a diphthong, and the second syllable is closed with a double consonant. These add a lot of weight in terms of time spent uttering the syllables. Also the (f)r sound, the (g)r sound, and n sound are all sonorant and have a texture and weight almost like corduroy (fragrant might be finessed into velvet under the right circumstances). It’s the first word of the first line and the quality is really palpable.
Something to experiment with might be looking up names of spring flowers, and appeal to specificity to supply a word bank of potential syllables, a color pallet of sounds to choose from.
Similarly, the phrase “spring has sprung” is terribly heavy, like a branch has broken under the weight of melting snow. The phrase is so short, the line so dense, there is no breath of celebration in the length or meter of the line. There is no space or air. The -ing in spring has a little sparkle to it, but the evolution of the syllable spring into sprung buries it. -ung is a very loose, dark, subterranean syllable, loam-y. Spring has a tension to the syllable, like a child dancing on its toes waiting for a treat, like leaves that cant wait to push through to the light. But they must go in their proper places, in the proper order, with a suitable song.
... sprung... spring...
hear how putting sprung before spring changes the transition, from dark to light, like a plant emerging from soil to sun? Hear how the sound opens (instead of closes)? It is sprung reborn as spring.
Obviously “sprung has spring” makes no sense, so this is were creativity comes in, devising a phrase to frame the abstract artistry of word placement in a way that is still sensible. It is also an invitation for longer phrasing, which is also an invitation for some sort of space, music, lightness.
The phrase, the line, is measured in breath. Patterns of breath are the flavors of emotions. The poet controls the breath of the reader with phrase and line, and this breathing becomes a kinesthetic entrainment, where the flavor and emotion of the poem is transmitted nonverbally.
If you are very attached to ending with the phrase spring has sprung, i would try putting a line break after spring, to the breath and mind of the reader lingers on the brightness if the -ing, before moving to sprung:
Spring
has sprung.
Although this structure might suggest an unintended innuendo.
just in general, I would look at how densely the stressed syllables of the lines are packed back to back. Spring doesn’t have to be light and airy, but its worth considering.
Just stuff to play with, if so inclined. Good luck
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