Young Writers Society

Not once upon a time,
but a time very like,
I saw a line of business men going to work in London town.

Everyday they came
and everyday I watched;
their black ties straight as hanged men.

With black suits
and black hats,
they marched from Tube stations, convicts in a chain gang.

Not once upon a time,
but a time very like,
I stood in Oxford Circus and watched them dance the conga to their waiting taxis.

Interesting to say the least and I had a nice mental image of a bunch of business men dancing to music on a New York street..made me smile, oh and by the way to me interesting is good so keep it up friend

This made me think. Maybe I was thinking about buisness men dancing, and for some some reason I pictured their ties having a design of a person on them, but it made me think. I liked how this was worded, so simple yet descriptive. I liked the element of fun that this had.

Ello there, Lord Twitington!

You open up this piece with a very quick gimmick that you revisit later on, but that’s really all it serves as—a gimmick that makes the title snarky. So the real content of this poem consists on lines 3, 6-9, and 12. So that’s six lines of legitimate content in this poem that gets your point across out of twelve. Fifty percent can be cut without losing your message, and I think that’s the first problem here! But let’s enter the content itself and see what you have simmering here.

Miserable men in black suits, hats, and ties who follow a routine every day. A speculative narrative about working-class society, or maybe just the men trying to make it in working-class society. So you have these men who have probably given up on dreams to support families. You have men who may be trying to claw their way to the top. And you have men who will die soon. There’s so much that the reader can read into this poem that you haven’t written, and it’s almost as if you’ve given us a diving board into a pool of thoughts instead of giving us the pool of thoughts itself. Does that make sense?

So to begin with, I think you should pick a focal point. Pick a man and get into his head as he dances this conga waiting for a taxi. Crack open his thoughts and give them to us so we can feel what he feels. Anguish, misery, ambition—they’re all things that you have waiting at your fingertips, but it’s as if you’re a tad afraid to tap them just yet.

I know that this was a short review, but I hope it does help, or at least give you a starting point for this piece. I’ll be pleased to review again once/if you’ve edited in the future.

-Lumi

I'm here, as requested!

And I'm feeling quite a bit of nostalgia on this one. I think I read this when you first posted it and never ended up getting to that review. That being said, its familiar which is good, so hopefully I'll be able to give a decent critique on this!

In any case, I'm going to start by trying to understand this piece. And I think, to a degree, I kind of have a basic understanding but am a bit unclear. Which makes me like this. In fact, it makes me like this a lot more than I can really put into words simply because of the fact that this is so subtle and yet the images are so unsettling that it makes you draw your own conclusions. Its so short and you use your words so well that I can't help but admire this.

That being said, I love the irony of this. I love how you explain this world away as if juxtaposing it with fairy tales, which is what I got from it all. And that's kind of a very whimsical way of looking at things. Probably why I like your poetry so much. Everything appears to be looked at through a pair of rose-tinted glasses or beer goggles. In this case, its kind of like 'child-glasses'. The irony of it is through the roof, which I respect and enjoy.

I particularly liked these lines;

Not once upon a time,
but a time very like,

They worked with your idea well and the repetition between the first and last stanza was delightful.

All in all, this was a win in my books. A big thumbs up. You captured something really interesting with this so being too overly critical with it will only get this so far. I feel that changing it would worsen the childish irony and I don't suspect you'd want that. Of course, that is if the ideology is somewhere along those lines. If not, maybe the subtlety is too much.

~Walker