Imperfection

This is a very personal poem to me, like almost all the ones I write. I choose to write from experiance because I think that way, the poem feels genuine, and the feelings are raw. =]

Anger engulfs her like an intoxicating smoke
Grabbing onto her, holding her, making her choke
This world will never learn how to stop spinning lies
Never learn to tell the truth straight in someone's eyes

Wishing she could learn from all her stupid mistakes
Wishing she could get away from all these hurtful fakes
Fake smiles, fake hellos, nothing seems real no more
Missing those days when you didn't walk out that door

You've turned into something she can no longer recognize
People hear her, saying things like, "at night she cries"
But what would you do if nothing ever went your way?
What would you do if you had no reason to wake the next day?

She tosses and turns; trying to make sense of this world
There's so much pressure, trying to be this perfect girl
So she finally gives up and let's everything go
Tries to escape everything she doesn't know

But something stops her, and tells her it's alright
She has to move on, be strong and fight
She raises her head high and with a straight face,
She does not trip; nor dare to fall from grace

Facing the world with a grimace resembling a smile,
Poise and maturity an adult's; although she's a child
Looks like a goddess but feels so broken inside
There's so much to show, but way more to hide

This reads more like song lyrics to me than an actual poem. The informality of it all is what makes it read like this.

They're very good song lyrics though. Overall I like it.

A comment on your intro.

I feel that one of the beauties of poetry is its capacity to refine raw emotion and edify it. See, emotion is personal. But you are writing this for a reader. You want the reader to sympathize with you. To do that, you must become the observer of your own emotion and not the feeler of it any longer. Because if you are simply feeling it, there is no need for poetry. The real feeling is always going to be more real than the secondhand account. Poetry's job is to take that small, personal feeling and distill it into a true, universal beauty. (That being said, the only universal is the local. So there's no need to talk about the cosmos or anything.)

That's all the critique I can give.

I told you I would come look at your work!

Anyway, like I said, I am a little bit of a meanie-pants when it comes to critiques, not because I'll verbally insult you, but because I have strict standards that are rather impossible. To me, poetry should make me want to cry and scream, "That's it!" Why? Because I have cried over poetry before because it was true that it just made me want to weep.

Now... on to your poem!

I know you said this is an extremely personal poem for you. And I can see why it is. It has a girl living in a "fake" world that she can't stand, and she feels like she's drowning in it, in a way. She is angry at it because she wants to live in "reality" but she is constantly surrounded by fakeness of the people she is around, of the place she lives in, and just of having to put up with them. In the ending, I think the last line sums it all, and I love it for its simplicity.

So this poem definitely has some truth as well, which is wonderful. Now, the next step is making it poetic enough to make me cry. I can see you made it rhyme. This is good--many good poems rhyme. But a rhyme doesn't necessarily mean that it's poetic. If I compare "Row Row Row Your Boat" to this poem, then you'll find that the latter is more poetic. What makes something poetic? Here's where everybody gets stuck on. I say poetry comes from a vivid use of language that bores itself in your brain. However, I may be wrong.

Anyway, there is a couple of things you can do to make this poetic. I can see your main idea, but I think you can rewrite this to be infinitely better. And I know, rewriting sucks, but! I think it would be awesome and you can make this really pretty and make me all teary and stuff, which would be good.

First of all! Address the reader. Make us CARE. Right now, we can see the girl's plight and feel sorry for her. That's the first step. Now we have to care. We have to see that she's teetering on the edge of everything and unsure. To do this, use imagery that the reader can relate to. In "Dover Beach," which is the poem I linked to you above (and you should totally read all of it since this is a poem very similar to yours), Malcolm Arnold does this by saying:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Isn't that awesome? Don't you love how he uses the imagery of the sea? He makes us see the sea as this vast, powerful being and then he turns it into something whose roar is full of melancholy and sadness. And seeing the sea turn from powerful to full of sadness is a transformation that tugs your heart strings and makes me want to cry. In fact, this was the poem that made one of the ladies in Fahrenheit 451 cry. Amazing, no?

You can do this too! I love your beginning imagery of smoke. Why? Because I get asthma attacks from smoke and I can totally relate to the choking feeling of the smoke and how you just sort of collapse and want to die from it. This puts action into your poem, connects it to the reader, and makes us care. It's one thing for us to pity the girl because she's living in a fake world. It's another when it's a life and death matter!

So just dramatize it! I realize you like things raw and genuine but... it doesn't feel raw at the moment. Dramatize it more, make it have a little more rough edges, and I think you'll get the effect you desire.

Good luck!

Thanks for the critiques =]
Alright Snoink will do.
The reason it's like this is because I originally wrote it for a poetry slam in my school and since I'm in grade 8, I was pretty sure my class wouldn't have understood it if I made it deeper. And I was right. When I presented it, no one really got it, even though the title should have been enough of a giveaway lmao. My teacher was like "Uh so Leelo's poem was about.. uhh.... what was it? Some deeper meaning? Anger?" I was like "... dude."

But I will most definitely rewrite it.
Thank you SO MUCH for that! Really helped ;]
And you are SO not a meany-pants! I found that helpful!

I LOVE IT!!! I think this is a great poem, and yeah it could be used as a song too. Most of my works are made for songs, bat are to short, the way I think I try to make my poems work is to sing them while writing them. This has some lines in it that resemble different short poems that I have done, but those are the ones I have not posted yet. So don't go looking for anything in my portfolio its very empty compared to my journals. The poem is very much like my own, and as a reader and a writer myself, I feel more connected to a fellow writer when they write something that connects with me or my poetry or my life, etc. This is why I am going to try and follow your line of work for similarities in mine, same as any others with feelings of my own.

Remember that you must write 2 reviews before you post your own work.

Here is what I thought about your poem.
I really liked it. It had a few forced rhymes and the flow was a little off at times, but it was a well written poem. I found a few little errors...

Fake smiles, fake hellos, nothing seems real no more
I would change it to this...

Fake smiles, fake hellos, nothing seems real any more.

People hear her, saying things like, "at night she cries"

This line seems a bit weird to me. It just does not seem to go with the flow of the rest of the poem. Try changing to something like,
Everyone hears her saying things;” At night, I cry." bad example I know, but just look at that a bit...

There were a few other errors with commas/periods, but the rest seemed ok.
Another thing to keep in mind, is you don't have to have every line capitalized.

Well done!

Josh

Hahaha... teachers are so funny! But whatever. And... an eighth grade class isn't exactly the best judge on what poetry is and what isn't, lol.

One of our best poets here, xanthan_gum, I believe, actually read one of her poems at a poetry reading. While everybody else's poem had garnered applause, hers actually got silence. She thought this was bad, but I think it's pretty cool to get absolute silence after a poem.

If you want, YWS has a radio show, and you could probably read some of your poems there. I'm sure you can get a better response there.

Aahah yes i know =]
But thanks again for your criticism. I've already started the second draft, as I guess you'd call it, and I'm almost done. =]
I'll post it up as soon as I'm finished, and you could critique it more. I actually changed it completely, leaving only the first stanza the same.

And about the radio show, that's pretty cool! I might try that after I get more practice and critiques. =]

Alright xbrokenxstar,
I love how personal the poem feels when you read it, and it obviously means an awful lot to you (especially in adolescent years of identity and whatnot).
However, when you write this kind of a poem, maybe rhyme isn't the best way of doing it, maybe just a stream of consiousness, as some of the rhymes seem forced and words are put there that were unneeded.

'Looks like a goddess but feels so broken inside

There's so much to show, but way more to hide'

Maybe change 'way more', to 'so much more'; but apart from that, this makes the poem and sums it up to a tee. Definately the most powerful lines for the narrative style you incorporated.

'People hear her, saying things like, "at night she cries"'- I agree with love2act4ever; it doesn't really fit with the rest of the poem and maybe make it more personal with 'At night, inside I cry.', which fits more with the ideology of the poem.
But overall, a powerful poem which, given some tweaking, has the potential to be pretty damn good

Keep writing!
Sday

Actually I posted a new version in Other Poetry, if you wanna see it.