Young Writers Society

Hey, yo, DrFeelGood! Strange here on this fantastic review day and I have a review for you!

I'm going to comment on the question you asked below. As a fellow satirist, it is rather difficult to write subtle yet engaging satire. Heck, I don't think the majority of my poems are subtle. When they are, I like it. However, the ones that are subtle (to me, at least), I put less thought into it. You know the expression "write with your heart"? I think that's the best way to go. Let it bleed out with really no thought at all.

The worst part about satire poems that are too "in-your-face" is that the author had a plan in mind. They wanted to make fun of the government, have an extremely precise plot, and have witty metaphors talking about religion. That person expects so much, that it becomes obvious. The work basically screams "laugh at me! I'm witty, I'm intelligent! LOOK AT ME!" which gives it no room to breathe.

If you want it to be extremely in-your-face and yet a satire, just be aggressive. Make it so the reader can't breathe. Be self aware, too. That's you making fun of yourself and those who write stuff like that. That's pretty witty.

With that said, I actually enjoyed this poem. It was obvious and not subtle, but it doesn't suffer from what I said above. I found this to be a nice humor poem. That's always good. You make me laugh quite a bit, and you know what you're doing. If you feel tired, then stretch. Explore!

Judicious he is,
He sprints with all his might,
Knowing the simple fact,
That the chase will never end.

The game has just ended,
The guy has just been caught.
I look at the Subway Surfer,
He's the reflection of my life!

Hey DivineFool,

I really like that you are connecting something trivial like a game on the phone with something more profound like life. You've got a good direction that you're going with this. Taking a game and making it something more profound can be difficult. Usually the difficulty is the scale. Finding something of a similar type such as the racing of life to something as small as a timed video game can actually be rather difficult for some people writing poetry. Sometimes the art is in how to relate things and I think that you picked two really good things to relate. Not only is the game something you can do at any time, it's something a lot of people have experience with. This makes it easy to develop a quick relationship between the reader and the narrator, which establishes trust and familiarity.

I think the main point I would like to make of critique is that though you have this clearly established early on, you dance around it, and continue to act as though it hasn't been built. Instead of dealing with the subject matter, you keep playing with the video game and how it operates. If we're reading this poem, chances are pretty high we know how it operates, and if we don't, you can summarize it for us in a few short lines. You don't need several stanzas to do that.

I think if you used less space talking about the game and how it plays out, and more time relating the two, you would have a better outcome. Right now it feels like the conclusion is really rushed. You don't have that much comparison between the two, just the brief stanza at the end, if that, it is more like the last line of the poem to reflect all of the beginning of the poem as something monolithic. This would be okay if the first part of the poem used more creative language that would stick with you through the rest of the poem, but right now it's rather drab, which is fine for what it is trying to do.

So, since this is under satire, I will point out that the above things can help whether this poem is serious or sarcastic about life being like Subway Surfer. Poetry reaches so far and in so many ways that life can be like anything and I think that arguing that life is like Subway Surfer is a valid argument. If you want to actually make your sarcasm obvious or funnier, you can do the above things same with if you want to make an actual belief known.

That being said, because it is a content thing and not just grammar and spelling errors, I'm going to suggest you do a rewrite. Re-format the poem in your head and work with it more like an essay where you're making a comparative argument that Subway Surfer is like the narrator's life. This means you have a few choices.

You can choose to organize it with describing one, describing how the second one relates to the first one, and extracting a conclusion, or you can take each stanza and describe one, the other, and summarize the comparison then at the very end, draw all of your conclusions. It's sort of like your choice of mixing paint. Right now we have a lot of red [Subway Surfer] and just a dab of yellow [the comparison to life]. I'm looking for more of a yellow-orange and you're giving us a slightly off-colored red.

The reason I think a more yellow-orange would be useful is because you've already drawn us in, you have good writing, you just need to use it to make something memorable. Right now your idea is memorable but there's so little of it that it's trying to go for the shock value and it's just not getting enough of an awe reaction. Instead go for a broader, more comprehensible picture and that will get better results.

The only other thing I can suggest is how to spice up the language. Honestly, I don't think you need to in this poem, though it is a bit dry, I just want to share the information with you so in the future if you're going for a really rich poem language-wise, you have my advice.

You have three main things you can use to spice up your language, sounds, meaning, and look. If you're going for sounds, you can explore rich sounds like "lucrative" where they have flowing thick syllables (sounds more from the back of the throat and vocalized), or you can use repetitious sounds like internal rhyme (rhymes in the middle of the poem), external rhyme (rhymes at the end of lines), or alliteration (words that begin with the same sounds). There are other types of rhymes too like slant rhymes which you can check out. Rhyming can be a pain though because if you start a pattern externally, you have to complete it and follow through unless you're using it to highlight a certain part of the sentence which you want to stand out. Internally, it's not that big of a deal. Alliteration tends to be the thing used today because it's easier to do and provides a better feedback when read out loud without as much work.

Meaning and look can be things like word play, using words that look or sound the same but mean two different things, and puns. These can be fun, but mostly you want to keep them to a minimum in a poem. Homophone and Homonyms are really common things to use if you're trying to be tricky with something and want to get creative with it. Honestly, puns are a bit overdone, but people do laugh and have fun with them so they might be a good way to taunt something like you can playing with a cliche.

All in all, I think you've picked up on something that can be incredibly funny or incredibly eye-opening and shocking depending on what you do with it. Right now this feels like the beginning of a poem that you just haven't finished. I hope to see you finish it, trim it down, and smelt it into what it can be. If nothing else, I think you can read this again in a couple years and get a good chuckle. I hope this helps!

Aley

I'm so glad you have wrote a poem about my all time favourite game!!! This is really good

You just connected life, death and this poem together...
Now this is what I call fine poetry.
Well done, bro. This was worth being featured!

Interesting take on the game! This poem is pretty creative and fun. I don't see anywhere that would require improvement, either. There are a few places where punctuation is needed, but I'm sure you could find those places by rereading. The only suggestion I have is considering changing the phrases, "Judicious is he. He sprints with all his might." To, "Judicious is he, Sprinting with all his might."

Happy writing
-Emily

I love that game. XD