Yellow

Wonderful poetry.

Your writing has personality.

It is very abrupt and temporary, which is a good thing, but you might consider tempering it with something concrete, something the reader can hold on to throughout the entire piece.

Your writing is defined by your style, which is in my opinion the very best kind of writing. The challenge is to avoid losing your audience in the immediacy of the details and the images you are using.

These are very engaging, beautiful pieces, but they are a little overwhelming.
Don't lose your rapid, high-impact voice, just give your reader a platform to stand on while they absorb everything.

Babanuuk

Hello.

While looking over this thread, I had an idea I thought I'd share.
It seems the more I read of your poetry, the more I realize they aren't poems at all. At least, not in the traditional sense. Collectively, they are more like a novel. An intensely personal, gripping novel in a never before seen dynamic.

Maybe you would consider building a collection, filling the spaces in between, and reintroducing the poems as a complete story... a memoir of sorts.

In any case,
your poetry is fabulous.
It never seems quite finished, but I suppose a writer is never done. Each new poem picks up where the last one left off.

Sensational work,
BABANUUK

sanddollar

fast, easy tidewaters
nudging up against the thighs of the dunes
and pulling away, a gray, fogsocked game of
hardtoget.

abandoned feathers and heavy, yoked whips
of kelp and beer bottles brown and one-eyed.
the musselbeaks on the rocks black
as plague sores.

the moon's envious leer,
a mouthful of stars, unnamed, like
stillborns. lazy, spreading starfish
adorn the rock surfaces

and anemone with wild tireless arms
waving, sucking, a puckered mouth,
green pallet caved in like toothless gums.
a fresh stomach – childless.

we walk along the sandbars
and watch the stifflegged seagulls
squat and squabble like fishwives.
the old charters of long departed men and women

scribed in the sand's flat chest under
nebulas of blue starlight, descendants that
prick the skyline, like berrythorns.
and you talk to me about the sanddollars underfoot:

pale, broken faces,
leftover coins from some ancient,
timeswallowed generation.

You have a beautiful way with words. A very conscious and observant writer and I enjoyed reading the poems that I did, particularly the first one. My only critique is to probe at the emotion hiding behind the imagery in your poetry. You're poetic, and your words are certainly capable of sustaining themselves throughout the entire poem. However, there seems to be a lack of...feeling throughout. As an example in this last poem:

"scribed in the sand's flat chest under
nebulas of blue starlight, descendants that
prick the skyline, like berrythorns.
and you talk to me about the sanddollars underfoo"

Perhaps this is a vague statement, but when "you talk to me about the sanddollars underfoo," as first person, how does the narrator react to the conversation? What is going through their conscious?

Just some thoughts! However, keep up the good work and I look forward to reading more from you.

windmills along the columbia

single-footed
standing like white cranes
against the blue, whispered horizon
alabaster and slender, like mothers dead in childbirth
soundless against the bald forehead of the hills –
those otherwordly sentinels.

harvesting, sweeping
longsuffering godesses, spooling up the clouds
and the summertime
through their solitary fingers
like unkempt hair.

mean, sour valleys fold upon themselves
and anoint the spinning heads who
stretching their hands skyward in some kind of
old, empty plea for rain
trolling the wind, the wind,
the tampered breath and the lipless faces

they sprout from the scrubland
like strange, sunless flowers:

emigrants
displaced.

A/N: Different from the last few. Feels like a reversion. But it's a potent feeling of mine, and I wanted to write something with feeling. This is a poem about not wanting change.

homeostasis

i remain undeveloped
regardless of your chemicals & your
red eye, staring & searching,
like a jealous wife.

you fold me, tampering.
quiet mechanisms, open doors, the slickheaded
screws & the thoughts removed like tonsils.
somehow, if i stay completely still,

unshuttered, closed up tight
your alterations make no difference.
i keep going & going
like an irrational number

repeatingrepeating, cycling
(if i stop & listen, then the careful
architecture described around me
will come undone, like a fancy hairdo)

i cannot grant you access, i cannot.
you are malignant, creeping,
i forget you, i lose you purposefully
& the memories, too

(the loyal evenings at the park
sitting on the playstructure & talking about
god & life, the night full of
unnamed stars & a starving moon

scooping the night like a pale gourd-dipper,
or the airplane & the bald, cheerless peanuts
lined up on the tray-table & your hand next to mine,
foreign & impossible as an implant

or the hot morning & the sun breasting the horizon,
rising like a baby's cry in the next room,
milkless & bored, & your unwashed hair
spread across the outofshape pillows)

i banish them. all of them –
stasis in the darkness
maintenance & consistency
i remain unchanged, unwilling.

and you fade like plush.

canning peaches

plush of a peach
like the abdomen of a honeybee
lisps under my fingertips
pitted oracle, I pick it and the stem snaps
and the whole morning stands still –
dewy-eyed, fractured.
the treelimb bobs up and down
like a curtsying maiden.

line them up on the cutting board, outside.
the hot mason jars shuttled around like transparent bishops
with their dislocated jaws, hungering skyward.
water on the boil and the peaches plopped in
one by one, where they float
an armada of stubbly, red faces
staring up. the water consumes them
like coughdrops.

transition:
a pilgrimage from on the boil to on the ice
they nod and swell and sweat among the shrinking cubes
like bankrupt men, and their skins loosen
like collars on a hot day,
so that when you take them out of the pot,
their fuzzy slips molt off, scalped.
yellow nakedness.

hot and slippery, you cut them with a knife
and they pry them open to reveal a
pit, twisted and brainy, rutted like an intelligence.
sticky lobotomy, a quieted patient.
two halves lie with red calderas and you sneak two whole peaches
away from the table and eat them and the juice
winds down your lips and chin and wrists and all the way down
your shirt and elbows.

butchered peaches in a mason jar,
you slide them into shelves (stomach
full of soft, digesting fruit)
and the tree outside in the yard is childless
as a barren woman.

Kylan, my dearest, darling-est moonblossom. I'm so sorry I've neglected this thread, but just for you I'm going to stay up a little later [it's already 4am] and review a couple of these poems, and come back for the rest later.

morning over cold tea

our unspoken words hang in the air like papal smoke

So I understand that you like the church imagery, and that this fits with the reference to church bells later in the stanza, but I really don't see the necessity of describing the smoke with 'papal'. Maybe a different adjective would work better and add something more to the poem, but to a reader like myself, papal seems like an empty adjective that adds nothing to the image.

or the stolen, horny glances, excited and staticky

Also, I'm not sure that you need to explicitly say 'horny' here. The tension is clear with the rest of the words you use, Kylan, and that's something to be proud of -- you really don't need to break the flow of this section with something so expository.

Overall, though, I thought this poem was beautiful and you did an excellent job of bringing out the tension that was never stated in the scene but only lingered there. You traced it well. After reading through it, however, there was an earlier line that I think is rather unnecessary:

a headhunter's shriveled prize.

I don't see that it serves a purpose, unless I'm just missing it.

mourning over cold tea

I'm sure you're already aware of this, but it was a brilliant choice to use the word 'snared' in the opening of this poem to set the tone. It was clear that in this pair of poems, this second one would have a darker tone [though the first was already sad], and you handed that to us right away.

dress spreading
around her like a pandemic.

Also, that simile was absolutely beautiful, and it works especially well with the other scientificky similes you've been using in these poems.

pale face, moondusted with cosmetics and grace
-ful abalone lips, her eyes downcast, like shillings
in a wishing well.

So this is description, and you want the description of the girl to be soft, but I think you may want to make an effort to have some portion of it also fit with the new, more sinister tone. In the next part, you manage to keep the darkness in the description of the tea, but it's absent here, and I think you should remedy that.

anonymous in the foglight as secret admirers.

Again, something more sinister than 'secret admirers'? Unless, of course, you're intending to keep some soft images in, then perhaps you might want to let it be, but I think that the concrete words you use are soft enough to allow you to add another touch of dark here.

misplaced, he is a fine memory.

I am unsure if you need this as the ending. It is clear that he is but a memory and that he is not coming from the third to last stanza, so why repeat it? Feel free to leave the poem with the brilliant imagery of the coral and the sun [though I think you could find a better way to describe the sun -- something white and pale?].

Overall, I really like the pairing of these poems together. The tones contrast each other beautifully, and though the first one was already disintegrating, the second is much darker and appropriately so. One thing that takes a bit of thought is considering the story line, which /could/ be made clearer, but doesn't need to be -- imagination can take care of the time between the poems.

sanddollar

abandoned feathers and heavy, yoked whips
of kelp and

I don't like the heavy imagery of the kelp. I admit that kelp is heavier than the other objects you were describing anyway, but it seems way too intense for the context. Rather than whips, something like strands. The comparison to yokes weighs on the reader like the actual yoke weighs on the ox. xP

and anemone with wild tireless arms
waving, sucking, a puckered mouth,
green pallet caved in like toothless gums.
a fresh stomach – childless.

And none of this stanza sits right with me. It seems, at times, overdone [for example, the arms], and at other times, completely out of the ball park of what I would expect for a description, so much so that it doesn't really make sense [for example, the stomach]. I don't know what to say, but you might want to consider revising it.

The rest of this poem, however, is still lovely. It's a great snippet into the images of the beach with that Kylan-touch of personality and personal-ness that makes the image just that much more lasting. Great work, Kylan.

PM me if you have any questions!

-Hannah-

gardening

hard, green tomatoes hang bald and pious
like the sick eyes of a dying man
I wait for them to ripen, to blush,
shy under the leaves which offer themselves, like royal hands,
just like I waited for you.

frill-headed carrots plugging the ground
and potatoes subterranean, slumbering, unready
like betrothed daughters in their mildewed sleep.
I sit among the hook-nosed peppers
and the radishes gather around me
red as waterless planets.

I think
I spy your eyes
among the cornstalks, tall and hipless
austere and shaking their tasseled papooses.
lined, precise, the stalks are ordered like
letters given in a spelling bee. they are hiding you up,
whispering, shhh-ing
librarians.

I remember you planting the strawberry plants
your papery, skittish hands patting down the earth
and your stray hair sun-blessed and white.
straw hat and the zeppelin clouds
you said that you could tell,
the strawberries this year
will be as big and good as blood clots.

it has been two weeks
and I wish that you'd stop playing this
tiresome game of hide-and-go-seek
among the garden plants
among the bald orbs and the
chandeliers of vegetables hanging from sagging arms
among the flowers bowing like footmen.

it is hard for me to keep up.

I've only got time to review one more poem of yours now, Kylan, because this time it's 4:30 in the morning and I'm starting to feel dizzy.

windmills along the columbia

alabaster and slender, like mothers dead in childbirth

I think you need an adjective before 'slender' for this simile to make better sense -- something like 'suddenly'? Since I get that you're describing them as slender in absence of the child {the mothers, that is}, but I don't immediately think of mothers as slender after childbirth while the feeling of birth is still lingering.

mean, sour valleys fold upon themselves
and anoint the spinning heads who
stretching their hands skyward in some kind of
old, empty plea for rain
trolling the wind, the wind,
the tampered breath and the lipless faces

I think this stanza is a problem. oO; It's not organized very well and so I have trouble making sense of it. First of all, I'm thrown off by the 'who' in the second line. If I try to read this out like prose, it doesn't ever connect to a second main verb and it leaves me hanging. Considering this poem is about windmills, though, hanging is not really an emotion I'd see as intentional, since windmills are more about constant movement.

I do enjoy the repetition of 'the wind', but it's followed by something that I can't make sense of. It might be because it's 4:30 in the morning, like I said, but I think it's something more. 'Tampered breath' might make sense as another name for the wind, but I thought lipless faces would refer to the windmills, which doesn't make sense since the way I'm reading it, the windmills would then be the subject and the direct object. Hmm. Consider revision and make sure that the order of the sentence makes sense as prose, unless you mixed it up on purpose.

I didn't like this poem very much. It felt boring and impersonal, and usually you have a way of mixing narration with personal emotion. I felt that was absent here, but perhaps that's what you were going for.

In any case, PM me if you have any questions about my reviews, and I'll be getting to the rest of your poems very soon! <3

-Hannah-

Kylan--

sanddollar

Chevy spoke on the lack of feeling in this poem, and I somewhat agree with her. I think that it lacks a dominant image of emotion, like how you feel about this scene and whatnot, but, I absolutely love the fact that you painted a picture with these words.

To me, it feels like you've just given us the scene. You're not giving us ways to think of this, but, you're allowing us to see it for ourselves. We get the full image, a peaceful scene on the water, but you're not restricting us with your thoughts at all. It's really beautiful, and in that way, I feel that you are carrying a lot of emotion by allowing us to interpret and feel for it in our own way.

I also really enjoy how you subtly, subtly slipped the description of sand dollars in. Overall, I think this is an extremely wonderful poem, definitely of your best. But then again, everything in Yellow is of your best...


* * *


windmills along the columbia

Beautiful description of windmills here; you actually make them sound pretty.

against the blue, whispered horizon
alabaster and slender, like mothers dead in childbirth

In a lot of your later poems, I find descriptions like this common.

Anyway, I quoted that to say, somehow this description seems a bit... distanced. Like, I don't especially feel that it suits the poem. Everything about this poem is outside-ishly natural, save for the windmills, and this description takes things to a strangely smaller scale?

I'm not saying it's not quite working, but when I read it the first time, it seemed to change the tone of the poem.


I do really like your closing. It's simple and it's beautifully effective. sanddollar closed well, but seeing as it was more of a picture than emotion based (which, don't get me wrong, is extremely beautiful) it had that "open ending" feel that allows the audience to close the poem in their mind as they choose.


* * *

homeostasis

Kylan, I absolutely love this poem. It's so many things at once-- it's simple, but if you're not reading carefully, it's confusing. It's absolutely wonderful.

I do think that the usage of many similes in this kind of detracts from the focus of the poem. It's like, we're heading in a direction, and you're stopping us every few paces to look at this here and this there; it's not a problem, and in a sense of lingering in what this character knows, it's working well.

In some places throughout, I think that you kind of switch from simple language to heavier language. That kind of disrupted the flow slightly, but elsewise, it was perfect.



* * *


canning peaches

I sometimes wonder: do you previous poems inspire the next ones?

I really like this poem in a sense that it's a common image and it's nice to see it described from another person's point of view, but, I kind of feel like it's too slow.

In a way, I like that, because this process is undoubtedly a long one, and you did an excellent job capturing that and everything else around it, but at some points, I felt that it was too much of a break [in the first three stanzas] from one image to the next.

Not saying it's a bad thing! I just think that you took your time describing the peaches and the process and it's showing a bit more than the later part of your poem, dear.


Nevertheless, the last two stanzas are wonderful. You did a great job on this poem, but the ending of this was superb.


* * *


gardening

I love the beginning of this poem, Ky. It's so adorable (even though tomatoes are absolutely the grossest things to ever grow in a garden) and I love how the narrator of this is comparing this image to something romantic.

I really enjoy your description in this. It's not too much, but you're giving us a lot of it, which is perfect; you're not leaving any holes for us to sulk over.

you said that you could tell,
the strawberries this year
will be as big and good as blood clots.

Here, this stuck out to me. It's kind of implied that the last two lines would be spoken, would be direct quotes from the gardener, but it seems kind of odd that someone would use "good as blood clots" as a description in speech for something that's to be eaten.

I love the final stanza, as well. It seems as if the narrator is rather bored of this, but still finds something enjoyable in it all.


--------

Beautiful work as always, dear. Keep it up, and I promise to review much sooner next time (if I can).



-- June

seasickness

meiosis of the moon;
splintered on the hump-backs of the new tide –
tiny petals of white light
water-born, like capsizing paperboats.

salt skin
and a new coat of paint on the house every spring
calloused beaches and the fractal skeletons
of bleached driftwood, sunning like pigmentless reptiles.

stovetop tea pot:
warden's whistle, and the steam departing like a morning-warm dream.
cooling bloodoaths in the sky, red throat of the heiress sun.
old man with the net-scarred hands sits on the porch

as the fog clothes the beach
and the buoys nod and plunge, celibate under the unpainted basilicas
of the earlymorning sky. seagulls with their undisclosed grammar
scream of tragedies longforgotten and commonplace.

it has been nine years
dull sun hanging like a uvula and the veteran cliffs
stare seaward with him; he keeps the stories and the poetry
of the congested whales and the sloop sails sagging like tired bridemaids

and the stargazing – virgo and orion and spika, shore-bound shepherds,
and the fish slippery and cold as corpseflesh, gills fluting pleadingly.
he still washes the grains of salt and sand from his hair in the morning
and he can still smell the tar and the hemp in the valleys and crevasses of his hands.

he watches the ocean
as a man watches a woman undress, undo her precious hair
draping her podded bullwhips on the crescent shore
her nightsongs infecting his ears,

whispering of homesickness

Hi Kylan,

Kylan wrote:seasickness

meiosis of the moon;
splintered on the hump-backs of the new tide –
tiny petals of white light
water-born, like capsizing paperboats.

Surely there's some other description you can set other than "tiny". And if there isn't, take that pointless term out anyway for it takes away rather than adds to the piece.

salt skin
and a new coat of paint on the house every spring
calloused beaches and the fractal skeletons
of bleached driftwood, sunning like pigmentless reptiles.

I believe you are falling into the very trap that you cautioned me against; either that, or these ideas have a lot more in common than I can see after three read-through sessions. You talk of skin, painting, and drifting wood in the same paragraph. The latter half is easy to piece together but the second line does not fit, or does not seem so at least. The connection the reptiles is also quite stretched, considering that one can find many more poetic and metaphorical differences between the tilting on warm waters and a reptile begging for a drop of sunlight (well, I can anyway). Consider revising it.

As to the rest of this, well done. I enjoyed it all save for the pairings of words that you used; it is not the technique itself but how much you overused it. Why beat the reader to death with a theme derived from such unusual word combination when you can whisper it in his ear and let him process the rest? It becomes tiring about halfway through and by the end it's become nothing more than a cheap trick, a magician's card game of which the audience already knows everything and so rolls their eyes everytime that trick comes up. I advise you to lessen the incidents with which you use those pairings. Of course, this is subjective and must be since you're introducing something I haven't seen in many other poems anyway.

You have a unique and fluent style of observing the fray rather than jumping into it, which is quite refreshing. I applaud you on managing to pull it off so well, not just in this poem, but in all others.

Hope that helped,
Galerius

apostasy among the tallgrass

and in the fields where the forget-me-nots
climb sideways, pious and succinct
with bees hanging like earbobs from their blue heads,
the minister composes a sermon and the cicadas
and scrub-legged locusts murmur blasphemies –
apostasy among the tallgrass.

the sun slides along the sky like a gastropod – on it's stomach –
and the houseboat snails ferry across the porchsteps
as mother kneads bread in the kitchen, which expands like the holy spirit.
she tells me that the yeast is alive – a thousand tiny grains
dehydrated creatures, which cluster like the white
membranous conclaves of ant eggs I find under the stepping stones.

the self-important clouds decay at a half-life
the brush of the wind gentle and loveless
and the men standing in the doors of the church as father
talks parables and scripture – he has not had a baptism in seven months.
it has been a dry season.

we hide under the eaves, in the shade after church,
like numbers huddled under a division sign
and father locks himself in his study to read the bible and to pray
as he always has these past seven months, praying for a baptism.
the trees stand waterless and black in the sun,
their leaves curling like lips in disgust
pageantry of the field, choir of the tallgrass

the dry mountain oversee us
like barons

and father's prayers evaporate from his lips.

Hi Kylan!

You only told me that Yellow has been updated once! You didn't tell me about seasickness. (And when I was scrolling, I somehow accidentally locked the thread... )

Anyway, let's see:

seasickness

I'm at war with myself on this: I like this, and I don't, and I can't tell which side I lean more towards.

Your images are beautiful, you've described the setting here, and now we can imagine ourselves on the sea and get the full picture, but, it feels empty. You have the picture, but there's no focus; there's almost no story in this, and I think it needs one, dear.

Until the fifth stanza, you're talking dominantly about setting, which, if we try hard enough, we can place it in a metaphorical sense, but then you start to tell a story, fragments of it, and by the end of the poem, I don't think you're finished.

We do get the hints of nostalgia and homesickness in it, but we need more. I don't mean a whole preachy description of why he wants to go home and whatnot, but a little more story behind this would do nicely.

It's a beautiful poem description-wise, and other than the fragmented feel of it, I really, really like it. I just think it needs to be "filled up" so that it can be fully appreciated.


apostasy among the tallgrass(aka, the type of poem that wins fangirl squeals)

Kylan, this poem is amazing. It's... more like you than seasickness is. Seasickness read with a slight forced tone, and this just flows perfectly.

It's perfect.

I mean, seriously, it's amazing. In seasickness, you described the setting, and the setting didn't cater much to a story, but here, every image is the story-- it's just beautiful. I mean, really, this poem is amazing.

Epic win. It's terrific, Kylan. Keep it up.

June