Young Writers Society

Hey ClippedWings. Autumns here with my thoughts-

So what do we have here - coming of age, the ups and downs in a friendship, 'what others think' getting in the way of two people. All of them are interesting material for a poem. But the main reason I liked this is because it's simple, graceful and never drifts off the main idea. Rhythm, flow, grammar are also okay. Amazingly, there is no use of conventional punctuation - commas and periods (how do you do that?) and it still works fine. So, no nitpicks in that department.

The only suggestion I would make is that you should try varying the intensity of imagery as the poem progresses. It seems to have the same, light intensity from top to bottom (which works fine, believe me). But you might want to try having some intense imagery at strategic points in the poem, for example, each time the two run into each other, put in some breathtaking-lump-in-the-throat-goosebumps-and-heartbeating-sy stuff. I think that would, sort of, demarcate the poem into meaningful parts, in addition to showing the time gap between their encounters with each other. I hope you got my point - I don't want you to edit your poem, it's beautiful as such, I'm just saying that you can try experimenting with it.

Keep writing!
Au.

that was so sweet to read, a cute love story. i liked your style of keeping lines short, it a good trick to make the readers read a quite long poem as this.
now for the nitpicks-
"shaking off the cooties"- what are cooties, please don't think i am too idiotic or stupid, i just felt it would be better to ask you rather than searching it on google. i am really not acquainted to this term.

"I said no"- why did you say no. you mentioned the age as twelve and i don't think much of the self consciousness grows by then to say someone no for a dance. moreover you two liked each other even then right. another question as why would such a small mistake break so sweet a childhood friendship even for a short time?
"You smiled
rather sadly for fifteen
and took it".- why "sadly'' i do not really see much cause for this sadness you mention here.
overall the poem is really too cute and pretty. it however is quite too long. i get it that you intended to develop all the emotions well but may be the 15 years thing could have been ignored.
i love your poems and its been long that i didn't review any work of yours so it was good to see your poem around.
keep writing
Rituparna

Clippedwings!

Your podium/valedictorian rhyme? Brilliant. I also enjoyed some of the subtler ones, like the seen/fifteen and the time/tie. I love how you played with it instead of imposing a rhyme structure, it made it a lot more natural and free-flowing, and we still get a very strict structure in the pacing and the way that time passes very regularly. I also enjoyed the sort of casual way you play with alliteration-- pocket protector, lunch line. These all sort of culminate to create something cute and I get this really warm and fuzzy feeling at the end.

My suggestion is to try to get tighter with some of these rhythms and sounds. The poem is already very clean. It reads like prose, the narration is swift and casual. I like that about this piece, I think that you can still preserve the way that the poem reads and still polish it up even further. Just take each line, or each stanza, and go piece by piece and pay attention to each syllable and each vowel and try to get things as tight as you can, try removing any excess, if you can remove a word and have it still make sense, do so.

I hope this helps,

as always, Audy

I loved your illustration of the way relationships between boys and girls change as they get older. The repetitive "When I met you" adds a lot of voice and rhythm to this poem and the same for the repeats of the "rather" phrases. I thought this was a very beautiful and unique poem. I only have one suggested change: I'm pretty sure you meant "suit" when you said "uit" in the fifth-to-last stanza.

Can't wait to see more,
Joy