Young Writers Society

Navita -- I will comment on these! Tonight, when I get out of work! I promise!

I OWE you. This might get lengthy.

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Tiempo:

Right at the very beginning, this is a much better poem than I ever wrote at your age -- but this is already off topic, because I try not to ever consider age much, and so... I think the concept is... timeless (OH HO, PUNNY), and I'm not going to call it cliche, because I think it's an important enough idea for a human to explore. And my favorite poet, W.H. Auden, often explored the concept of time and human's relationship with it. So I'm a fan.

The first stanza, I have no issue with whatsoever, I like it completely. The first line of the second stanza however, "from the milky bow of moon" -- is such a strange and vague image. It sounds good to the ear in an aesthetic way, sure, but the idea behind the image doesn't stand up to much thought whatsoever. And here:

till from a listless skyward breast,
it can't draw more -

You drop into a contraction, which I find is casual language -- "can't". It doesn't quite fit in, considering you're saying things higher-end like "till" and "listless skyward breast", haha, so I would elaborate to "cannot".

Time, you naughty child, you need
a mother and some manners.

The crossed out phrase was unexpected and -- out of place to me, I guess? It didn't seem fitting to the overall tone of the poem... to me, anyway.

Just

move me
I am slow to move

and once moving

slower still

I love the first two lines. The repetition works, as an intro it works, all that. I'm wondering why... the next two lines are apart... and I want to snip off that "and". I'm dubious of those two lines, but I will continue.

dawn to dusk, cicadas sing
and still I languid lie -

I love alliteration, assonance, all that, but languid lie sounds inappropriately mixed up -- but "lie languid" doesn't sound good either, with that longer word, hard sound at the end of the line. I suggest experimenting with this line, and trying to soften it up.

in the heat! in the haze!
where patience passed the passing gaze
that skyward flew
knew I somehow
the bead that then beaded my brow -

WIN. But I feel like punctuation is lacking between "skyward flew" and "knew I somehow".

And I am okay with the rest of this poem. In fact, overall, I love the image. It reminds me of lots of things -- too many to say -- but I grew up in the country, so maybe you can imagine. And I've laid in the middle of the road before. So. Ha. Your use of language I think is very graceful considering the overall image too -- it fits.

Fireflies melting:

Why do these not count as reviews? I would have five million reviews, right here. Oh man!

I am not a fan of this poem, unlike the prior two. This one's imagery feels disjointed, and you don't have a unified theme going on -- and if you do, then I am completely missing it. One image doesn't seem to tie up with the next, or the first, or the last... and I'm questioning "brushtroke", but I think it's a typo rather than on purpose. But if it's on purpose, then eh.

Recuerdo:

Another Spanish title! I took four years of Spanish! Hooray for me!

Rodlight... typo? Vague imagery? I cannot tell. I say typo. NaPo obviously produces them, excusably.

Anyway, I like what concept you're trying to explore with this -- sudden memory with the feelings associated with it, regret and whatnot -- but a lot of your imagery use is questionable here. "Bowels"... never a very good word to use, haha. The connotations I believe have taken that word from writers.

all at once
eyes skimming the slurry soup
of noun and verb and god-awful adjective
of cursive alphabet and

and I really like this stanza, but punctuation seems lacking here, and the alliteration sounds too contrived:

where memory was a delicious
possibility pawing

at my conscience, consciousness

The ending seems sudden too -- marriage.

The ice-cream man:

my father was the ice-cream man
each summer I would ride on top
of his little caravan, and we would
resurrect the moms and daddies melting

YESSSS. I love it. I love the random rhyme and the spaced out alliteration. I think this is a perfect start.

I LOVE this poem. I say though -- make it longer. Again here, the ending seems sudden (understandable, with NaPo), and the relationship with the father growing cold sounds like it could be elaborated on in another darling stanza or two. I think this poem is crying to be longer.

Zed Neverlasting in the Middle:

squatting in the smarmy sun and
picking strawberries, laughing

This poem is interesting so far -- these lines seem too... not cliche, but the images are bland and obvious, and I feel like you chose the imagery for the sake of the sound of the words, which makes the imagery... false and bland. Hard time saying what I'm thinking here.

Also, I don't feel like the imagery in this stanza is necessary -- it doesn't match with what comes before and after it. Keep everything in the poem -- but get rid of this stanza. If you want.

Okay so... this poem is about disliking what is popular and accepted, correct? Exploring it through... the letter zed? Hmmm. Like, Z can't work as a normal letter, it needs to sound bizarre and stand on the edge?

That is amazingly clever.

This is my favorite poem I've read throughout NaPo. I want to share it with someone or something, ha.

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I am getting tired -- it's late, I did have work. I will return to this thread at a later time! I promise!

<3 Clo

Wow, Clo, that was likewise some of the best advice I've received on my writing so far!

I agree Tiempo is about a too-widely-covered topic, but I hoped with a fresh metaphor of time, it would not be cliche. I have reworked sentences in there on my own copy of the poem. I actually didn't like 'Just' much; it seemed too unbelievable and bland for me, but then again, I have never lay down on a road; maybe that's why. It's not a masterpiece, yes, but I'm fiddling around with it all the same.

I've lengthened out the endings of Recuerdo and The Ice-cream man, but before I feel confident that they 'work' and are not just 'tack-ons,' I won't be putting them up on my NaPo thread, but'll keep them in my docs at home. I definitely agree about that useless strawberry image in the poem on Zed - it seems you've drawn out more meaning out of that poem than I had! I wrote it simply to express my annoyance at stuffing 'z' in words as is done in America, but also giving the idea of weeds and popularity in my obvious pruning of words the British way. I guess the structure was such that there were even some hidden meanings in there!

Thanks - and I look forward to the other reviews. Yeah, I wish they counted as reviews too.

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So. Where have you been all my life?

Your April 8th poems are great. Your style is so fresh and punchy, and yet, you never let your voice overcome the necessary element of the poem -- the image. I'm usually not disappointed when I read your poetry -- there is always a fresh image, an impression of something new and well mastered. You have a certain degree of casual nonchalance in your poetry, which is something that I'd love to see reflected in my own work, a certain modern beatnik groove thing going on (I just woke up...don't judge me )

April 9th -- I much preferred the Land of the Long White Cloud to Necking, just because Necking is more of a weird, bland super-vignette...Although, I did find the closing stanza interesting, just because it reminds me of a scene in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, which is a fantastic book if you haven't read it yet, where the mother and father of the main character end up scrubbing the leg of the main character raw after that area was touched by a sexual organ when she was *almost* assaulted by some guy in a stairwell. I didn't care for the way you wrote Cloud in at first, either, just because I don't really care for direct conversation with the audience in any piece of work, but by the last half, you had me. Sort of a portrait of New Zealand. Good stuff.

Anyway, keep up the good work. And I hope you become a regular fixture on this site.

-Kylan

Thank you, Kylan, for the wonderful comments. I hope I have not overwhelmed you with mine.

I'm very tired, so I apologize if I fail to phrase things appropriately.

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Middle Ground:

I enjoy, really, every line here. "Love never lived a line". I find more meaning in that than you probably assumed, but still. I feel like that is a very strong line that people can interpret in a number of personal ways.

Your RL:

The first part of the poem here I find, well, unnecessary. You approach a person -- I found the only really important lines the bit about smiling.

In fact, I feel like none of these parts should be separate parts -- they don't stand on their own. And at the end, I feel strange, because I feel like after being slowly drawn out a story was just starting -- and then you stop -- before really anything happens. Maybe the prior poem was so good I'm just comparing too much.

Commandment:

I like the very idea behind this poem. You almost seem to sexualize it with your word choice -- I'm not sure if you did that on purpose. Maybe with the "circling up the skirt" and all that. Sexualizing words and writing, I can get behind that. I really dislike the imagery "adverbs shitting on my pages". I know some people don't like adverbs -- but how harsh! Also, maybe I'm bias because I like sex but I hate flatulent related things, haha, but I really don't like the images given by "shitting", in a poem that seems so -- intimate.

Cassy Randolphson:

Wow. Here I was thinking I might have something to say about your latest, but really -- that was an amazing poem. It almost seems like your development of the character could open up to a story, or couple with a photograph or some such.

I'll try to accomplish more, maybe on Sunday, here.

<3 Clo

Cheers, Clo - funny, some didn't like my geometrical love ('Love never lived a line.'), I half-heartedly agree with everything about YouRL (and the whole point was to leave you dissatisfied, unsure, wanting more, but hesitant to ask - so glad I managed that! It's kind of about an edgy topic, so, yeah.) I'll spruce up Commandment for you (did you realise it was from a Christian perspective - I break the Commandments, by stealing and then murdering the words, and then change (the wind) in the form of love (the sexual imagery), flings my creation of destruction into the 'righteous air!' - clear? or not?). Glad you like Cassy. I love that girl

Heyyy, I guess I should stop lurking at some point, right? So. Review. Yes.

Navita wrote:

Blue Diamond

I gave you a deep blue crystal
the whitewater day before you
left us.

"I gave you a deep blue crystal" isn't, maybe, the best first line you could use here. It's not always necessary, of course, to have the first line be gripping and shiny and so on and so forth, especially in poetry, but I'm pretty sure you can do better. "Deep blue crystal", as a description, also lacks something, and seems almost redundant, given how much better a job you do of it later on. Consider just not naming the gift at all in that first sentence, and maybe inverting the sentence also (I like whitewater day loads more, as openings go), or else rewriting that first clause.

When I was twelve
in a slash of space-light, I
watched it grow into a perfect
copper sulphate diamond –
I only had to turn away
and it had blossomed.
Four and a half fingers,
cracked iron poles grasp it now; you
wanted it, you say you are
sixty-six but you’ve said that
for almost forever.

I want a better sense of where you found this diamond, and how. Space-light is a lovely, lovely phrase but it went right over my head. Watching it grow? And 'blossomed' is an interesting word here because diamonds don't, exactly, grow like flowers, do they? They more build up. Like anthills. :'D At least, that was my understanding, although it's been a while since I knew anything about diamonds.

'Cracked iron poles' is kind of so-so; the echo of a diamond-setting in how you describe the hand of whoever the speaker is talking to could be nice, I guess, but isn't currently, and I'm pretty sure that wasn't what you were going for anyway. Try making it more specific? I dunno.

I recognise the soft patter
of ma’s footstepts, father’s thump,
I learnt them young – somehow
the mocking slappity-slap of your
mouse-yellow, two dollar
jandals I never needed to master.

Hm. I want more transition. Rearrange this part of the stanza, I think, to emphasize the earliness of the memory, the parallels to almost-forever.

In the flying oval lip of
morning,

The flying oval lip of morning is awfully cool, but, um, what does it mean?

5 o’ clock, you rose
and yelped your prayers in
the cavernous kitchen-lounge
where we had made a shrine. I
clamped my pillow over my ears
unable to even softly dream.

No niggling little complaints, I really like this, in all its simplicity.

You are a hoarder, fighting
over your skyless stash of odds
and ends, stabbing me with
your vegetarian glare and
raspy silence when I used the
fishknife on the melon and took
a month to master the blubbery
art of knitting scarves – but no,
I think you will keep it, this
clear-dark diamond, if not
because I made it but as
it’ll fetch a toe-high price,
since at any skittering instant
it might fall and shatter.

And this last stanza is the best of the poem, rhetorically and otherwise, to me.

That said: the idea that the diamond was made makes me think I am missing something really important, in fact upon rereading I am almost certain of it. Are we actually talking about copper sulphate crystals, or what?

Note: everything is true, true, true here, and I don't know if I've done it right - what message do you get out of it? What feeling? What is the significance of the blue diamond? I want to make sure I've got that across right.

I don't think I got it. A grandfather, I was inclined to think, or grand-something anyway, damaged physically and mentally, and the child who knew its duty if not exactly its love for the person, this strange fixture of its existence? Uh.

I am very bad, in general, at understanding poetry, and it is early in the morning in my timezone, but my first reaction is that this is maybe too true. You veer between a certain spareness of description and support for the reader and then again to density, an abundance of both: I think you are better, right now, at density, as in the last stanza, with all those close and lovely phrases strung into perfect lines, but this feels like a poem that could do with some poverty, at least, I think that's what it's called, a poverty of images and words. See if you can't pare this down to what you think is essential to the feeling you are trying to convey while still never bringing in the feeling itself: squeeze all the excess juice out of the sentences. It might work better, for you and for those of us who are reading it.

Hey Helpful - that was...have a guess...very helpful indeed. In fact, I'm going to do a rewrite right now. Just to clarify a few things: that copper sulphate crystal was something I made in science class - yes, I pretty much watched it blossom and grow over the course of a few weeks/months; you put a tiny, tiny solid piece of copper sulphate, suspended by a string into a copper sulphate solution, and it 'grows' = gets bigger (in the shape of a diamond). I am thinking about the poverty vs density thing, which you have so interestingly phrased, and it will probably gnaw at me for the next few days. The poem (I hate to have to spell it out) was about me giving a present to my grandma that was made as fragile as our relationship.

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NA-VEEEE-TA. You're pretty much my new favorite person.

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You RL -- AGAIN!

I now see where you identify him as a teacher:

your voice, tender, leading
me through the proof of induction

and complex numbers.

And at that, I love the idea of a lecture sound romantic -- tender! Also, now the end of the poem does seem more appropriate. The exposure of a question, very scandalous. Gets the heart going, as you even say in the poem, and then it cuts us off.

I don't know how I missed the teacher bit before -- I knew he was elderly, but it just skipped right by me. I would suggest trying to shed off some of the subtlety, but of course this could be a critique on my reading comprehension of the poem, in which case you need to change nothing and I need to pay attention more closely!

As for the controversy of it -- controversy is amazing. I say tackle it and enjoy it, dive head first into it as a writer and be wary of the aftermath, but plan accordingly. I'm all for it, and the story behind this poem (well, the writing about it anyway). Plus, it seems a thing lately -- so many stories and movies.

Before I speak of Fantaisie-Impromptu: is this poem about bringing music into the world? It's hard to tell, but a reread seems to suggest this?

<3 Clo

Hey Clo - to answer your question about Fantaise-Impromptu - here's the FIRST reason why I wrote it: because I've done this - I snuck into a uni hostel's music room at the crack of dawn and started playing that piece of music like crazy on the spur of my dream, wanting to wake up the whole wide world. On a simple note, it's about doing crazy things like that on the spur of the moment, on a dream. It's also about the whole 'creation vs destruction' thing like 'Commandment' - I am shattering that tiny smidgen of space between dark and light, that fragile in-between with music (something creative becoming destructive) - but I do NOT want to put words into your mind -so next time, I'd prefer it if you gave me your version of it FIRST and then I 'revealed the secret,' as it does not help me as much. I want to know an oblivious reader's first thoughts - not MY thoughts reflected in YOURS! But feel free to take a stab at it now, nevertheless.

Yes, I know I shouldn't ask, haha, but I felt a little confused about the topic. It's very abstractly put together, and gives no hint of an actual setting until toward the end, though it implies a setting. My first impression upon reading it was that you were desiring to bring music into the world to have some sort of effect -- any effect. I thought you were speaking of the idea of creation behind music, making something that will cause other people to react to it in a myriad number of ways.

The lines themselves are superb, and the abstractness and complexity of it is interesting, though the images are almost too free at the beginning, not anchored down by an solid image or setting, and so it's difficult to realize what even the topic is until the end. It's too vague at what you're getting at for too long. I would say try to solidify some of the concepts -- lightly, ever so lightly, we don't want to get blunt or anything which I tend to do haha -- at the beginning, just planting seeds of the idea into the reader's head and letting that bloom into realization, instead of letting the reader drift and not absorb any whole idea, drift back and scan some lines, drift some more.

The bridge at the beginning -- I just can't tell if that's literal or part of your concept, and it's okay to both, but then again it's not enough to anchor the reader down into a meaning.

The writing is wonderful though, and I obviously am a fan of creation/destruction and all that.

<3 Clo