Young Writers Society

Hi there ForeverFlying. This is Kays here dropping in for a review on this exceptional Monday night seeing that this is in the Green Room and I'm looking to review. That being said, I wanted to give you a warm welcome to YWS! If you ever have any questions, don't be afraid to ask me or any other names in green or red. Now that we've acquaintanced ourselves a little bit better, let's cut to the chase and jump right in, shall we?

I already attempted reviewing this once before but my review ended up being deleted because I accidentally misclicked out of the first tab (the one that I use to write the review in while in the other I read the poem and copy and paste) which I ended up being upset over for a couple of minutes but I'm ready to repeat what I already said before so let's start by taking a look at the first three lines.

I look at you the way one might

look at the stars, or a sunset.

But would you know?

Looking at these first three lines while the lines are fine and there's not all that much that can be added to pack more of a punch and instead this is more of an opening that isn't quite soft but isn't quite packing the emotional weight or strength that other poems may. Neither delicate nor a punch to the gut but what I do want to talk about and critique is the flow of these first three lines. I'm going to suggest taking out the period at the end of the second line or on the other hand there's the chance for a second possibility which is to take out 'but' at the beginning of the third line.

The problem that stands here now is that the word 'but' is a S.T.A.B. word and the definition is: essentially a word that is usually supposed to be used to connect an independent clause to a dependent clause. These words are So, To, And, But/Because and you can see why they're all on the list. There's the option of removing the word 'but' in the third line for this reason or going with the first route that I suggested and connecting the second line to the third line and taking out that period and placing a comma there instead. That being said, I wanted to point out the eighth line. The eighth line begins with the word 'and' and believe it or not, I'm completely okay with that.

There are exceptions to the rule of S.T.A.B. that are far and few between but basically taking these words out can also help the flow but the eighth line is a rare example of 'and' beginning a line done right. I wanted to also point out the fact that the word 'tongue' is spelled wrong in line eleven and my overall thoughts on the poem are that while the imagery is interesting I found this could've held a bit more direction or to be more specific, structure? The themes are clear by the end of the poem but I'm going to suggest breaking this up into stanzas (if you hadn't already and your formatting wasn't messed up by the Publishing Center and if so, give me a moment and I'll get into that).

Since the Publishing Center is odd and messes up the formatting of poetry a lot of the time if the author is copying and pasting instead of screenshotting their poem (this is the first way that you're able to make your poetry look the way you want it to). With screenshotting you can basically open up whatever software or program or document is used to write the poetry, screenshot and crop out all that extra stuff around the poem although I tend to take the second route which is formatting manually. You can line all the lines up in a stanza and then hit shift+enter where you want the line breaks to be but finally if all of those are seeming a little confusing there's always this lovely article in the Knowledge Base written by Aley on formatting poetry in the Publishing Center. Overall, interesting and solid piece although there are places that can be strengthened with editing!

If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask! I hope I helped and have a great day.