Even Strong Men Cry

was sad, wrote this stuff down about my family, (bro, dad, me) and just how the idea of 'strong men' is twisted. anywayz i just really need help with it, i dont know how to format it or lay it out at all, i think i say wat i want to say in it, just i dont know how to make the layout good.

Even Strong Men Cry

Even strong men cry, because to be a strong man you have to find a way to vent,
To dump all the pain,
To let it all go,
To start anew,
For the suffering to cease,
For the resentment to fade,
For the self hatred to disappear, otherwise it may come as a shock when your tears begin flooding, and you question whether your hard enough, whether your not as hard as you thought you were.
When your girlfriend leaves you,
When your family abandons you,
When your name is said with bitterness, you find more salty tears,
When you find out an old friend that you wish you caught up with is found dead,
When your mother leaves you,
When your grandma is sick,
When you turn around and your hardness and macho attitude has left you with…
No friends,
No family,
No beliefs,
No aspirations,
No happiness, only despair…
It can go two ways, self pity or self hatred
But truly strong men,
Know its ok to start again, get on with it,
To not let sadness taint your ability and your beliefs,
That my friends is what strength is all about.

Heya! My name is TheNewHero, here to review.

This poem was okay, dodgy, good topic. I can't pick out a tiny bit to nit-pick so I'll do the whole piece.

moonbies a.k.a moonbies wrote:Even strong men cry, because to be a strong man you have to find a way to vent,
To dump all the pain,
To let it all go,
To start anew,
For the suffering to cease,
For the resentment to fade,
For the self hatred to disappear, otherwise it may come as a shock when your tears begin flooding, and you question whether your hard enough, whether your not as hard as you thought you were.
When your girlfriend leaves you,
When your family abandons you,
When your name is said with bitterness, you find more salty tears,
When you find out an old friend that you wish you caught up with is found dead,
When your mother leaves you,
When your grandma is sick,
When you turn around and your hardness and macho attitude has left you with…
No friends,
No family,
No beliefs,
No aspirations,
No happiness, only despair…
It can go two ways, self pity or self hatred
But truly strong men,
Know its ok to start again, get on with it,
To not let sadness taint your ability and your beliefs,
That my friends is what strength is all about.

Cons:
This was jumbled
Repetitive
No Emotion!

Let's start working from the bottom up.

NO EMOTION!
You've listed a bunch of stuff that could happen by being too stoic. But while I read this (Both ears closed, no music and reading out loud) I couldn't really feel emotion. The key to extracting emotion is... make something personal. This is one of the first, and BEST poems I've read. Yeah, it's missing some stuff but otherwise, it hit me in the heart. Calling All Heroes - by TenYo .

How can you get emotion?
Firstly, words. Sad. Bleh. Despair. Bleh. Bleeding Heart. Bleh. What then Hero? Rather this: Moist Cheeks. . A Heart of Black, Falpping Leather, Blown about by the wind. FTW!. Black Winds That Churn My Blood. ^ 2. It doesn't mean using a thesaurus for fancy adjectives. It means taking concepts and physical Stuff and ptting them together, building a picture. If I told you, paint me "Sad" you'd manageish. But if I said, "My heart is gone, left behind is black wind." Then you'd make sure you used black and dark purples and horrible blues and frame it in black.

Repititive

When your girlfriend leaves you,
When your family abandons you,
When your name is said with bitterness, you find more salty tears,
When you find out an old friend that you wish you caught up with is found dead,
When your mother leaves you,
When your grandma is sick,

No friends,
No family,
No beliefs,
No aspirations,
No happiness, only despair…

This wasn't very well structured. You could have done better. What wasn't good about it was it repeated stuff a lot. Why did you repeat? This is repetitive, scrap it. Okay, onto the next!... see? By the third sentence you were already saying, "I gotcha man, just tell me how to improve!" That's what your reader felt like. They were waiting for the moral of the story.

How to Improve this.
This ties with the emotion. You have to change certain words, add words, visulize and make sure there's a difference between the hurt of a girlfriend leaving and a mom hating, of your friends hating and your beliefs crumbling. Make each one absolutely different! Draw the emotion with these two paragraphs and after each, give a moral! Boom Bam! Excellent Poem is just a little while away.

:Arrow: This was jumbled

Even strong men cry, because to be a strong man you have to find a way to vent,
To dump all the pain,
To let it all go,
To start anew,
For the suffering to cease,
For the resentment to fade,
For the self hatred to disappear, otherwise it may come as a shock when your tears begin flooding, and you question whether your hard

Excuse me? What you've basically said here is, You need to cry to get stuff of your chest. Otherwise, it'll be weird when you cry. This confused me. You need to restructure it.

moonbies wrote:Know its ok to start again, get on with it,
To not let sadness taint your ability and your beliefs,
That my friends is what strength is all about.

This wasn't very nicely written? I thought we were talking about crying, not strength. This is your poetic climax... you blew it.

How to Fix This
You need to keep your concepts together, organize them. Maybe break this up into two or three stanzas. Intro - What People THink of Crying
Middle - What Being Stoic Can Do
End - Resolution: What Crying Does For You

---

Overall this didn't seem to get out what you were feeling. Because overall, what did you say. It's okay to cry? No. You named the cons of not crying. Someone reading this will say... okay, but crying will make me wimpy and all. You have to say what crying willg et you. But well done otherwise. And welcome to the site!

Fly On,
Write On,
Your Fellow YWSer,
TheNewHero

Wow, well, I feel like TheNewHero has really done all the work for me. He talked about letting the EMOTION of the work get out - which is REALLY hard, since to do that, you really have to break every stereotype of 'manliness' there is. So...good luck with the re-editing.

This poem is raw. It's still written fresh from you thoughts, your patterns of logic. Things like this, that are so raw, so emotional, can come out unemotional for the simple reason that we try to say them in straight words, in LITERAL language, black and white, and we fail. If it is too in-my-face, I actually cannot comprehend at all. I need some imaginative flair, something that I can compare the experience to, some IMAGERY (TheNewHero gave a good example of this: 'My heart is gone, left is the black wind.'), something else to take my mind off the reality, and, in doing so, to amplify it, to concrete it. This is a bizarre concept, I know, but that's really the best way I can say it.

So...specifically, I won't quote everything here, but will simply say this: currently, it reads like a very long list of bad things that are happening and everything is quite literal. I think it would have more effect if it focussed on one or two (three at most) of your cases where crying might be needed, and REALLY explore it. Give it some depth, rather than breadth - we're not debating in a competition, here; we're trying to show our depth of understanding into this strange and untouched topic. The hardest thing on the eyes is seeing 'N's' down the page, after a whole line of 'W's.' Ouch.

Otherwise, I commend you on choosing a topic that is both fresh, and something that I have actually never seen addressed before - so 10/10 from me for originality for the UNDERLYING idea. Now, just make it come alive and waltz in from of my eyes. I know you can do it...plan, think, and, most of all: GIVE IT SOME TIME.

i wish there was a 'love' button next to the 'like' one 'cos i would totally click it. this was awesome. there aren't words to describe its beauty, or maybe there is, i've never been great with words.

my only advice; NEVER EVER EVER STOP WRITING

I love your poem. But like you said the problem is with the format.
Basically, there are too many comas in the lines of your poem.
But like I said, I love the message and the central idea of the poem.
Remember that the key to better writing is to keep writing and writing and writing. GOOD LUCK!