The House where the Black Mass Lives

Hey, this is Kman134 and I'm here to review your work.

firstly, some of the sentences within your poem were a bit long, especially the third sentence.

"The only thing I want to do is smash it swiftly with force against the grain until the side is black and bruised"

This is an example of my case. you really need to shorten it a bit, while trying to get your message across.

Keep up the good work, though.

Heyo. Gladdy here for a review!

First of all, shaping: There are a few lines that are way too long to be in a poem. One line (in poetry) should /never/ go to the next line. For example:

The only thing I want to do is smash it swiftly with force against the grain until the side is black and bruised

Or maybe I'll just punch it through the window.

Hey!

Welcome to YWS <3
I'm really happy to see a promising poet come to join us.

Alright, so here on YWS we follow this for our critiques: The YWS Critique Sandwich

Or at least, we try to. I'm going to go off of that guideline for how to write a good critique while I critique your poem.

First: the complements. I really liked the flow of the poem and the imagery you used. This poem is heavy with imagery including the depression being this black mass living with everyone in the house and not just the individual who is depressed. That is so descriptive and it gives us such a good visual to cling to that it's going to be hard to forget next time I write about depression, which is perfect.

I think you also have a good way with words, although sometimes you get a bit jumbled up. That leads into the second part of a critique, what needs fixing. I think overall the poem is very good, but you do get your words a bit mixed together and that ends up giving you longer limes it seems. These longer lines are okay, but they're sort of losing the potency of the poem because you're having to deal with pronouns, prepositions, and other complex sentence structures that don't yield well to a slim poem. To fix this, edit things out.

I'd suggest you take out about half of the poem honestly. For instance, the whole thing about making the fist black and blue feels a little underwhelming after you get done with the poem. It's a lot of words for not much content. You're just trying to say that the character wants to punch the bed until their fist is bleeding, basically, but you go the long way around and it makes things more difficult to follow. For instance for a bit I thought that there was another person they were hitting and not the headboard because it wasn't clear how a headboard could end up black and blue. Simplifying this line will take out a good chunk of the confusion, and if you can't simplify it down, then just take it out.

Next, you have all of this talk about stationery items, but I really feel like you could use other words, like stagnant, still, stiff, immovable, inanimate, etcetera to really get the point across without using the same word twice in the poem. You can also break this up into more lines which will give the poem more of a flow for the eye. The more you have on one side of the page, the more stationary the eye becomes too which can emphasise your point along with the natural pause between lines that happens when our eyes flip down to the next word. These will all emphasize your point in the poem, with the structure of the poem and make it look and feel cleaner and more professional.

The last thing I'm going to critique about the poem is the capitalization and punctuation. Basically, make sure you mean what you have. There are a lot of different ways to handle capitalization and punctuation and because you're brand new to YWS I want to give you a cheat sheet to what we know about it.

Capitalization in Poetry
ABC's of Punctuation in Poetry

In summary of these two articles, Capitalization in poems can give you different feels for the poem. You can capitalize nothing, every line, or just where sentences start and each way has a different reaction and feel from reading it. Explore! Punctuation is the same way. You can add punctuation how you read it, how you would write it classically, or at the end of every line. Each one is going to give you a different feel; explore.

I would suggest you go with punctuating as you breathe and only capitalizing lines. That's going to give you the most typical approach today and potentially the most educated feel. Your poem could also do very well with no capitalization and no punctuation because it's about depression and having a lack of capitals for even the word I can show a loss of self-worth and a lack of self-respect. It's all up to you in the end, but I thought I'd share.

Last but not least, concluding. I think your poem is really good how it stands. It's a bit thick though and could use some trimming. I gave it a like because I really like where you're going with it and I wanted other people to see what you've written. I would suggest trying to take off around half of the poem editing out useless words, useless phrases, and taking out things that can be confusing such as the whole fist + headboard thing, and simplifying. That's going to make the poem a lot crisper and create a better overall feel in my opinion.

I hope this helps! If you have any questions about YWS or about this poem in particular, feel free to drop me a line.

Aley.

Hey,
So, having read this, it's quite interesting. It takes some thought to analyse, and, as poetry is famed for doing, definitely got me to look deeper into a concept I hadn't understood until now. (I'm still trying to pinpoint exactly what the black mass is) All around, it's a nice piece of work, creative and intelligent. I'm looking forward to seeing your future work.