The Teenage Mind

Hello, ILoveBooks here to review your work in Review Day! That is great.

Happy Review Day!

This is just wow for me. This really spoke to my heart. Because seriously I'm a teenager myself. And I experience some of those teenager problems along the way. And for me when I saw the title of your poem, it caught my attention so much. So I couldn't help myself but push the button and start to read this thing. And wow I didn't not regret reading this one. It was simply amazing. This poem was dark and morbid for me. But that darkness actually hide one powerful meaning. It actually taught me and the rest of the teenagers out there who are reading this some moral things. Well done for making me cry inside with this heart warming and wonderful poem. This is what I always wanted. A poem that is about my life. Thank you for writing this.

Happy Review Day again by the way.

Just continue writing and you will have other successful things in life especially being a poem writer.

-ILoveBooks out.

Hi Amindor. RainbowOfGayness here.
This is wow. It is filled with alot of emotion and deep thought. Being a teenager, this lets younger and older people look into our minds and see what we think about. As for the way you've presented this poem it is fantastic. The way it's typed and the words that are used makes it all the better. I enjoyed it. Happy writing!!!

Haiyaz. Wow. This poem is really emotional and realistic. I'm a teen and I totally agree with everything written in this poem. You really did show how each teenage mind is entirely different, and I completely agree with this. I love the way you wrote so many different thoughts that go through different teens' minds. You really depicted the difference yet similar things in their minds, (the similarities mostly/entirely being how each child's mind wonders something about something different). All in all, I really like the poem. Thanks for sharing.

I absolutely love this poem! I myself am a teenager and I believe and value the same opinions you presented in this poem. I loved the way you described many different teenager struggles and how sometimes some people are going through more than what is on the outside. Many people in our generation need to read more stuff like this.

No one knows
Except us
So if your wondering why some of us are so hard to understand
Look deeper

Hello,
This piece has a lot of raw emotion to it which came across vividly, well done, and you explored many elements of adolescence which is extremely challenging and traumatic. Sometimes it was difficult to read as the rhythm of the writing was often interrupted by an extra line here, and missing one there.
I'd like to see a future collection of your work that focuses on one or two of the idea explored here, in more depth, instead of jam-packing everything into a short space. Although, in saying that, it did make the last few lines have a decent impact.

Good luck with your writing.

Hello Amindor,

First Thing's First. Love your profile picture, in fact, I'd love to call my good friend Bast over to see as I am sure she would gush over it. Now onto the review!

There are things I like about this work and there are things I feel could be improved on. First, I felt there were times where this could be a bit difficult to read. Part of it is the centered formatting, part of it is that there is one piece of punctuation in the entire poem, and part of it is the sentence structure. I think some work with meter could really help this poem out. I am not saying that the entire poem needs to follow a certain metric style, but I do think it needs to flow a little better. It feels kind of choppy.

Punctuation is a must. Each part that starts with "the teenage mind" I think, ought to be treated as a new sentence. I'm not sure centering the text works for this. I used to love centering things as well when I was younger, in recent years I've come to see that as a distraction often times unless the lines are quite similar in length. Yours are similar, but they are so short that the line breaks combined with the centered text just slows the reader up and causes a lot of unneeded cessations in our reading.

Some things I liked. I actually really enjoyed the repetition. I enjoyed the multiple narratives going on. I think that is something that can be worked with. I love when poems are able to weave together narratives of so many different people. It makes them more interesting, more dense. I think the message could be a it stronger, right now it feels a little whiny, especially with that last line. I can just see an adult reading this and saying "Typical teenager." More emotion, but less petty emotion would serve you well.

Hope this helps you out. Keep working on it! It could get somewhere!

-H.o.H.

Sorry, I forgot to press review on it :S

Wow! This is Meda for a review~

Okay, so I guess the first thing to address is that this is really raw. It seems like you really have a story to tell, something you want to express. That's good! The best writing comes from purpose, in my experience, whether self-indulgent, self-expressive, a gift for someone else, something you struggle to say aloud--whatever the reason, it lends to quality writing.

On the other hand, I feel like this piece isn't really bringing anything new to the table. It boils down to a story that may have been better expressed in a prose format. It comes across as kind of...angsty, for lack of a better world. I remember feeling like people didn't understand me because I was a teenager, that adults forgot what it was like to be our age, and that isn't quite the story. I think it's more a matter of gaining further perspective on the thoughts and feelings of our younger selves. I have a number of very vivid memories from my early childhood up to the end of middle school that make me cringe, based on further experience. Yes, sometimes it is hard to remember what we were thinking in the past, but that doesn't mean people of different ages are fundamentally incapable of understanding each other.

It mimics a lot of my late middle school to early high school poetry--a very common theme that I see in a lot of people in that age range is setting oneself up as separate from the crowd, or as part of a group that others don't understand. It's something that I think most people grow out of as they gain more perspective. I think the best thing to do to gain perspective and to become a better writer is to live. Read about philosophy, have discussions about world events, talk to someone you usually wouldn't, etc.

Onto more direct things:

Personally, I tend to avoid direct narrative poetry as much as I can, at least in the form you have here. I find that focusing on drawing an emotion out without outright stating that a person feels or what that should make the reader feel tends to evoke more powerful feelings overall. That has really helped me to write some powerful things.

I also think the short lines as well as being centered and in one continuous stanza make it rather difficult to read this piece. It can be really effective to play around with line breaks and punctuation and other stylistic things.

I also feel as though your general writing style could benefit from a little bit of vocabulary expansion. Most great work challenges a reader to think, whether through creative use of simple words or through specific language highlighting exactly what is meant.

I hope you are able to keep the rawness you express in this piece, as I feel it is one of the best foundations to build good poetry on.

Thank you for posting!

Meda~