Young Writers Society

Nice poem. Kind of cliche, but that's fine from time to time as long as you try to have a fresh perspective.
Your site mentions that you played piano for some time, and this poem indeed felt more like the lyrics to a song, maybe the refrain. (The actual words remind me of Rise Against and Linkin Park.)

I can't really critique it as a poem, but if you were trying for a sound like I mentioned above then you really succeeded. =]

Cheers JRS! Thanks for asking =) As the poem is short, I won't go saying my opinion for each stanza and jump to 'Overall' to say what I think.

To be honest, this feels kind of philosophical and I like philosophy, so I found this poem interesting at the very least. As ilyaeelz said, it's kind of cliche, since many of us actually know the meaning of these lines from other sources, but then again, the effort in this poem is evident and makes it worth more than saying stuff like 'I already know that'. Well, you see, one of the nice things in this poem that made me like it is that it has rhythm, words flow well. With a good flow, it's easy to read and enjoy a poem; I pretty much believe that works for this poem. I can't tell that this poem is bad, but I'd have to say that I'm not a fan of stanzas where first sentence repeats the whole time. I had times when in my poems something repeated too, I was told by a few people that I should change it or at the very least use a synonym or a sentence with similar meaning. Can't really describe it, but it's like that for me too, that when I read a poem without something repeating often, it just leaves a better impression or something like that. You don't have to take this seriously if it goes against your mind a lot, but it's what I honestly think.

There's not much to nit-pick in this poem, so I'd have to admit there's nothing much for me to say. I wish you good luck at writing poems and I'm looking forward to see what you come up with next =)

Best wishes,
Kyou

J.R.S wrote:

The Things You Never Knew

It's not who I am, but what I do, that decides for you,
All the things you never knew. This caught my attention just because it is so true. A good start.

It's not who I am, but the mistakes I make,
That help you with which path to take.

It's not who I am, but my miscues,
That you so often choose to abuse. I don't like this stanza as much. Not only does the ending no longer rhyme (not that not rhyming is bad, but it threw me off). The rhythm also changed. Instead of ending on a high note you end on a low note. That probably didn't make sense. Let me see.. before you always ended the last line of a couplet with an accented syllable, but in this stanza you end with an unaccented one. Or at least that is what I got form it.

It's not who I am, but what you choose,
Is all that you ever knew. I would like to see a BANG at the end, but this poem seems to just dwindle off. You just repeat what you have already said in a different way.

Overall I think this is an O.K. poem with some cliche parts. It could use improvement and editing, but not really any expansion. P.M. me if you have questions about my babbling.

Hope I helped,

A. S.