lovenotes

Thanks to everyone who helped! ^^

Spoiler

Based on my L poem from this:http://www.youngwriterssociety.com/topic76725.html

Lovely notes littered the floor like forgotten rose petals, wrinkled and
torn from their sheaths. Looking down, I knew that you hadn't meant for me to see them:
they had the markings of a secret and they felt coarse against my hands,
like something I might regret, something that I wanted to deeply inhale and nestle away in my lungs.

I let my eyes wander across your treasure, and the language made me smile,
archaic syllables tacked on the end of verses so unlike the
person who had written them. But, I could make myself imagine you reading them aloud,
hunched over your notepad with that familiar scowl on your face, sounding out each word
in hushed, fervent tones to the dark you liked to sit in.

Loops and elegance interrupted the occasional honest/earnest scrawl, on and off and on
again with words like "doth" and "thou"-- sometimes, you just couldn't seem to make your mind up.
There were erratic capitals, scripted and gilded and thrown out in the midst of
clumsy sounds and meters, and I smiled at your indulgence in eloquence,
the pitter patter of letters against letters, scraping out declarations of adoration and lost causes.

It wasn't until the page second to last that I saw your smudges, dusty with ink and
something like tears that I found your true thoughts, tucked in the spaces and line
breaks, in all the empty little parts that almost seemed forgotten.
It was the things missing that made the difference, the words you left
out and the lowercases--

Love was capitalized. Loss was too.
Lacy words, I thought. I wondered why you didn't capitalize hope.
It seemed so lonely.



Thanks for reading!

Hades' wife! You have a lovely poem here. I think the best part are the last two stanzas -- especially the last! But the second to last stanza kind of hushes the poem from the amused feeling that it is. It's kind of like listening to someone tell a romping story about something funny that happened, and then the voice kind of hushes when that person recollects that the story's characters are no longer alive... if that makes sense.

I'm not sure I like "Lacy word, I thought" bit. The extra l sound kind of makes it humorous, and I like how it sombers up.

I'm not quite sure I like the first stanza. It took a while for me to get into it. When I realized they were a secret, I was interested, but I didn't really care about how they looked like petals, as in the first line.

Hope that helps!

There will be a review for this sometime soon.

WOW! i just got chills. Fantastic ending to a wonderful poem. I felt like i was on a rollercoaster! Each word was the correct word for the situation and I wouldn't change anything. The careful playful placement of "pitter patter" that kept the poem moving to the thought enducing shame of "hope and loss". Fantastic! I hope this gets featured because everyone should see how amazing this truly is. Another home run i would think Perse!

Hi Penezeka, a review as promised.

This is worse then the last poem I reviewed. As lovely as the people you get advice from (and no offense to them), stop working with them. You can listen, consider, but do it on your own. Poetry becomes a mess when there are too many people working on it. To be honest, poetry is one of the loneliest arts because quickly there are just too many cooks in the kitchen. Next time, write something without any input from anyone else? Just to see where you stand on your own.

This becomes quite the mess of ideas, tones, voices and images. I'm left unsure of what you (the persona) is feeling, I'm actually nearly voided of any feeling at all. It's like eating something sticky, cold and tasteless. I'm not going to go in-depth with this review, because to be honest there's not much too say, it's simply a congregation of pretty words that look like they were fished out of the dictionary, blalant phrases, too many ideas without a backbone and a really really tired story.

I'm going to address your writing in general instead, because really I can kind of see where I was at not very long ago (except my stuff was morbid dear god). You're depending too much on other writers. They can be really helpful, but you become voiceless and you won't get any emotion onto paper. Rely on them for prompts, opinions and critiques. I don't know how much they've contributed to you writing this poem, but when writing a poem I personally think you gotta go out in the dark on your own.

There's not much more I can tell you until you turn your computer off, shut everything out and write something and really think about it, take an idea that you find personally challenging, or something that happened to you. Post it without revisions etc. From those poems are where you can really improve and see where it's lacking. You're better then a lot of poets we see on the internet, and you clearly know it. Now instead of leaning on others to produce this work, step out on your own. Nightshade said something interesting, the fact your churning out so much poetry you lack an emotional connection, which I think relates to this. Take a breath, really find an idea you love and really thought about, then write it without looking at other work, talking to other people whatever. On your own in the dark.

That's all I got to say.

Kamas

Spike. Let’s hit it. (also, I lied [re: end of this review])

To begin with, I’m unsure how I feel about the use of ‘forgotten’ in line one—your image here is very specific and portraitesque; given that, I think that you can do much better, given your touch of language, to portray these rose petals as something more than just ‘forgotten’. In fact, as a general rule of thumb, try to avoid using adjectives (I’m preaching to myself) in images that don’t particularly lend a great hand to powering the image forward. Does that make sense? Also, there’s something magnificent about the pairing of ‘wrinkled’ and ‘torn’. Good choice.

Try playing around with ‘looking’ as it doesn’t give a master’s touch to the phrasing. In line three, delete the word ‘they’ because it puts a hiccup in your flow. Line four has much of the same problem in the use of ‘something that I wanted’—it’s just a tad bit of a hindrance. Your call, really. I think you can do better than ‘nestle’ in the same line: aim for something darker, as that seems to be the focal point of that particular phrase.

The next stanza requires a bit of quoting to give my suggestion. Just a tad bit of formatting change in the first two lines, and I think you’ll like the outcome.

I let my eyes wander across your treasure, and the language made me smile;
archaic syllables were/other verb tacked on the end of verses so unlike the

Along with this change, I suggest changing ‘person’ to something less vague. The voice you’ve built thus far—not only in the narrator, but in the author of the letters—can come through in just this one word. Following that, the second half of line three is a bit wonky to me. The use of the conditional word ‘could’ doesn’t set well in this particular place, as it talks about her ability rather than what she actually did. Show vs. tell and all that jazz. The remainder of this stanza is quite well-done, other than one thing:

dark you liked to sit in.

I can hark at this in two directions:

1. The English Major Direction—you ended with a preposition (but I don’t care much about those)
2. ‘sit’ seems so awkward in the presence of such strong verbs and adjectives. Give me more.

Stanza three is a teenie tiny bit floppy for my tastes. It seems to have an identity crisis. To begin with, loops (regarding cursive) and elegance (regarding wording) give this stanza such an air of pretension…it’s very unlike you. Second, choose between honest/earnest because slashes are not words and shouldn’t be used as such. If you want to give scrawl a double-meaning, find a gimmick to pass it through or just cut one like I would. “on and off and on again” makes it feel playful, and that’s fine if that’s what you were going for.

Replace ‘words’ with something more poetic since it’s quickly followed by King James himself. Jumping down, ‘pitter patter’ clicks a wrong key with me due to its playfulness. I would suggest replacing the two instances of ‘letters’ with actual letters—two letters which make pitter-patter sounds when clicked together.

The rest of this stanza is fine. The next stanza has one predominant quirk, and it’s in the grammar of the first sentence. You use ‘that I saw/that I found’ in the same sentence without a break. Fix it, please. The rest of the stanza is perfect.

And in the end, I agree with Snoink that ‘lacy’ needs to go—it’s too playful for the somber ending.

I really loved this, Spike. Keep flaunting your handle of words, and be sure to listen to the good more than the bad. Keep in mind that you post your work on YWS to be critiqued and helped, and not judged for quality. Also keep in mind that each artist will take influence from every voice they hear, every word they read, and every image they see. As such is true, seeking the help of others is perfectly natural and should not be condemned. So after you write something, do as you wish with it.

I do think it’s good practice, though, to edit before posting here—it shows you care and demonstrates a desire to better yourself. But, of course, that’s my opinion and cannot be validated just by my own claims. Try out what works for you because this is art, and only the artist can ultimately be vindicated through their own art.

-Lumi