Young Writers Society

april 8th, 2024 - lexical white noise

like, yeah, writing a poem
every single day for a month,
that's hard. I respect
that you're actually
trying to see it through, in spite of
you having abandoned
most all your novel projects
and short story drafts,
maybe for good, maybe getting rewritten
over and over because you're hoping
to come up with a version
that doesn't suck (uh, good luck).
hell, I'm only on day eight
and I'm wondering if
it was a good idea
to commit to this concept
for thirty whole poems.
I'm afraid I'm going to start
repeating myself pretty soon
going over the confusing metaphors
and stilted dialogue
and questionable punctuation
and just the weird writing style overall.
and for what? nothing I say goes far enough,
nothing I say is Enough.
your poems are, pretty bad, frankly,
but how do I begin
to put a name to all their problems
in a way that makes sense to me,
much less anyone else?

it gets even harder to talk about your poems
when you're clearly beginning to get tired,
running out of ideas, probably both.
like yeah, your 20th poem.
what's even going on here?
the title implies a poem
looking back on itself,
but that part doesn't matter?
you lose some change,
but it's right in front of you,
but you don't notice that,
and suddenly you're him
and also still you? and he's
turning the light off
and dreaming about the poem
you're writing. why end it like that?
we lose stuff all the time
and have trouble finding it
because we don't usually check
where it'd probably be
because why would we
do something sensible like that?
like, that's a poem right there,
what's all this you and him meta stuff?
and for the love of god,
stop throwing in stuff in your room
or stuff you're doing
because, I don't even know why.
the baseball glove you never use.
electric cords is repetitive,
also it's cords, not chords.
and why are they leering?
do you know what that means?
oh, and you take ibuprofen, whatever.
this is all starting to feel like
lexical white noise,
the linguistic equivalent
of flicking all the switches
in an airplane cockpit
and hoping that it'll fly.

cw: some war stuff

april 9th, 2024 - even the title's dry, you're writing a poem not a research paper

have I talked about
your word order and word choice yet?
english, a mash-up of a couple languages
that steals words and phrases from
just about everything else,
somehow really sweats the details -
big blue house sounds fine,
and blue big house doesn't
(and good luck explaining that
to anyone who isn't fluent) -
but it gives a little bit of room
to be flexible, especially in poetry,
you can get away with caring more
about alliteration, atmosphere,
flow, feeling, emphasis,
breaking the rules for the aesthetic
and/or to make some kind of point.

but if you're going to switch words up
for the sake of it, it's not going to go well.
"it likely is"? that sounds clumsy,
formal, even a bit old-fashioned.
and what do you have against contractions?
and when you're not busting out the passive voice,
you're spending your time making the subjects
of all your sentences either random objects
or abstract its, which is wild
when you're writing about something
as personal as hating the feeling
of shoving kleenexes up your nose
to stem the bleeding,
you don't even call it blood,
you call it hemoglobin.

I've said this about so many of your other poems,
but I don't hate the core idea here.
deadlines suck, but you're better off
dealing with them instead of ignoring them.
you're convinced you're not original
and you need to dress your poems up
for them to Mean Something, but it turns out
what I actually hate is you
dressing your poems up.
that mustard gas comparison is in bad taste,
soldiers don't usually carry
dead bodies around,
even the words you use are so detached -
hemoglobin, rendering, encasing, etc. -
I can't really picture what you want me to,
and I'm not sure it's worth my time to try.

april 10th, 2024 - winning at english

it feels like you know
what words literally mean,
but you don't get how they sound,
their history and context,
the kinds of things
they do and don't bring out
of your poetry,
and it feels like you think
the goal of writing
is to use the most words
in the most ways,
and that's how you win
at using a language,
a thing that's normal to want
and possible to achieve.

what really bugs me is that,
as far as I can remember,
you don't think there's anything wrong
with how you're typing, writing, talking,
not any real difference between those things,
you've got a consistent voice,
it's just a baffling one.
some of the people you argue with on the internet
tell you you're stuck up, pretentious,
think you're better than them.
and like, in your defense,
if that's all they can say,
if they're not even trying
to poke holes in your arguments,
that sounds like their problem.
still, you know that's how you come across,
and you know it makes it harder
for you talk to people,
but you've decided to stick to your guns,
you don't need to adjust,
everyone else just needs to
get you.

which is how you end up writing poems
where you randomly decide you're british,
talk about safes making sexual advances,
keep misspelling words with double consonants,
make up expressions and kinds of cigarettes,
throw in some political references
to show you kind of know what those are,
and wander all over the place because
hey it's satire, look at that twist ending, forget about
all the dangling plot threads
and social commentary that falls flat
because you don't know how people work.
I guess your poem's about greed, guns,
desperation, addiction, conspiracy theories,
and whatever else you've decided
to cram into this thing, so it's just
confused, I'm confused reading this,
why are you like this?

april 11th, 2024 - visions fugitives

don't you think it's weird
you're almost sixteen
and you don't have a phone,
and you don't even know
what you'd do with one?
sure, maybe there's some friends
and some websites you wouldn't mind
hitting up a bit more often,
but it's not a big deal.
you've got your computer
and nintendo 3ds internet
that takes a minute to load google,
you've got your family
and whatever news channels
they've got on the TV all day,
you've got your video games
and those little notebooks
you're filling with stories,
poems, ideas, whatever you want,
what else could you want?

and fine, I'm a little jealous
that your world's so small,
that you've got the time
to sit in the back seat
writing about whatever
while your parents drive you
and your brothers to salt lake city,
hell, if I remember correctly,
I'm still using some of the
story ideas and worldbuilding concepts
you're working on, but still,
you're going to have to grow up
one of these days, so maybe
don't rip on your younger brother
because he's a kid who just
wants to show off his cool new phone,
even if he isn't quite sure
what to do with it yet.
christ, you sound like
a seventy-year-old man
complaining about the kids
and whatever they're up to.

and like, that's what you're choosing
to talk about? the concept of cell phones?
okay, fine, I like how you feel like
that dead deer you saw by the side of the road
as an atheist in a painfully, intensely
mormon capital, just how weird it is
to see that kind of iconography
all over the place, it's almost overwhelming,
you really don't feel like you should be here,
but can't you just tell me that,
instead of doing the whole deep philosophical routine
(mostly you being petty about whatever)
because you're convinced that's what poetry is?
can't you tell me more, in general?
the doctors screwed up grandma's surgery
and airlifted her to salt lake city,
your parents are freaking out,
you're freaking out,
you're dumping all your feelings on *him*,
it's been a long time since you've seen
half the people you're going to meet,
half the places you're going to go to,
it's going to be one of the last times
you ever see your grandpa alive,
what's that even like? please give me
something more than crumbs,
bits and pieces of memory I'm clinging on to
even though the longer I think about them
the more I bleed into them
so they're not even accurate anymore
but they're all I have,
please don't do this to me.

april 12th, 2024 - your parents don't even know you write poetry, do they

our grandma gives you some kind of solitaire
machine? I keep imagining it looks like
a tamagotchi, and/or those little cubes
you and your brothers collected as kids,
you put batteries in them and watched
stick figures run around, bounce off the screen walls,
talk to each other if you stuck those cubes together,
anyways, yeah, something like that - a little display,
buttons that make beeping noises when you press them,
move the cards around, set them down, reset the game.

and in the blur of the next few hours, out the hospital,
back to the hotel, out to a restaurant, closed,
another restaurant, chat the whole time,
try to keep grandpa from freaking out
because he's used to grandma calling the shots,
he doesn't know what he's doing on his own,
and you're over here in the back seat
hoping to win a game of solitaire. you don't even know
what half these buttons do, you keep screwing up,
but it's better than paying attention to anything around you,
you've got a Problem in your hands and you're solving it
the way you always do - guessing as soon as you can,
getting it wrong, adjusting, guessing again, repeating
and getting a little better every time, this is solitaire,
it's your game, you've been playing it for years,
you don't want to let her down, do you?

you hand the whatever it is back to her the next day.
I don't remember if you ever win a game, or even get close,
but she's, proud? happy? at least to have something
in common with her grandkid, something more than
awkward brief hellos when mom decides to put you on the phone,
oh hey you're doing that writing thing, right? yeah.
how's that going? pretty good. great.
and it feels weird, doesn't it? getting a compliment,
even something kind of like a compliment, your parents
hand those out the way rich people hand out their own money,
never ask you what you're working on, don't seem to care.
doesn't that drive you up a wall sometimes? you tell yourself
it doesn't, but be honest with me, be honest with yourself.

[yeah, complaining about organized christianity a bit - would rather not get into an argument about it, to be clear]

april 13th, 2024 - jesus christ has great brand recognition

in hindsight, I could see why
someone might be tempted to find god
out there in america's wind tunnel,
towns by dried out most the year creeks
barely clinging on to life,
depending on oil on the cusp of running out;
overworked windmills about to fall apart;
trucks driving for hundreds of miles
through the endless mesas and prairies
to drop off and sell everything at a markup;
and, of course, there's the rich
building their mansions on the hills
to get away from it all, and by all
I mean the poors literally living
down below, by the long road
from cheyenne to rock springs.

but someone would have to be
born and raised in a bunker
carved out of the earth
with a lifetime's supply of beans
and people who never tell them
about jesus christ for them
not to have heard of him,
and I'm concerned about the
sociocultural, theological,
and financial implications
of spending money on a billboard
and more money repairing, replacing it
instead of say, giving that money to charity,
it's hard not to remember the televangelists
with perfect white teeth saying the lord
wanted them to have a third jet,
but still, you're being a little edgy here.
if it's the difference between
eternal happiness and eternal suffering
you can see why the faithful are as aggressive
as they are, the ends that justify
so many means. that doesn't make converting
good or justifiable, that doesn't mean
it can't be used for the sake of power,
but maybe you can tone things down a bit,
don't break out clumsy comparison to human sacrifice
dressed up in the fanciest language
you can think of (though, credit where it's due,
at least your word choice actually
fits the tone and theme better
than it normally does).

cw: swearing and abuse references

april 14th, 2024 - choose your own trauma

how do you even know about
teachers hitting students
on their hands with rulers,
like, that *is* a thing,
not nearly as much
as it used to be,
but wow, you're hung up on it
enough to bring it up twice
in a poem where your narrator
gets dragged from incomplete metaphor
to contradictory metaphor
to the point I'm not even sure
what you're talking about,
maybe the narrator daydreaming in class
and getting screwed over
by a school system that thinks
they're lazy, wasting their time,
and that system refuses to help them
learn in a way that works for them.

or something like that?
maybe the narrator is just,
it's a pretty cruel word, but lazy,
maybe the narrator is doing fine
but is feeling a bit guilty
about not paying as much attention as they should,
not getting the grades they want to,
and inventing abusive teachers in their head
to punish themself, some bigger metaphor
with a bunch of smaller ones inside,
that seems like the kind of thing you'd try,
bite off way more than you can chew,
but maybe I'm assuming too much,
I just don't want to take this literally
because then you definitely
don't know what you're talking about,
you go to an - okay, "go to," that's
kind of a silly way to put it,
you literally walk to the computer
to start your school day, but -
online school, you're in an online school.

cat's out the bag, huh?
we hate explaining it. yes,
we're technically homeschooled,
but that implies some kind of
super restrictive religious upbringing,
and restrictive, maybe a bit to you,
but it's fine, you basically agree
with everything your parents say and do,
does it really matter whether or not
you have a choice in any of it?
anyways, we're not religious,
it's a public school system curriculum,
you could cheat, but your parents
keep a close eye on your grades
and double-check your essays
and you want to Learn, so it's fine,
you don't think you could make it
in a brick and mortar school anyway,
everybody else would eat you alive,
probably just call you the r-word constantly,
you'd have to spend the next forever
tearing down the walls you'd built around yourself,
as opposed to where you are now,
you're doing fine, at least,
you feel fine, you have some rough moments
here and there, but that's just growing up,
not worth thinking about.

so we can explain it,
it's not bad in the abstract,
but it's still Not Normal,
it could say a lot of stuff
about us and our parents
that we don't have the time or energy
to unpack, so we nod our heads
and pretend we had the same
high school experience
as everyone else, we were just
the quiet kid in the corner,
that seems to work well enough.
after all, if it's what everyone went through,
why would we be any different?

april 15th, 2024 - diving into an empty pool

you're really just lazering in on everything I hate
about the previous year's poems,
like hey, you personally can read frankenstein
and figure out what victor or the monster
are talking about in their chapter-long monologues,
so clearly your readers can handle
you throwing them into every single idea/though/metaphor
spiraling out of control branching off into kind of related things forever
until you yank them back in time for the next stanza
to explore something they've already forgotten about;
and then there's all the personal references
you pepper in to the point it feels like
some in-joke the audience doesn't get,
hell, it's been so long I don't even remember
half of what you're on about until you
spell it out for me, in the poems or your notes;
and you're pretty insecure about your intelligence,
the way you mention that volcano
that popped out of the ground in mexico,
canaries and crows as symbols of death,
a girl trapped in the mud after a flood/earthquake (?),
I think isabel allende wrote about her,
some hilariously unsubtle walk on water
spread out on tree branches
talk to the birds symbolism here,
really trying to show off to the audience,
if they don't get it, that's just proof
that you're a special gifted talented kid,
just like your parents tell you you are,
and if you're not a Genius, who are you?

fine, that's a little uncalled for,
but I'm getting angry.
what do you think poetry is? I'd swear you read
hughes or dickinson or thoreau or brooks
and think to yourself, well, you don't get
what they're writing about, so maybe
they aren't writing about anything,
it's all about pretty sounds floating
from one line to the next, you can just
write literally the first thing you think of
and pat yourself on the back
for being so profound and spontaneous,
leave your readers to do the hard work
of giving any of your poetry meaning.
like, why should I care about Obvious Christ Allegory
who happens to be so perfect the whole world
stops what it's doing when something
admittedly pretty traumatic happens to him?
what does he represent? what makes him perfect?
why do you, an atheist, spend so much time
thinking about the divine? I hate you sometimes.
you're so shallow you don't even think about
how shallow you are, you just dump a bunch of words on the page
and move on.

april 16th, 2024 - that's why you stopped telling your parents you write poems

sorry about yesterday - I can't pretend
I like your poems, but you deserve
at least a bit of respect?
it's impressive you're still writing at all,
much less to an audience,
after all the stories and poems
you tried to set free and had to watch
limp over to a pond only
to get chased and hunted down by a fox.
people not getting your symbolism,
even the stuff that was pretty obvious.
people getting confused by pronouns,
who you were referring to and when.
people coming to bad conclusions
about the stuff you didn't describe.
and you took those bleeding shredded
nearly-dead projects and brought them to your mom
only for her to strangle the life
out of them because she thought
every emotion, feeling,
suggestion, implication
needed to get spelled out,
if it wasn't an essay that told her
exactly what she should be thinking,
she didn't want anything to do with it.

and yes, I've complained over and over again
that you make the audience do all the work
of getting meaning out of your poems,
but there's a whole spectrum between
explaining nothing and explaining everything,
you can paint enough of a picture
so other people can fill in the gaps
with what they care about,
and then boom, everyone's happy.
and sometimes, when you wander around
from point to point in a stanza,
you stumble on something that you explain just enough,
like a parent weaving their child together
and trying so hard to make something
neat and tidy and perfect, and failing
because that's not how kids work.
honestly, this whole free association thing
wouldn't be a terrible way to come up with ideas,
I might have to give it a try at some point.

cw: swearing, references to war and death

april 17th, 2024 - the grass drinks blood


not sure why I'm clinging on
to this memory specifically,
but I see you writing that poem
on a saturday afternoon, sitting
at that metal table mom bought a year or two before,
it looks great, she has to wipe it down all the time,
if you lower your head and brush your nose against it
(I don't know why you do that, but you do),
it smells like blood,
and you smell like cut grass
because you just mowed the lawn,
you're sweating, taking deep breaths,
sniffling constantly, a bit tired and a bit allergic,
but you've got some thoughts
that have been rattling around in your head
over the last couple hours you've spent, oh god,
dad hasn't switched to an electric mower yet,
you're still using the push mower, aren't you,
it sucks so bad, if the grass is thick enough,
like by the base of the tree, you have to
go over it twice, and good luck
if there's a storm rolling in
and your dad wants you to wrap it up quick,
can't believe you would've been able to
think about anything at all,
and I'm pretty sure you don't have
a laptop or a phone yet, so you're
breaking out a mechanical pencil
and writing stuff down in a
several hundred pages, already half full
after a couple months notebook,
your handwriting's very, maybe not neat,
but small and kind of pretty
the way it curves and blurs together
and probably doesn't make sense
to anyone else, but it doesn't need to,
you can read it, you're the only one
who's going to read it, that's good enough.

and even if your wrist hurts like hell,
you like the feeling of scratching out
something with literal and metaphorical weight,
and this time around you're hung up on, among other things, a story
you read not too long ago, an autobiographical diary
(or an author using the framing device of a diary)
of a girl living through the siege of sarajevo,
running for cover, forced to face and name death
in the bodies of her friends and neighbors, and somehow still
trying to be a normal kid with hobbies and interests
and hopes and dreams in the middle
of shelled-out apartment buildings and schools,
and it drives her up a wall, there's a point
she starts screaming at politicians and generals
endlessly compromising and negotiating
and pretending that they care about the people
dying every second like those people aren't just
chess pieces to sacrifice, shuffle the rest around
and wrap up the game, get the next one set up,
Serious and Important Leaders who don't want to get
too Political and Emotional here,
they all have power, want more power,
want to do whatever it takes to hold on to power.

if that story's stuck in my mind
after all these years, I can't imagine
the way it's haunting you, it deserves
so much more than a couple lines,
like here's an actual experience. no,
don't write like you're in a war yourself,
but tell me how fucking wild it is
to get even a glimpse of a nightmare
you couldn't begin to imagine happening to anyone,
you in your safe and comfortable life.

cw: mountain climbing is pretty dangerous

april 18th, 2024 - qomolangma

it's a bit wild it only took
a few decades for climbing mount everest
to go from this massive accomplishment,
the peak (haha) of human skill and willpower,
how we can work together to figure out the unknown,
conquer it, leave our mark on it,
to being a whole industry, sponsors and camps and guides
funneling hundreds of people up the mountain every year
along carved-out, roped-off paths,
it's never been easier to summit
so everyone's trying to do it,
some hoping to do something with their lives,
some hoping to set records (youngest, oldest,
first [x], first to do it in some way,
fastest, part of a broader challenge),
some just hoping to get a good view up there.

but it's still mount everest. it's so tall
most people can barely breathe, much less think at the top
without the oxygen tanks they've brought along;
so massive it can take weeks to hike through,
head from one camp to another only a little higher up;
it tears itself apart and remakes itself constantly,
water freezing and ice melting, shattering rocks,
winds picking up all the pieces and hurling them
down cliff-faces, dragging with them anything they caught,
storms leading people astray, walking them off ledges
or beating them into the snow to freeze to death
and mummify in the cold for the next day's hikers
to walk by, see the back of a jacket, take a quick picture,
no point in sticking around, they've got to get up there before nightfall,
who even knows if it's safe off the path, maybe a sherpa can check.

and yeah, peel back the layers of inspirational stories,
that metaphor for personal discovery you like enough
to not immediately ditch it after a line,
and what's left isn't pretty - people making
life-or-death decisions when they don't even
have that much blood in their brain,
doing anything they can to prove
they made it up to the top,
calling the shots on who to save
and who to abandon to the mountain side,
all the piles of trash and human waste
crammed wherever it can fit,
the earthquakes trapping people in flimsy tents
ten thousand feet up,
the sherpa trying to make whatever money they can
setting up routes, cleaning up after tourists,
braving a sacred mountain with a name
they didn't give it, dying as expedition footnotes.
all that conquering and adventuring
at the expense of a real place,
the real people who live by it, what's the point?
if the climbers going to risk their lives like that,
do they have to bring anyone else down with them?
and can't they at least respect the mountain
while they're at it? also, while I'm at it,
it's definitely not the hardest mountain to climb,
and, depending on the definition, not even the tallest,
so there's that.

cw: swearing

april 19th, 2024 - the tree in the play

you started writing anything creative in the first place
because your fifth grade english teacher
said your essays were so mature, so serious,
you used so many words a nine-year-old
wouldn't be expected to know (I think you were nine,
you'd skipped half a grade, then did fifth grade
in a single semester to fix your schedule,
on that note, fun fact, don't go to college when you're seventeen,
your parents will have to sign everything for you
and you'll feel like a goldfish in the ocean, anyways),
and she didn't know she was throwing gasoline into a fire,
but wow, you really took all her compliments to heart, huh,
entered all the writing competitions she introduced you to
and came up with these bloated pretentious disasters
about a Man in terrible situations talking about
how terrible those situations are, usually a Woman there
for him to have feelings about, she's always his girlfriend,
they don't have anything in common other than
what they're going through, but at least
they can yell at each other,
those stories wrote themselves,
you got a couple awards out of them,
they're on the shelf by your bed collecting dust.

I mean, you cared about those stories
when you wrote them, you still do now,
it's just, they're super shallow,
you're more in love with the ideas behind them
and the questions they bring up
than any of the actual narrative bits,
throwing characters in there, developing them,
giving the audience a reason to care about them,
you didn't know enough about people
or why anyone does anything to come up
with an actual plot or compelling characters,
those stories are really just philosophical tracts
drilling morals into the audience's thick skulls,
and what scares you is even where you are now
you're not sure you can do any better than that.
you're resting your head against the tiles
in the shower telling yourself bad wording
can ruin creative ideas,
but good wording can save boring ideas,
so it's fine you're kind of a loner shut-in
sitting around coming up with worlds to fall into,
you can just make it all sound cool enough
people are willing to overlook
all the story parts of the story,
maybe not great, but good enough,
and yeah, it'd be really cool
if people respected you, if you mattered
in other people's lives, you echoing
long after your death in all the people
who remember your name, that's
as close to immortality as you can get.

so I can see why you like the idea
of propping up the people around you,
being a muse, a wall to bounce ideas off of,
a source of inspiration,
help them get their shit together
so they can go out and do all the things
you don't think you'll ever be able to do yourself.
and god, wouldn't it be so nice
if you could crouch down, let someone else
climb on you, stand on your shoulders,
jump into the air, and fly off,
wrap you up in the shadow of their wings
so you, face against the pavement,
don't feel the need to face your fears
or chase after dreams you might never make happen,
they'll never have the impact that other person will,
you're sixteen and your life's basically over
and you don't even need to try for the rest of it.
and it's, incredibly sad that you want
to give up that quickly, that you think
it's hopeless for you, that you're convinced you're stuck
in the background of your own life.

cw: swearing, suicidal ideation, references to violence

april 20th, 2024 - BORROWING THE POET YAHYA HASSAN'S STYLE BECAUSE I THINK IT'S NEAT

april 21st, 2024 - your poems suck and you should write more of them

I wish I could remember
when/why that switch
flipped in your brain
and you realized maybe
you should tone your poems down -
get rid of most the metaphors,
make the whole thing easier to read,
tell a consistent narrative
(unless you're going for a specific effect),
think about the words you're writing
before you write them -
maybe you got some reviews
telling you your stuff was unreadable,
maybe you finally looked around
and started taking inspiration
from everyone around you,
maybe you got tired spending
however long crapping out lines
you don't even remember now.

but yeah, between 2017 and 2018
you were busy with your novels
(ditching one project
and picking up another one),
and you didn't bother with poems much
unless they were for
some kind of challenge, like napo,
and honestly that whole
end of high school
start of college period
is a bit of a blur to me
for a lot of not great reasons,
so I don't think I can ever piece together
how exactly you changed your style
to something you're happier with.
which is a bit of a shame -
with your family and your teachers
giving you terrible advice,
you desperately trying to follow it
so you could be some kind of writing prodigy,
what made you decide
to start going your own way?

don't get me wrong, these 2018 napo poems aren't great,
but they're readable. like hey,
this guy's traumatized
over some kind of terrible relationship,
can't really remember it
and would regret remembering it,
all that business, I get it.
sure, the whole her writing in blue marker
on a blue background bit doesn't make sense,
why would she hide herself when it seems like
the narrator is doing most the work hiding her;
you're obviously throwing in the first names
you can think of off the top of your head;
"handing you tobacco" isn't a real thing
real people say in real life;
the whole eating bricks metaphor
is a bit gross and uncomfortable,
which is the point, but I'm not sure
it fits with the imagery in the rest of the poem;
otherwise, it's a pretty okay poem, finally.
kind of funny, because this isn't a thing
you've got any personal experience with,
but, uh, let's just say you will soon enough,
and you're slightly more on the mark
than you should be.