Young Writers Society

Hey Gee!

You have a lyrical style in all of your poetry that is very expressive of whatever tone it is you're trying to achieve. The title immediately drew me in, and I know this is one of your NaPo ones, so I'm just going to dig right in.

Now, the concept of a faceless man without anything to admire or smell, or in fact, live -- I love that concept. This idea has an enchanted, fantastical quality to it.

I'll be honest though, I'm not a fan of the repetitions in this. I think it's fine if you begin the first stanza with the "I have no -- I lost my -- I painted my ---" and then sort of use the rest of the space that it creates within the rest of the lines to sort of delve deeper into that theme. It's okay to express that you saw the light, but why not also express the significance of seeing it?

Still, all in all, it's simple, refreshing, lyrical as always. I'm always happy to chat this one over with you. Hope this helps.

~ as always, Audy

"I lost my dimples when my heart crippled."

" but subsisting in this pain feels like a crime.
I am sorry, Madeline, but you can't be mine,"

You rhyme, even if it is slant rhyme, rarely in this poem, and these two quotes are the ones that really stand out to me. That bothers me. I noticed it really with the first one, even though it's not exact, dimples and crippled are so similar I read mentally cripples, which doesn't even really fit the poem's tense. Maybe that's just my reading, but I figured I should point it out.

So this poem somewhat annoyed me in another way too, it is very formulaic in the language choice. It's not all the way through, but it is enough with the italic passages, that it was bothersome. I know I'm currently irritable, so take this with a grain of salt, but the italic passages really lost it for me. I feel like painting everything onto a dead baby child is a bit extreme, and doesn't say enough at the same time. It is extreme in that your mother is holding a lifeless test subject, and it doesn't make her feel sorrow, she was dismissed as a sociopath in my head. I'm not sure that is what you were going for, but then you say you were also alive, because you were gullible, and gullible people actually do have to be able to believe something, and cadavers cannot believe, so somehow, this is before you died, before you were an infant cadaver in your mother's arms. (You as in your speaker, not you as in Gee, I'm just not really going to sort through that right now.)

So that was my first assumption from the first stanza, "Before I was dead in my mothers arms without her crying," and then we have a fragment. To me, that's alright. A poem can be a sentence after all, so I kept reading, and you started doing this, and this is me paraphrasing or whatever they call it.
'Before I was dead in my mothers arms without her crying,
I was a painter attempting to create my own face.'
But you aren't concise. You go through your nose, your eyes, your dimples? At first I was thinking you were going for senses, eyes, ears, nose, skin receptors, mouth, You could even do, with my skin receptors, I found my eyes, my ears, my nose, my mouth. It just didn't make sense that there were dimples and lips with the mix.

But also you kiss Ane Lee, and I have no idea who that is. I don't think I ever will. That was alright, but it was confusing. I disliked most, that you used 'I painted my' every single time. When things get repetitive in poetry, according to what I learned when I was in 3rd grade in poetry o0 you drop it to just the stuff that isn't repeated. The reader can figure out that you're just adding more statements to that one section without any problem. So in essence your poem would look:
"I painted my eyes when I saw the light.
nose when I smelled a rose.
dimples the first time I giggled.
and lips when I kissed Ane Lee."
You could even add ... before each one to suggest it is missing something.
Same thing for the rest of the italics. It's a thought for how else this poem could look and something to play with.

I think I would drop the italics all together though. The real poetic language happens outside of those when you're talking about white lies, dead test bodies, and that type of thing. Again though, I don't know who Madeline is and I feel like if you dropped the name, even though it is important to name them to you, it is not important for me to know the name unless I want to write a biography on your speaker. I don't want to write a biography on your speaker, I want to see how your speaker talks about the feeling of being incapable of love for someone else, like the mother was for the dead test baby.

Anyway, I like the imagery you used with the dead test baby even if it confuses me, and the white little lies is cute. You just got too far away from it through the poem for me to follow, especially when you're just repeating yourself with the distracting italics. I hope this helps. If it doesn't I'm sorry x.x;

<3

While I enjoy the inventiveness of your premise, I feel that a bit more cohesiveness and concision would do this piece good. It lacks a single, unifying theme. Consider you first stanza--read it in terms of its relevance to the body of the poem and to what you are trying to accomplish with it. Establishing a starting point is essential, but can you recall anything of your infantility, GeeLyria? Any emotion? You see why it has no place in narrative poetry: poetry is a vessel for experience and personality and emotion, and you know of your infant years only through stories. Further, in the context of this particular piece, your opening stanza simply has nothing to do with what follows.

I call for more cohesion because this begins as a narration of your childhood and ends on a romantic note, and it's difficult to see where the two link. Some other symbols are unclear--what is the thorn and why is it there? What is the significance of "cadaver of my silence?"

Additionally, a certain element of line-by-line connectivity is lacking in this piece. The line breaking does little to mask the extremely repetitive sentence structuring, which I recognize was intended to lend structure to this piece but was invalidated both by the inconsistent rhyme schemes and the syllabic imbalances. Consider this:

Fallibility wasn't strictly punished back then,
but these days you either die or run away.