Young Writers Society

Hi again! You're so awesome. I know we're all here for reviewing, but you are MUCH better at showing thankfulness for reviews than I am. It's a good quality and it's always nice to see someone take reviews into account when you put your time into them. That's why I'm back! To see what I can say about this new poem. : )

The first thing I want to say is that I always recommend, unless you're tryna get experimental with your poem, is to take out the line breaks and punctuate it like prose. Then put the line breaks right back in and if you're good at prose punctuation you'll have a perfectly punctuated poem, too. Right now, there's a lot missing, but I think you can fix that on your own.

Now, as for the rest, a lot of this poem seems familiar. Like it's been done before. Everyone's seen blood tears, and though maybe it's intense the first time you ever think about them, the novelty wears off quickly. I've seen it before, so it's weak for me in your poem. You have to find the specificity that only you can bring to this exploration of emotion.

That means taking out all the vague explanations. I don't want to hear that you did bad things ("These unjusts that I have done"). I want to see what you did, or at least feel / sense the remnants of these "unjusts". Give me specificity or give me death, I cry! haha.

Now, maybe you don't want to be specific. You want to grab all these bad feelings at once and evoke them. Then don't tell me about them, still. EVOKE them. Use words that FEEL like the unjusts you've done. You don't have to talk about one, but to talk about all of them, skirt them a little. Think of things related to unjust or snub: candle stub comes to mind for me. Word association games can help you out a lot when you're trying to scrape together a poem.

Oh, it's hard work, but you can do it!

Let me know on my wall or through PM if you have any questions, since there aren't any notifications for you replying to my review and I might never see it again!

Good luck!!

Walker here, as requested.

There is a certain depth of emotion you're trying to convey here, and to a degree, you really attempt at hammering it home. A lot of strong, near graphic imagery with the bloody tears and the heavy sounding words like 'damned' and 'destiny'. The problem being is, during this certain attempt, you spend so much time on the intent of the poem coming across as vivid and dark and merciless that the diction becomes almost muddled by the overuse of such terms.

You lose the real power those words could bring forth by pairing them constantly with ones of them same nature. Like eating an entire pie to yourself. That first slice of pie is delicious, but after a time, you start to feel sick from all the dough and apple and sugar, so that, by the very last piece, you don't really feel as if you're enjoying it anymore.

Thats what happens with heavy words. Slight conveyances are beautiful. A whole ton of them slammed all at once can be overbearing and, quite frankly, unenjoyable to read.

Not that this, of course, was unenjoyable. There were certain aspects I regard.

As for substance, the intent of the poem was meant to be dark, which I can understand as poetry, often enough, brings out the beauty in the darkness. Just, when looking at some of the more tragic lines, I felt a little miffed by them. For instance;

Oh, the sorrow I have cried,
be damned if it did me good.