Hey whachamacallit! Here as requested!
Formatting & Organization
This is clean, clean, clean. The poem looks very polished as far as punctuation, line and stanza length, and the quick three stanzas you've got. This might seem like a minor point, but if a poem looks polished on the page I believe the reader automatically is going to read it at a higher level, assuming that the author put more effort into it - and will trust that what the speaker is saying isn't just random words smeared on a page but something deliberate and thought-out.
My favorite formatting / organization decision I think was your choice to use a question mark at the very end to a sentence that doesn't at first read as a question, but then when read with the poem makes the reader look back and see that the "company" is their anxiety and fear which is always in this lonely presence with the speaker. Clever decision that makes the reader linger on that final sentence a bit longer; almost haunting. The last word of a line, and the last line of a stanza always linger a bit longer for readers, creating a pause so it's important to choose them with care, and for the most part it definitely seemed like you used this to your advantage - choosing important words when you wanted the reader to linger and transitioning words when you wanted to pick up the pace.
The only thing I'd say formatting-wise that I didn't love was little ~squigglies~ between stanzas because it felt a bit casual for a serious poem (though I'm guessing that was to deal with the YWS publishing center which sometimes hates stanza breaks - maybe for this tone of poem use dashes -- instead?). Also I didn't think that rhyming the final couplets of each stanza did much and felt a little like an afterthought because there weren't similar rhyme schemes going on elsewhere in the poem.
Imagery & Metaphor
Imagery and metaphor are the bread and butter of poetry, I thought that you had a nice clear central metaphor that anchored your poem; anxiety to a jail. And most of your imagery matched up with this too. Even though the idea of the mind or anxiety being a jail isn't out-of-this-world unique, you were able to add a lot more to the metaphor to give it more interesting layers.
A few thoughts -
It's good to stay within the same imagery-family in poetry (unless jumping outside of it is instrumental in some helpful way) because this helps a poem feel cohesive and make the image layered and connected instead of a bunch of disconnected statements and images. For the most part in this poem you stayed in two imagery-families industrial/bondage with the chains and keys and isolation, and then also water/ocean imagery. You very smartly connect these two images together in stanza two with the drowning being even more serious because they're in this jail/cage. I think the poem would be stronger if you brought some aspect of that water imagery into stanza one, because you really center on it in stanza two, and then bring in hurricanes in stanza three. This would add a lot of continuity to the poem (it could even be something small water-related like tears or sweat, just something to get the three stanzas working together).
Lastly on imagery continuity, I didn't feel like "confetti" fit within that picture of imagery-themes you were working with at all, so it felt a little awkward to me. Freedom, boats, light, stretching, all might work as better contrasts that fit within that imagery-family.
Theme & Meaning
I interpreted this poem to be about a person who is struggling with anxiety and fear in a way that's become kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy because it revolves around their loneliness and lack of human connection. They are anxious so can't make connections so become more anxious and the cycle repeats, so they feel like they're alone and drowning apart from their fears which is all they feel they have left.
This is a pretty powerful theme, and I think the idea of drowning especially resonates with me in regards to anxiety - just in how it feels cumulative and suffocating. You were able to get at the issue with multiple angles that felt very powerful.
I also think that this poem is pretty easily understandable; even if the reader can't follow one of your metaphor connections, they have a full three stanzas to figure it out - and you stay very centered on one theme which also helps communicate meaning clearly.
The only thing I felt was lacking meaning-wise is that depsite the poem being about something very emotional and serious it didn't strike me as very personal. I think something that adds that "personal" aspect is two things:
1) communicating the stakes within the conflict -> just like in prose; a poet must communicate the stakes of the conflict for the speaker in order to make the audience care. In other words, why is it important that the speaker is lonely? How does that concretely effect them? Why does it hurt to be anxious? (not just what does anxiety do but why is it painful?)
2) the second way to make a poem feel more personal is to bring it out of the realm of the abstract and make it specific and concrete. Right now the poem is talking around the idea of anxiety without bringing up any of the actual things that the speaker is anxious about. They hint at it - but don't actually say it. I've written a KB article on Specificity in Poetry if you want more information about that topic.
Overall this is a nice poem. It tackles a theme that has some depth and importance, and it doesn't feel cliche because you really dive deeply into the metaphors/imagery that you've chosen. It's concise but also clear. I think there's a few things here and there that could add to its depth, but this is a piece you should be proud of! Keep on writing ~ and let me know if you have any questions about my review!
- alliyah
Points: 144392
Reviews: 1222
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