|
9/11/2017 4:13:07 PM
|
|
Critique please. Is it poetry or song?
|
you use figurative language, metaphor and simile as an integral part of expressing the musing, so it is a poem. The rhyme scheme is very strong because the syllable count of the lines is very short, so the rhymes are especially noticeable that close together, so the very regular rhythm of the rhyme scheme creates a very musical/ lullabye sound. Also, your phrasing is very well matched with the line breaks, so the rhythm of the phrasing is heightened by the line breaks and this also adds to the musical quality. It could be put to music, but that doesnt negate the poetic use of figurative language.
|
|
9/12/2017 7:13:49 PM
|
|
Critique please. Is it poetry or song?
|
That's so beautiful that your grandmother passed on poetry to you, Judy! What a rare gift!
It sounds to me like what you're describing is your inner ear feels the rhythm and meter, and your words come out intuitively. There is no doubt in my mind this is the fruit of the work you did with your grandmother scanning poems for syllables and rhymes.
The short syllable counts were perfectly fine for the piece. The piece was expressing fruatration, agitation, a state of high energy. I think your inner ear naturally felt the tension of the short phrases.
With your highly developed inner ear, you might very well enjoy Mary Oliver. She doesn't use regular meter and end rhyme, but her poems are wraught from a highly refined awareness of prosody, repitition of rhythms, artful line break, instress, etc... She's highly accomplished, and the prosody of her poems is exceptionally lush and rich. Both reading her poems for leisure, or scanning them is always a joy. If you're not already a fan of hers, you might look her up. Her book "Dog songs" is a spiritual experience.
|
|
9/12/2017 7:17:48 PM
|
|
Critique please. Is it poetry or song?
|
Also! Remember the term Lyric Poetry exists because this form originated from the old greek lyric poets that performed their poems to music!
It seems more and more modern lyric poetry seeks to eschew its musical heritage, but this is its birthright. It is in its blood.
|
|
9/12/2017 7:53:30 PM
|
|
Tell me what you think.
|
If you'll forgive me, I think this work can be heavily edited down to simply three lines:
I've, stalked her.
I've, found her.
She comes.
I apologize, but I'm not sure what the work is meant to express. I don't think it has a romantic tone; It is sexual/ lustful in nature, but not erotic (in my opinion); and, this is conlfated into the phrase "I've, stalked her" which amplifies any feel of disquiet the reader may have had up until that moment.
The strongest aspect of the work is the author's willingness to be honest, and the author's fearlessness to share with the reader at an intimate level. However,
I do not think the author has considered that the poem is a space the reader occupies, and what the reader's experience of the poem might be. I found the poem disquieting.
If we wish to isolate a poetic musing, it would be the longing for someone one does not, cannot have. unrequited love. The ache. BUT - this is perhaps best expresses at a spiritual, romantic level. The incompleteness of ones life, the loneliness, the soul-tearning to be found.
When the ache for someone is expressed only at a sexual level, and is even so bold as to use the phrase "I've, stalked her" the author should not be surprised if he ends up sounding like a stalker.
I think there is a poem by John Keats "Blush Not So" that i think the author will enjoy and find edifying in addressing an erotic subject in an entertaining and romantic way.
Pablo Neruda also has excellent love poems, and odes to lovers that record the beauty of their body in a romantic and soulful manner.
|
|
9/12/2017 8:07:56 PM
|
|
Your Enemies
|
i think this work would be better written as a play. Vengeance requires the space for a plot, for justification, the human element.
the author may enjoy reading the play "Medea" by Euripedes, and consider writing something similar.
in the work as it is presently, there is no element to humanize the vengeance, or illustrate the enemies in disgrace. it alludes to a love for the victim of the enemies, and strongly conveys the passion of the speaker, but there is simply not enough space for all the elements to take leaf. This work is a seed best planted in the fertile soil of the theater. And, it is a strong seed!
edited by superlativedeleted on 9/12/2017
|
|
9/12/2017 9:28:07 PM
|
|
Let Loose Your Words of Critique
|
(in a perfect world)
A poem should never be an iron maiden, spiked
with the author's opinions, and shut
on the reader as punishment.
Contempt for the reader is not a solid foundation of a poem. In an ideal situation, a poem is a space, one the author creates, through prosody and imagery - for the reader, to share with the reader, as a friend might, the musing that has added to the quality of life for the author. A true poem is an act of love - not romantic love, but philosophical love. Hate poems happen, but these are only poems by virtue of technical skill. They are not Poetry - if you'll allow me to claim a philosophical distinction between a poem and what Poetry is.
Your poem wants for conversational phrasing. The language of The Bard and Christopher Marlow is an ornament best left on the still body of their work. Borrowing their language only holds one up for comparison to their masterful skill, and assigns oneself an impossible task. If you speak well, it's best to write as you speak. Much of prosody lies in the span of a breath, the relationship of phrasing to line breaks and caesurae, as well as lexical stress, morae, and the sonic qualities of alliteration and sometimes rhyme. I would focus on these elements, rather than attempt to resurrect the extinct species of Elizabethan English. Meter and metrics are immortal. They perdure beyond the change of syntax and coloquial language. Prosody is the nature of the ear itself, and even, in some way, the nature of the mind, as well. Do not distract yourself chasing golden apples, and in so doing miss the beauty of your living language. Steal a branch from the tree of life, and plant your own living golden apple tree! Study the old poets. Find what is immortal, and leave the dead where they lie. (No prosodic necromancy, young spell weaver! If one raises the corpse of Elizabethan English, usually it is not pretty - it usually staggers around rasping, grey and tattered, and devours the sound of the poem!)
The angst of your poem is made clear, as a presence, but the clarity of its purpose and imagery is lacking. It seems to be about the destruction of the natural world and mankind's apathy to the suffering it creates - however, saying so is somewhat a leap faith.
The parts you say clearly are: referring to the reader's Higher Power as an ophidian, that the reader should feel shame, and mother nature's tears. The rest is a bit like scuffed, unpolished silver - it has a satiny texture, but difficult to see anything clearly in it. But, that doesn't mean it is worthless or lacks potential.
My suggestion is... rewrite... as a sonnet. Not a Shakespearean sonnet... make the volta the first line of the sestet. In the octet, I want you to write 8 lines that viscerally capture mother nature's beauty, the color, diversity, the powers that shape the world, the balance of life itself, her fragility in the midst of her unyielding resiliance - no telling - SHOW... with images - focus on verbs and nouns, use adjectives only if necessary - mother nature's beauty is in her energy, her activity, and these are verbs - things acting, interacting, acting upon.
THEN - the volta/ sestet - using images show it being destroyed (have you seen the video of the tree-stripping logging machine?! utterly horrifying). MAKE NO ACUSSATIONS. Tell nothing. SHOW.
the beauty of the octet creates a spiritual space for the reader to experience nature. the volta shows the destruction. you won't neex to say anything. they will feel it. if they feel it, their eyes will open as wide as their hearts.
accusing and attacking the reader simply leaves them bruised and defensive.
good luck!
(remember - conversational phrasing... please, see Master Shakespeare back to his peaceful rest. He's done the world his good. To us he leaves the rest!)
|
|
9/12/2017 10:55:21 PM
|
|
Critique please. Is it poetry or song?
|
I've read many poems that are descriptive that succeed in altering my emotional, spiritual, or intellectual relationship/ awareness of reality. The poet is in a constant state of inner dialogue with reality/ the perception of reality, and the poem is a vessel to capture/ pass on a moment of awareness, direct experience of reality at a human level (at whichever level it occurred).
there are many emotional "poems" that do not add to the perception of the human experience. One might be tempted to say there are poems and then there is Poetry.
|
|
9/13/2017 12:09:32 AM
|
|
THE FEWLY APPRECIATED
|
Keith,
no. poems are like breaths. you don't ask if there should be another one. you just keep on going. shallow, deep, well or hurried, you just keep on going, and it gives you life.
so what if people don't comment? they could be snobs, shy, bored, lots of reasons.
they are excellent poetry manuals, especially by Mary Oliver and Ted Kooser.
If you wish to dig deep, classical poets wrote essays about poetry. it would take research, but they still exist. resesrch the leaders of the poetic movements, and see if they wrote essays or trestises about their style of poetry.
if nothing else, reading poems from skilled authors exposes you to their values. What did they write about? why did they feel it was important? who do they write about? what was their relationship to life that made them see existence that way?
grab a pencil, mark syllables for lexical stress, count syllables, weigh the morae, examine the relationship of breath and phrasing, of phrasing and line breaks punctuation and commas. if you mark out lexical stress, is there symmetry of sound, are there repeating patterns.
Underline consonance, circle assonance. Mary Oliver has a fantadtic section on the dynamics of each family of consonants and how they may be used skillfully.
If one is patient, with a pencil and thorough examination, each poem itself may teach something. For example, some of John Keats sonnets abandon regular iambic pentameter, but constrains himself to 10 syllables per line, 5 stresses per line, and the last foot of each line must be an iamb.
ALWAYS READ POEMS OUT LOUD. when you're studying them read syllable for syllable, don't rush through them, o ever emphasize the stresses to hear the pattern. Look for poets that use elegant meter - doesn't have to be regular meter, but beautiful meter - generally speaking, having more than 3 stressed syllables in a row is getting into dangerous territory unless there is an artistic reason for it. Even more than 2 stressed syllables back to back sticks out very boldly. building space and room to breathe in a line is important
anyhoo, I'm rambling now.
the answer is, you just keep going. poem = breath. keep breathing.
|
|
9/13/2017 3:45:56 PM
|
|
Enclosed rhyme
|
Hi Levi,
I like the sailing theme.
Fixing the "flow" has to do with prosody mechanics, which would require a longer explaination that might not be suitable for the Be Gentle forum, as it is more detailed.
The only criticism that is simple enough to leave here is, you need to take out "Captain, my captain, (i fear)..." This is an iconic phrase from Walt Whitman.
Thanks for sharing. Hope to see you in the High Critique forum to talk about flow.
|
|
9/13/2017 4:03:52 PM
|
|
Wavedance..Id love your feedback
|
ooooh, okay. hmmm it might be more effective if you put in articles, a conjunctuon here and there and take out some lines that slow down the pace:
Lace waves lap the tender shore,
brushing away layers of sand,
revealing something
raw in the salty waves that dance.
If you'd like me to explain my suggested edits, I'm happy to. I think this is closer to what you're going for, but not sure.
|
|
9/13/2017 8:00:29 PM
|
|
I live under a rock - Irma
|
Early last week I received a notification on my cell phone that "Irma is getting stronger" - I didn't realize there was a hurricane named Irma; I assumed Irma was an elderly woman with a terminal illness that the public had been praying for. I was like "Good for Irma."
Then... I found out she was a hurricane.
edited by superlativedeleted on 9/13/2017
|
|
9/14/2017 12:30:47 PM
|
|
Feedback plzzz! : My Perfect Home Zone
|
I think this has a solid foundation. I think the yearning for a righteous life is expressed in a humble way.
I like the last stanza suggesting the soul is to be a garden. I think this needs to be expanded visually through the entire poem. i think there are lots of opportunities for rich imagery. The prayers of each stanza are good, but there are no images. When you describe beautiful things in your work, you can imagine they are offerings to God.
A garden has many images that could be described beautifully.
I have a suggestion about structure. It may not work. It is just an experiment.
I think each idea should be given three stanzas. If the idea is filling someone with light, then the three stanzas would be a) using images of that have no light in their hearts b) use images of the garden of paradise, showing light filling things - leaves, water, flowers, and how it gives it life c) your stanza of prayer for you and your family to be filled with the same light.
this would create a strong dynamic between the stanzas - suffering, beauty, prayer.
you could do this for each idea of the poem. When you get to the line about the soul being a garden, all of the stanzas of the garden of paradise will be remembered, and they will flood into the prayer to be filled with blessings
so the thought of each section is balanced between the dark example, the garden, and resolved in the prayer. I guess this is somewhat similar to strophe, antistrophe and epode in greek odes? only, youd be doing it for each idea, instead of once for the whole poem.
in the stanzas giving the dark examples, it will be important to simply describe the images without saying they are bad or something is wrong. the images will speak for themselves.
so, that is my idea. i don't know if you will like it or not.
|
|
9/14/2017 9:40:29 PM
|
|
Critique please. Is it poetry or song?
|
Oh, gosh. I wasn't comparing your examples. I don't know who Henley & Frey are. I know Poe & Ginsberg.
I find your desire to quantify the value of Poetry through attendance and how much people pay for their seats disheartening.
I remember sitting in on a university lecture that a friend was attending and the guest speaker was a scholar of Shakespeare. His findings were that had Shakespeare been left to his own devices, no one would have heard of him beyond his own generation because he was completely without ambition. Had it not been due to the diligent propagation of his work by an ambitious and opportunistic publicist/ promoter, neither you or I would have ever known Shakespeare ever existed.
Similarly if Emily Dickinson's friends had not collated, edited, and promoted her works after her death, she may have passed entirely into obscurity.
Choose any famous poet and say "what if..." and they disappear from history.
Many of the mentors of very well known poets are entirely obscure except for the diligent academic and scholar. Popular poets are simply the shining peak of a mountain as the sun passes by into darkness.
Poetry exists as an abstract entity. You can attempt to quantify its excellence in units of empty chairs vs. empty wallets, and there would be a margin of truth to it, but to say that is the entire sum of Poetry renders it a whore.
edited by superlativedeleted on 9/14/2017
edited by superlativedeleted on 9/14/2017
edited by superlativedeleted on 9/14/2017
|
|
9/15/2017 2:00:17 PM
|
|
Critique please. Is it poetry or song?
|
The expanse of poets is an ocean; I'm just a salmon swimming out to sea, most familiar with the little nexus of streams I was born in.
My personal thiasus of poets are mainly corpses, their spirits living on in white sheets
of paper,
(My, how they still sing and dance!)
I prefer poetry that has a discernable or audible meter/ prosodic attentiveness, even if its free meter. A deliberate use of sound. I don't find this quality frequently in modern or contemporary works. A nylon tent suffices to keep out the wind and rain, and is useful when traveling light, but living in one would not be palatable.
|
|
9/15/2017 3:12:41 PM
|
|
How important is rhyming?
|
Rhyme (end rhyme, specifically) serves several functions in (old world) poetry and structured form. Metrically, it is a very audible demarcation of the end of the metric line, its the poetic eqivalent of counting to 10 on an abacus and resetting the beads and sliding a 1 bead up in the 10s column. Its also like the accented beat at the beginning of a musical phrase that marks the transition and balance of sound.
Its repetition also gives the ear something to expect, to anticipate, and the ear is pleased to its ordeliness.
It is also primarily a device that originates from poetry's origin in the oral tradition when poems were memorized instead of written down. the rhythm of the meter. but especially the rhyme serves as a support and mnemonic device to aid memorization.
in addition to being part of the oral tradition, many world poetry traditions are intimately tied with song, and many poems were performed with music. So, the rhymes and refrains added to the musical quality.
There have been studies that allege that even if you hear a melody once, there is a part of the brain that never forgets it. when the brain forms associations, it literally forms connections between brain cells; it physically happens. This is also why slogans and jingles frequently make use of meter and rhyme, because in some fashion it writes it into the brain in a way that prose simply isn't. If you're inclined towards superstitions and magic, this is also why spells use rhyme and meter, because the pattern acts on the mind in a tangible way and becomes stronger with repetition.
poems don't have to use rhyme; it's simply a device. in fact alot of contemporary poetry eschews end rhyme and fixed form, partly for creative freedom, and also to break away from the song like quality, and its association with an expired tradition.
|
|
9/19/2017 2:27:54 PM
|
|
opinions?
|
I'm not sure who the speaker is talking about. Up until the we get past the word excuses, it feels like a mother's love poem to her child (which i really enjoyed!) cherishing the naivtee of her toddler. After that i felt very confused, and it felt like it became an attack instead of a poem.
|
|
9/28/2017 3:19:51 PM
|
|
New at this...need some feedback on my haiku! :)
|
I think the concept is good. I think you're intuitively hearing/ feeling how the short lines/ line breaks interrupting phrasing slows down the pace of the read and creates a soft effect. Using short phrasing, or caesura even in longer lines can create a similar effect. For example:
At lunch, gazing on the clouds, light filtered through, and I wondered ---
what was on the otherside?
I think the poetic thought of your poem could be more strongly captured as a dynamic between the speaker and a sensual detail. It's simply a matter of style though. Some enjoy direct explanation; some enjoy a sensual riddle.
Good Luck!
|
|
9/28/2017 3:26:54 PM
|
|
New at this...need some feedback on my haiku! :)
|
Also, it's my understanding that authentic haiku deals with observational details of nature, frequently implying a season. I believe its cousin form Senryu is the form devoted to observations of human nature. If i understand correctly neither form is abstract in nature, but rather brief illustrations of concrete details that capture an insight into the nature of existence or human nature.
|
|
9/28/2017 3:31:36 PM
|
|
introduction
|
I need a link to your poem (s). when i click on your handle it only takes me to your forum profile. i only have access to your other forum posts. was unable to find you using the site search and no way to search by author
|
|
9/28/2017 4:30:23 PM
|
|
Emotional Literal Tomes - by - Bob Atkinson
|
The dance of the dilettantes hasn't many steps.
It isn't meant to be remembered, nor to cause upset;
it's simply meant to get us through, like breakfast spent in bed.
It gives us comfort just to know our words have just been read.
And if a noble Dour-Glower 'gins to shake his head,
that's just fine and dandy, we'll tuck him safe and sound,
and read to him instead ---
Once, I met a Dour-glower walking through an orchard
"How dare they call you apple trees;
you're only whisps of bark!
You haven't many leaves,
and you're little more than seeds!
You think you're special with your flowers,
yet I've never seen you fruit!" screamed the Dour-glower.
What could the saplings do?
All of it was true.
They couldn't drop their leaves,
nor tear apart their petals.
But as the Dour-glower took his leave,
the sun above shone true.
The soil of the field was just as sweet
and craddled every root.
edited by superlativedeleted on 9/28/2017
|
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
|