Blank, Part 1

You've been posting pretty avidly.

Formslipper wrote:

Spoiler

Transpose yourself into a place of emptiness- a place where you don’t exist- a place where your mind and body are just inflections of an area removed, reminisced:

Why is this before the poem? What are you saying? What's this doing? What does it mean? Does it have any purpose in the reader reading what comes next? Nope. It's a spoiler. These big words are big pretentious words that snub their nose to me, don't communicate to me, and then act as if they somehow...move me somewhere; why should I transpose? Does the "word" peel open the aether resting between the craftsman's sliced bread and honey lathered slabs of dough that are the reader's pulpy squishy mind we finger-paint oil acrylic and pastel on with fresh sharp steak knives? Please, keep it simple with your reader. I'll greet you with a common "what's up" and you greet me the same, as we would be as people natural to ourselves; anything more and we're getting bad, bad first impressions.

You’re in a slate,
Acedia is you,
Your mind: conflagrate,
The past: no longer true

What? I'm in a slate. Why the Greek? My mind is....a multi-syllabic word? The past...is not to be trusted. What? These are images eloping with ideas in a shotgun wedding successfully unsuccessfully achieving to be itself but reluctantly acknowledging the smoke and fire around "comprehension".

Awake, for riches rot,
Their promises (grim!)
Are sought-
“But” you say, “ 'the empyrean' is dim.”

O-! For have I not found thee on the vine of illustrious infamous desecration of the art. What are you saying Form? Stop using your brain and just speak plainly. Just illustrate this with beautiful simplicity and relevant diction; I tried this, what you're doing here, and found it largely unsatisfying after a poem or two.

Yea, though cringing at the sight,
You find that evil is Heart’s plight-
Indeed, find you, though greatness calls,
Man- in his finiteness- falls

Spare the reader, and me, your melodramatic call to a nebulous moral code; news flash, the Western World is no longer a holistic system of moral conflicts, but now the question of the moral and the conflicts and the existence of them altogether, if not even the complete 180 of the old system, an inverse though. You do manage to keep with syllabic form and structure though, and rhyme....ok, but rhyme isn't meant to be a decoration. Rhyme is quite different and most modern attempts don't get why it works and why it often fails.

So, do take yourself-
Of all places,
To Mental’s shelf,
Where Mind races

“No,” you say, “I don’t exist.
My past can’t last
My future can’t subsist!”
And so, though starving, you fast…

Um, the last line I guess explains this. The dialogue and rhymes are passable, but where's the depth? It's a heady intellectual pseudo strophe on existence. The title is intriguing, but the "Part 1" isn't really very good in poetry. Instead, make it all in one poem with Roman Numerals, numbers, etc; connect the entire sequence, illustrate it together.

Advice: your clinging to traditional ideas of poetry is limiting you severely (those traditional ideas went out the window several centuries ago for a reason). The capitalization at the beginning of each line doesn't serve a purpose. except to fit that form; in the pursuit of making a type poem, a form poem, you disregard attention to content and use large words and idea to carry weight...but that's not how I relate or care. You're not appealing to me, you're lecturing me. I would get this entire poem and look at it in sequence and see exactly what you're saying, what's necessary, etc, and proceed from there.

Hello again. I've got to say, this poem may just be better than the last one I read.

However, there are a few points that I stopped and thought, "Noooo! Why?"
For example.

Yea, though cringing at the sight,

Why did you use 'yea' ? It through me for a loop because you use such nice words then kill it with yea. :/ Made me a little sad.

Their promises (grim!)

Why did you use parenthesis ? I'm sure a dash here would have sufficed, don't you agree? By doing what you did, I feel that you have tried to put too much emphasis on the word and it loses its strength.

Overall:

First-- I love how intricately you incorporated spiritualism into something almost dark. I was taken aback by this. However, you seem to lose it on the last two stanzas almost abruptly. :/

Second-- Again, I love the rhythm and flow you create. It is an amazing gift.

It's great to read yet another exceptional poem written by you. Keep up the great work !

--Jayleigh