Logophile Mutilated & Keen

Criticism is welcome, I wish to improve. This is a writing forum, after all, is it not?


Logophile Mutilated

Where was she when the love of words
was obliterated
by an overdose of self-hatred?
Why did she let writing
escape her grasp, to be replaced by
Merciless Lashes against a tired body?
When was it that the pen,
once used to endow spirit upon a blank page,
changed its form?


Keen

the pen has become
r a z o r
s h a r p
etching Failure
into unworthy limbs

Logophile Mutilated
Interesting and yet it was short, powerfully short. I enjoyed it very much and it described everything with great beauty and detail. I enjoyed reading it.

Keen
This was also a very short and powerful poem which I don't really think was much of a poem, no offense. It was more like a sentence. No offense. I really did like it.

Both poems were very well written despite how short they were, images filled my head and the words flowed effortlessly off the page so great job and keep writing!!!

Thank you. I work on short poems because I find the longer I write, the more I lose focus and I like having a certain point in mind when writing, especially writing poetry.

More reviews are welcome and are much appreciated!

I like the shortness and compactness of the poems and ideas - I like what they said, I like what they attempted to say, and I'm here all the way in reading them. As a person who mainly writes short poetry or long poetry, and little in-between, I tend more on the short side - even with my reading, I tend to fall more on the short side, and these just call out to me.

Logophile Mutilated- I liked the imagery and the questions. I'm not sure about capitalising Merciless Lashes, because it seems like you're drawing more attention to that than to the subject of the poem, and dancing away from the tender topic you've tread upon.

Keen- Once again, some odd capitalisation (why is Failure capitalised?) but overall it's a very powerful poem. I feel like you could put razor-sharp into one line, and your spacing it out like that was something of an attempt to lengthen the poem by just a little bit, but it really works either way. I love the imagery, I love the words - especially "etching". Do you know how little I come across "etching" these days? This poem just calls to me, and I love it.

Hi there Horizon,

Criticism is welcome, I wish to improve. This is a writing forum, after all, is it not

Indeed it is, but if you're posting here it means you're looking for reviews therefore criticism is what you're going to get in one form or another

What you have here is a potential (though sterile) voice, smothered by oh-so stereotypical poems.

I'm all for expressing yourself or certain situations in poetry but when it becomes all questions that are trying too hard to be poetic and "deep" it tends to lose all appeal to me. Using words like "self-hatred" and "overdose" quickly make this dissolve into one of those emoh poems that honestly bore me to death. There's nothing original or interesting about them 99.9999% of the time. I can detect a potential voice fighting underneath it, but this kind of poetry smothers all originality of tone or voice because it's all been done before and many times. Save me the boredom and take this in a new direction and expand your voice, don't thrust it into the easiest thing to talk about.

find something different, this is a big beautiful world with a million and one things to talk about. Not just teenage romance, and desperateness of a situation. Though those are two powerful themes, you have to learn how to handle yourself with words in a certain manner before you even stand a chance of tackling them and getting something good out of it. And chances are, once you've settled into a specific set of personal standards for poetry, you don't even want to go back to the introducing themes of teenage romance or suicidal tendencies.

Next, and probably a valuable tip if you want to separate yourself from this type of beginner poetry: Using self-explanatory words in your poetry significantly shortens your poem and drains any emotional attachment your reader could possibly have. If you don't leave room to paint a picture of, for example "self-hatred", you remove that connective aspect between the words and your reader. A reader thrives off slowly being brought into a scene, a state of mind, a feeling with comparisons to things they can imagine. Is self-hatred like a rotting fruit? Okay, paint that for me - what does the fruit taste/smell/look/feel like. It could be anything really, but don't expect me to feel any sympathy for any set of words strung together without it appealing to me and my senses.

Best of luck and if you have any questions, feel free to toss me a PM!

Kamas

@ancientforever - Thank you for the feedback. As with your signature, poetic license is my one true love and as such I like using it whenever I write poetry. I feel as though capitalizing words brings the right sound - the right harshness to them - like I wanted them to have, and the lengthening of "razor sharp" is meant to bring emphasis to the transformation from pen to something more harmful... I realize this isn't very proper grammar, but to me poetry is about expression and that is what I felt expressed my sentiments best. BUUUT that isn't to say that I'm not going to take your comments seriously and into consideration - you did make valid points about the failure to stay on topic and whatnot. So thank you.

@Kamas -

Criticism is welcome, I wish to improve. This is a writing forum, after all, is it not?

Indeed it is, but if you're posting here it means you're looking for reviews therefore criticism is what you're going to get in one form or another

I... don't understand what you mean by this. I... said... criticism is welco... oh, never mind. I'll just get on with it.
I do agree that emo poems are way overdone, and that's why I tried to stray from the topic by speaking instead of one... person's conversion from a writer to something else, how suddenly one day the words didn't come anymore and s/he turned desperate trying to find them again. I wrote this because it's something I've genuinely been through. And to be honest, your criticism is absolutely valid and I don't mind one bit - but I guess I don't understand where you got "teenage romance" from. Like, at all. Never is it mentioned in any form in either poem.
Anyways, so I'm going to admit that your criticism kind of made me not want to read further because for the first two paragraphs, you barely spoke of how I could improve - but the third paragraph is, in fact, helpful and so thank you for that.
AAAAAAAAAAH YEAH. More critiques welcome, as always.

Hi Horizon, I was using teenage romance as an example of something overused in poetry. Not as pertaining to your poetry.