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140,481 Literary Works • 673,248 Reviews
Hello I am Firedancer here to do a review of your poetry.
Okay so I am not the best puzzle solver and I must admit that I am a tad bit confused on what your poem is actually about. Not your fault at all, entirely mine. I have never been the best at gleaning secret meanings from ambiguous poetry.
However I do like a couple of the ways that you describe and compare things. For example the stanza It came
in a chest embroidered
with wild pearls not yet
tamed by deep-sea divers. It sounds very pretty and beautiful. Again I don't really know what it's for. You say that it is a chest for someones heart? I'm sorry, not very good at these, but very pretty imagery.
I liked how you described your fingers being as rough as winter gravesones. Gravestones are very rough so I'd imagine that in the winter they'd be doubly rough.
How long did this take you? It always takes me awhile to do poetry so I always like to ask other people.
By the way I love your Avatar. It is sooo EPIC!! I love Pirates of The Carribean. And Johnny Depp, he is an amzing actor!
Anyways, keep up the good work and keep writing for sure!
It took me about a minute to write. I actually wrote it while jogging on a treadmill at the gym - had to grab my phone in a hurry to get it down while it was in my head. I tend to just vomit poetry out
Thanks for your comments.
Omar! Yes, yes. Me again. I'm sure you'll be thoroughly sick of me rather quickly.
I love love love your first line and a half. Killer.
Ok, that aside. So, flow. It's a nice, ambiguous thing that I think almost everyone defines differently. And, technically, I don't think it's an actual poetic thing, but a thing we want it to be? Anyway, I play with meter and rhythm, and how I want things to sound when I read them - and I think most of it comes from music, because that's the only way I can describe what I mean. So... rant aside, here's what I'm seeing.
You start with this great line and a half, and then it breaks - well, rather. It starts as a pickup, and then lands on "one bullet..." (or I have it backwards; my music is getting muddled) and the problem is that "one bullet was all it took" is too many beats for the measure/phrase. Take out "was," and tell me what you think?
I won your heart in a game
of russian roulette, one bullet
all it took.
Is that more what you want for flow? Like, what I'm seeing is mostly a tension between full prose sentences and attempts to sound poetic, which is throwing you off. Take the rest of the stanza for an example:
I won your heart in a game
of russian roulette, one bullet
all it took. It came
in a wild pearl embroidered chest
not tamed by deep-sea divers.
Er, ok, I personally don't like what I did with that, but I think part if it is because that last line doesn't do anything for me poetically, so I'm having trouble forcing it in where I don't want it. I think you're better off with just "wild pearls" as an image, or... hmm. what if you did something like
"..one bullet
all it took to claim
a wild pearl encrusted..."
Yeah. Anyway, is this what you're looking for in terms of comments/flow stuff? Actually, I don't like what I did there, either. Guh. Maybe ignoring me would be more helpful?
Also... I love the first two lines of your last stanza. I'm not quite as fond of it from "without" to the end, but I also love it, so go figure. But, I think it's in part because the rhythm feels off. I think it's in the use of "came"/"without" - I keep wanting to read "came" as "can come" and that throws the rest of it. But, that's also only marginally helpful.
Anyhoo. Seriously, is this what you were looking for in terms of comments? Like, there's a couple places breaking rhythm kind of makes sense, but only if that's what you intended, and other places I don't think you want the jarring effect that's there currently.
Hit me up if you have questions! Or if my ramblings simply didn't make sense ^^
Bek
Haha, no, that's not quite what I was looking for, and I don't really like what you did with those stanzas either
Flow is pretty ephemeral, I agree, but this poem is not based in meter or practicable rhythm so I don't particularly care if one line is longer or has more beats than the one that precedes or follows it.
I use commas to force you to pause - without them, I do want you to read in a near-continuous fashion. And I reject the idea that it's too "prosaic" simply because it contains full sentences; poetry is far more than just disconnected images thrown together haphazardly.
So, to the commas:
and I wonder how something so dirty
came from a well so pure, without
muddying the water, just
a little bit.
--
Actually, I'm with you on struggling with 'can come' and 'came' there. I keep flickering between the two. I might end up changing it.
And:
It came
in a chest embroidered
with wild pearls, not yet
tamed by deep-sea divers.
--
The alternative to that passage is to take out 'wild' altogether. It came first, and I only came up with the latter phrase after. It makes 'wild' a touch redundant, I think, and I might end up removing it too.
Um...it's really early in the morning, so I don't know if any of this is making sense, but thanks for your comments anyway! Tis much appreciated.
Cheers
Hi Jiggity! Storyisking here with a review!
So. I actually really, really love this - and I think one of the reasons I do is because of how many times I scanned over the words again in order to grasp a meaning, or discover something that I may have missed firsthand. I sometimes love when poetry does that: forcing you to think because not everything is completely lucid on the get-go (or maybe I'm just slow.)
The choice you made to take out a few commas was a good one, I believe. Not that they aren't bad necessarily, but the flow of this poem was a really nice one. I like how the commas didn't interrupt that.
I don't have any true constructive criticism to give you on this, tbh. It's short, but sometimes short is better. You clearly have an imagination that fuels your talent in poetry, and I think that's amazing!
You've probably been told this before, but really - keep up the good work!
~storyisking