Mindset of the Media

I really like these sort of poems with two completely different meaning depending on what way you read it. I tried to write one once, but completely failed. It is a bit choppy and a few descriptive words could be added to make it flow better and easier to read. I don't quite understand 'Freedom' when reading it from bottom to top, as it has no context before it, so it doesn't quite make sense being there. Other than those few points, I enjoyed reading the two-meaning poem and I would like to see if you can come up with anymore. Great poem!

Hi! For some reason, I am seeing your name a lot in my feed of late. I read your post about you being a fanfiction writer. I read some of your writings and would like to see more coming from you.
Now about the poem, it was interesting. I remember having read another such poem which uses contrasting ideas alternately so that if read backwards, the meaning changes completely. As pointed out by Daenyss, it felt opinionated. The imagery and clarity of thought was missing. It was not the best experience to read it, partly because of the line breaks and the simple choice of words. Perhaps a little more emotion, a little more depth, a little more reader friendly and it will be a nice poem.
Lastly, the title didn't stick around by the end. It can simply work without labelling it as media mindset.
Keep writing and have fun.

This is great! Opinionated, but not so much so that it's a turn-off, rather that it's thought-provoking and interesting.

I feel like the line breaks work, but perhaps if you made each sentence its own line they might work better. Line breaks shouldn't feel like you chopped up a sentence, they should feel as though it's a natural time to say "Ok, time for a new line." With your poem, I ended up feeling like "Ok, this makes sense, but this is still kind of choppy." One way to fix this is to paste this entire thing into a document as a huge paragraph, then add line breaks where they naturally fall. They do add a pause when reading as it takes time to switch focus between lines, so try to consider "Does this pause fall naturally here?"

That's really the only critique I have for this poem. It's very interesting to me how this tells two completely different stories just by reading it in different directions, so bonus points for creativity on that.

As for the title, I don't think you have to say that this is just about the media. I think that this could justifiably be about two different kinds of people, or two different ways of moving up in the world. It has a lot of interpretations outside of the media, so to narrow it to just that one interpretation in the title kind of sucks for me. I like being told what to think when I read prose, but when I read poetry, I like it to be kind of up for interpretation. Maybe if this were just titled "Mindset" I'd like it better? Just a thought.

Overall, great job, and keep writing!

Hello HalfbloodFangirl! c: Cat here for a quick review! Let's get started then, shall we?

Clarity
So I love the idea of a poem you can read both forwards and backwards, but it didn't really work for me. I couldn't understand what the two different sides of the poem meant at all. There were quite a few parts that seemed conflicting and repetitive. When read only one way, it definitely didn't get it's point across. I also know that most of the time backward-forwards poems have two opposite meanings, which I only got a little bit of.

Flow
This may be from the way you have to write the poem for the backwards-forwards aspect, but the whole poem felt a little clunky and didn't work together. Especially when read backwards, it just rubbed me the wrong way with the way it flowed.

Imagery
Kinda weak to be honest. I couldn't picture what was going on and there weren't any pieces of figurative language to spice it up. The whole poem felt kind of bland to be perfectly honest.

Emotion
Also a weak point of this poem. I've been saying this a lot today, but you can tell if the author poured their emotions into their work. I know what you were talking about is one of the harder things to pour emotion into, but it could definitely use some sprucing up in this area as well.

Other thoughts
I did have some trouble with the punctuation in this piece. I know it's to try to guide the reader into what your trying to say, but I almost feel as if it might be better without any? I don't know, punctuation in poems are a hard thing to begin with.

After reading this a few more times, I'm just barely starting to understand it, but feel free to ignore some of my comments because I've never reviewed this kind of poem before. It's just a weird change for me c:


Overall an interesting poem that I really enjoyed! Great work and keep writing!
~Cat

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