Young Writers Society

revising, will be up again soon...

Hey,
Thank you so much for requesting a review! Unfortunately I don't think this will be too helpful because I really enjoyed it. I loved the imagery and the flow of how things went. I am a little confused on that last line and what the meaning is, but as well I am not compelety sure I know who James Dean is either.

PM me if you ever need anything reviewed,
Tiffany

I really like this poem, but I'm going to focus what I didn't like.

I'm not a big James Dean fan (all I know is that he was in Rebel Without a Cause and died in a car accident), so the first few stanzas were lost on me, which is why I feel like the beginning was a bit long-winded. It didn't really add very much to the poem, besides that he was a reluctant, beautiful movie star. But that comes full circle; if you didn't really know about James Dean, then you really wouldn't fully understand the first 2 stanzas. I'm not really sure how to fix this, or if it needs to be fixed; to fix it would mean a break from your writing style, but the people who are going to read this are already going to know James Dean, so the description of him will be understood.

Also, it's a bit jarring of a cut, to move from a description of Dean to the night of his accident. I'm not exactly sure how it fits into the rest of the poem, either. I understand that you want to make this more of a tragedy by having as this huge, handsome star in a major accident, but it feels jarring and unnecessary. You have such a good description of the accident as being horrific, that the 2 stanzas don't add anything. I feel like they shouldn't be a part of this poem; they're good, and you should keep them or have them as their own, separate poem, but I don't like them here.

Grammar Nazi time. To start, the fourth stanza needs commas. It takes a second or 2 to understand what words are together, which is confusing to the reader. Although, now that I'm think about it, it's a good way to convey the confusion of being in an accident, and the lack of commas conveys the speed of the Dean's car. Forget I brought that up; good job there. But you should be capitalizing the beginning of sentences at the very least. Having all lower case letters gives this calming, indifferent feeling to the poem, as though this isn't important enough of an event, and it's a major contradiction to the title "American Disaster".

Other than that, it's a perfect poem in my eyes.

Hello there Blackbird!

Here as requested.

First of all, I just want to thank you for the request and hope I could be of a help. Now on to the reviews.

In my opinion, seeing all those letters in a lower-case arrangement is somewhat uncoordinated and off beam. Really, you should capitalize the first letter of a sentence but not in every line in your poem though. Also, you've mistakenly dispersed punctuations here.

For example:

Jostling along a sun-scorched highway,
thin red needle slicing upward, upward (Now, I don't think it's correct to place the word 'upward' twice in this line)
as he bounces in the seat like a ragdoll, (You might want to make a new sentence here, so just capitalize 'as')
teeth glinting like mints and his laugh serrated.
The Santa Anas peel away his layers.

The format of this poem is okay but wouldn't the poem look better if there are some rhyming, meters and many more? I mean, I have to say that I very much like the subject and the concept behind this piece but just like I said, use some syllable patterns or something; just so the poem could be twisted a bit. Plus, if ever you're dedicating this to a particular person, I say be specific. Being specific to the point that we, the readers, don't have to Google him or search him in Wikipedia. Who really is that person? his inmost identity or something that I could freely know without asking for any source that'll support this poem.

Let's go to the good things. Spellings! I see they're all spelled correctly. Well I know it's the most basic thing in a poem, but some poets just don't bother correcting their misspelled words. Also, you've maintained the consistency of your tenses here; they don't jump all over the places, which is a good thing. And since the voice in this poem in my point of view, is somewhat emotional and dark, I want to say that you've managed to impress me especially at the last part.

So I agree with 'Thething' here. It's a good thing that you're considering his suggestions but I could sense that you've only tended to delete the first two stanzas and edited the last lines. There are like many things that you need to reconsider especially if really want to make this poem good.

All in all, I say this piece has potential. I know you've much more to offer right here, so let your mind open it! Haha. Hope I helped and PM me for questions.

Keep writing!

Peace out!

~yuri

Hello! And I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get this review up!

(from the original version) First impressions - please figure out what you're doing with your punctuation! I'm not following right now, and it's making it much more difficult for me, at least, to get beyond it. Especially since I'm not sure if some of the effects are intentional, or why you're using fragmented phrases and not always complete phrases, and standard punctuation marks that aren't following standard punctuation rules. If it's purely a stylistic element, than I do not like it, but that's pure opinion, as long as you're aware of what you're doing.

Beyond that! I have one basic question for you - what point are you trying to get across in this poem? Anything I say beyond this is in relation to this question, and how you can best get your point across. Also, anything I say will be based on my interpretation of this question, so keep that in mind, too, please!

Ok! You've edited since I've started! Ha, ok. And from the start - punctuation is much better!

A thought on this line, "The Santa Anas peel away his layers." - if you do "peeling away at his layers" you'll set up a nice parallel structure in the stanza (and the same applies to "bounces" a few lines above"), which gives the entire stanza more energy. Also, should "Santa Anas" be possessive? It doesn't sound quite right, but I could just be looking too hard at it. Or! You could just avoid the issue and say "Santa Ana peels", though I'm not sure that works.

My big issue with the revisions I see is that you're adjective (or just description in general) heavy, which I find incredibly distracting and not conducive to making a point - then again, I am a fan of concise, and the shorter the better! So take that with an extra grain of salt, but! If you don't mind me using a stanza as an example?

In a breath: tires screech, glass shrieks,
buzzards swoop, the needle freezes - falls.
A cry dies, replaced by incandescent fume's
toxic rush.

All I did here was rearrange your words to pack the most punch, and trim anything I saw as "fat" - you may disagree, and I'd encourage you to! But just know why each and every word is necessary, and constantly ask yourself if you absolutely need. And then be prepared to defend each word choice!

Overall! I think you do have something here, you just have to keep pushing yourself and your words! On a final note - I think you do have some really great lines in here, like "the hollow space between each heartbeat", but it feels like you're stretching each stanza too far, possibly for the sake of form - each stanza has five lines, and in some, it's too many lines! I'm positive someone will disagree, but I'd rather see you tighten your words than stretch them to meet a format - especially since I think you're better off sticking to free verse in this case. If nothing else, you can always claim that you wanted the visual presentation of the poem to reflect the chaos of the life you're writing about

Thanks for an engaging read!

Bek