Young Writers Society

Hey, this is Summerdepressionexe; I have a quick review for you.

This piece is beautifully disjointed. It doesn't have much in the form of an overarching 'plot,' but it all falls under the same message, which is why it works.

I love the line "we wait for political revolution, despite not knowing what 'distribution of wealth means, because all we know is that melted popsicles taste delicious in front of PBS Kids on the TV." It takes me back to my childhood and really shines in your theme of innocence.

In the future, I would suggest doing a quick grammar and spelling check on your work before posting it. I saw quite a few typos, which is not a big deal on this site, but may cause some problems if you ever try to publish your work.

Lastly, I love how you use capitalization to your advantage. The entire poem is lowercase, except the last line, which makes "Thank You" all the more powerful.

Anyways... have an awesome day, Evander, and keep writing!!

Hey man, you know I love you, so I'm not gonna bother with the whole "this is great but--" and I'm gonna just ramble on about whatever I see at the moment.

So the poem starts out with an ambiguous pronoun: we. While I think that sometimes this is all right, I really want to know who the "we" is specifically in this poem. I think that it would anchor the poem a little more in reality because you've got a lot of stuff going on here, and I think a more concrete anchor would help this poem come into its full glory.

waiting for childsize scissors make the edges smooth;

the light from the outside world fades away with the promise of pizza lingering, never spoken.

means,
because all we know

we left our cardboard castles by the pizza boxes

as our father dragged them back

the past holds tight

Hmm. I will get to the point.

There was a little disjoint between the stanzas, it didn't seem to be one continuous flow. I understand some of the messages given, but there are unclear.

Try to space out your lines more, it confuses the reader a little bit with everything jumbled together. Also, the beggining of each line should be capitalized.

Keep up the god work! And don't be discouraged!

-Caroline

Hi Castor,

Thank you for posting this piece I enjoyed the nostalgic imagery and the current criticisms. The recurrent imagery of the "cardboard castles" and food ( )definitely tied the poem together and conveyed the sense of helplessness in access to information and the current climate. Overall, you truly have some powerful imagery throughout the entire piece.

I have a couple of criticisms. I don't claim to be necessarily a solid poet or an avid poetry reader, however there were a couple of things I noticed. I noticed you have a pattern in the funnel length. The first and third stanzas have longer and more complex phrases while the second and fourth are more simplistic. While I believe this pattern can help give the reader a break from the complex stanzas and emphasize particular statements or final imagery, I struggled with finding the flow. As I read the poem, I felt as if it was a bit disjointed within the stanzas themselves. There didn't seem to be a clear direction from one phrase to the next within the stanzas.

If you were hoping to communicate a sense of anger or frustration through this structure, I understood that more through the imagery than the structure and pattern. Free form poetry doesn't necessarily have to have a pattern, but it felt in your poem that you meant for it to have some sort of effect from the pattern/structure. If this is something you want to work on, I would suggest simply reading it out loud or reading too people because you'll catch where it's awkward, typos, or where it doesn't work.

That being said, I think you have a solid foundation of imagery and ideas all throughout the poem. I hope my criticism doesn't discourage you! My complete intention is for it to be constructive Please let me know if there's anything else I can help with.

All the best,

Jadefox