The First Sunray

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I loved your word choice:) excellent vocabulary. I especially liked "The topography of a smile." well done, I enjoyed it.

Heya Kamas! Long time, no talk! How have you been? I like your new color, because you wear it so well!

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I would go about trying to convey the season in a more subtle manner. I'd take out "of winter blink" and possibly put something like "and pale lashes". That's just a suggestion, though.

Winter's the past season, correct? Try drifting into the new season, spring, gradually. Perhaps make a few more lines about winter and start to hint at weather warming. Immerse your reader in spring slowly, like stepping slowly into a pool. I say this so you may lengthen it a tad more, because I love reading something, especially a poem, that's lengthy, because it shows time, effort, and if you can pull it off the quality really shines out. This for me gave a great visual, but there's still room for improvement (there always is!). You have a unique way of describing spring, but I want to see more than the grass, flowers, valleys. I want more emotion. I want to feel the thrill of watching a bud peek its head over a snowdrift. Spring means new life- make sure I know it!

Anyway, before I get too off track I just want to say that I enjoyed your poem. Keep up the nice work, Kamas! I hope to chat with you soon.

~Selene

Hello.

This is beautiful. I love how you personified the changing of the seasons, likened them to the expressions on a person's face. And also how you turned the gestures of nature into human emotions. This was, in all, a very lovely read.

I've only one comment:

"A reminder of that ardor will come and pass."

Shouldn't the line above be, "A reminder of ardor that will come and pass"? I think you exchanged ardor and that?

Haha. Not very helpful, I know but I truly loved this.

--Knightly

Kammieyaz,

Great personification of wintry spirit. I love how your focus was on the smaller things without diverting out attention from your target topic.

I do not like how you brought us to full stops at each line; that disrupts the flow of continuity, and I think that one of the most important things in poetry is flow, unless you have other devices to play with. You know, poetry is so confusing with its myriad of laws and not laws and blah -- who can say what's not poetry and not?

Either way, you did a good job here. My only other recommendation would be to connect and transition by removing words like 'and', 'then' and whatever else isn't necessary to relate to us, so that you have a cleaner, better cut poem.

Good job, Kamms. Thumbs up and a gold star for you.

June

Hi Kamas,

This is worse than your poem involving Native Americans. It is not as good as much of what you have posted on the literature forums, for (thankfully) topical reasons as opposed to systemic ones.

Kamas wrote:...

Normally I try not to focus on such petty things as capitalization and punctuation, but that's what completely killed your poem and turned it into bland word-churn. The last line is the only part of this piece that's even remotely passable; the rest is monotonous and tries to turn a rock into a palace, unsuccessfully.

You capitalize every line, which itself is choppy and jarring, but that's only a problem subset to a greater one - that is, the fact that you end every line's idea on that same line and do not attempt to make it permeable or flow into the next. Someone has already pointed that out earlier, so I will not continue except to stress how terrible that looks on this poem. It makes it a skeleton.

Why is the grass smirking? You guide the reader to believe that the melting is a good thing, a thin film of memory of warmer days, but your words speak differently. A smirk is almost never a good thing, and in this case it degrades the value of your theme.

The line beginning with "A reminder of" is especially insulting to the reader's sense because it insinuates that he is not able to connect two neurons together and finish painting the picture of which the poet is only supposed to outline. It deprives him of any ability to stand on his own two feet. "This is a reminder!" That is blatant and a disturbing roadblock in a poem clearly meant to convey the meaning through imagery. Take it out and be consistent with how you write.

Overall, no good. Something can be salvaged from this, but it will take effort.

Hope that helped,
Galerius

Hey Commas! It's really late, so I should probably go to bed, but I figured I would comment on your poem first!

To start, stylistically, it's really stop-and-go. You flit from one scene to another without really pausing, and altogether the fluidity of the piece reminds me more of Transformers in style... which probably isn't a good thing.

Now, you said you tried to put meaning in here, but what it looks like (to me) what you did was you stuck a metaphor with each image and hoped that would somehow be meaningful. Unfortunately, metaphors have to be connected to be truly powerful, which means you need an overall theme that you can tie everything together so that it all fits together. It's the difference between a bunch of puzzle pieces scattered everywhere with no cohesion (which is what you have at the moment) and a solid picture made of puzzle pieces.

This probably makes no sense... let me demonstrate with my own (extremely rough) poetry. Mind you, both are rough drafts, so it is by no means perfect, but I just want to show you how I took a disconnected image and (hopefully) tied it in with something more meaningful.

First Draft:

Spoiler

In the glowing sky
a moon hangs, its surface
scarred and haggard.
Full and bright, it winks
at me as morning pink
swallows up the stars and
knocks away the frost
hanging off my breath

Seventh draft:

Spoiler

In the glowing sky,
the moon hangs, its surface
scarred, haggard, and
gleaming like a pearl.
Full and bright, it winks
at me, seeing its craters in
my bitten cheek and its gorges in my
split lip and gunshot scar that hangs
right below my eye.

And we are just two long-lost twins
trapped in an eternal moment,
dizzy with distance, condemned to
recognize and reflect each other,
without a word, until at last
the morning pink swallows up the stars
and knocks away the frost
hanging off my breath.

I don't know how helpful that was...

The point is, if you wanted to make it more meaningful, you have to connect it with an overpowering image that links everything together and expresses something critical to human existence... if that makes sense.

So how do you do this?

Each writer does this differently, so who am I to say what you've done wrong? But generally, you have to brainstorm and think, "What does spring mean to me?" And then, after thinking about that, switch the question around: "What do I mean to spring?" Look at it in all possible angles and then write.

Because really, poetry is all about expressing universal truths in a brief snapshot of words.