Young Writers Society

Howdy outvaders and happy Monday. This work has been around for awhile so I think I'll finally boot it the rest of the way out the door.

The main issue of why this was looked over so many times and neglected, outside of the poetry quality itself, is the fact that you threw it together as a collection. I know from experience from posting collections in the past, that people are rarely a fan because it enforces the connotation of being really long. That's the reaction right out of the gate that people are having to this piece, and I know that for sure because that's basically what someone said when I talked about reviewing this work.
When people go "Oh at that piece", not a particularly good sign and while these have potential (swear I'm getting to the content), you might want to go back to consider splitting them up. I haven't read the poems yet so perhaps as a collection they all loop into each other, even though that's not the vibe I'm getting from the first glance.
There's just a lot for you to take into consideration here.

Now let's talk about that author's note way far below, because it sets the mood for a lot of things going on here and there's a line there that bothers me.

I hope that from here, you see us not as weeaboo teenagers trying to be edgy and cool, but as human beings trying to find an audience to express their deepest insecurities.

I feel like I can't do half these poems justice by judging them all at once, so I'm going to be doing a long review and it's going to be about all of the poems individually. I'd appreciate it if you could Post them individually next time too so I can get points for each review, but eh, whatever. It would also give us time to cultivate more of a relationship with each poem. That being said, on with the reviews.

The Collection as a Collection

A collection of poetry needs to feel united as a group just like a novel or a short story. It needs to tell a story and contribute to the conversations of poets today. I feel like all in all, you have two stories going on in this collection of poems.

The fact that you've narrowed it down to two conversations is really promising. One conversation is about depression and suicidal thoughts. Most of the poems fall under this conversation. Two of the poems don't directly connect as clearly with it however, and those are the poems about sexuality. These poems belong in their own conversation so we're not distracted from the first. They are important messages about how religion and perception can make us feel horrible about what we ARE but ultimately, they fall under a subcategory of depression that's not being talk about in the rest of the poems, and the rest of the poems don't stray too far from the original conversation of "What do I do with this depression" or variants thereof.

One way you could include sub conversations in this post without breaking up the conversation would be to disburse them better among the collective. Instead of putting them together, spread them out. Go from one topic to the next with things that sound like they have the same type of message, but it's under the surface. In this case in particular, it's hard to narrow down what poems and what order that would be, that would be for you to decide honestly. In most cases, it means that the poems written are tooled towards a certain result or picked for the collection due to their content. It doesn't look like these poems were picked in that manner. This looks more like the poems were picked because they were written together by different authors.

In this case, you could still mix them up to make it more of an even collection, but it wouldn't be as effective unless someone else also had the same underlying theme like I said before.

Onto the poems themselves. Inside the Mind of a Killer by: あんどれい [I would like to @ the user but I don't know their username and I'm pretty sure it's not the (kanji...?) so @outvaders can you give my feedback to あんどれい?]

This poem struck me as very relevant given the recent suicide shooters and mass killings that have happened in my country. I feel like this poem talks about it in a unique way. I never thought of them doing it because they wanted to die differently than other people, but it did happen. Most of them were shot down and there is a "death by cop" suicide thing that happens. I guess I'm just more hopeful that people wouldn't kill other people because THEY want to die. I feel like that's rather selfish, but who knows, maybe that does happen. We don't really know because the dead can't speak.

As a poem, it speaks well. The flow of the poem and the content is good. There's a little confusion and boredom with how "being unique" is repeated the same way over and over in the poem. I mean, you can use it as a refrain, but you might want to put a little more creativity into how to say unique because at this point, the way you say it isn't, well, original. The more creative and individualized the word unique becomes, the more unique the poem gets.

I also feel like this poem might suffer from a need to specify. Here's an article about specificity that might benefit you reading. Specificity in Poetry and I think the part that I really would say you might want to skim would be the "Digging Deeper" part at the bottom. The other tips for how to create more specificity, why it's needed, and when something is too specific are all good too, but I feel like that part in particular is something you might want to look at.

I feel like this poem has a story, but we're not included in it. We're not told what that story is, and that makes me sad. That's why I'm suggesting getting a bit more specific about it.

All in all though, the poem itself is solid work. I think you definitely have a voice that you can grow with and use to express yourself, just work on being more specific so you don't accidentally get preachy.

(Untitled) by: @Kokorohane

This first Untitled poem works within the realm of a riddle really well. I'd almost say that it works better as a riddle than a poem, but I still think it has merit as a poem. The poem explores the general idea of this thing which is depression, but in a way that isn't very obvious talking about all of the things around depression rather than depression itself. It has some good symbolism for that, like talking about trying to reach happiness or [not depressed] but not getting far enough.

However, I feel like this poem really tries to go for the poetic but it only hits the superfluous markers. For instance, it's not necessary for a poem to rhyme. It's not necessary for a poem to have end punctuation. It's not necessary for a sentence to be contained on a single line. All of these things are things this poem does well, but they make the poem feel halting and old.

Now, if you were going for halting and old, great, you've done that well, but I don't think you were. I think this might be a case of self-imposed handcuffs and I'd love to give you a key. So! Here are a few myths about poetry and why they're false. Yes, they're all false.

Myth: A poem must contain sentences
Poems can contain sentence fragments, just nouns and verbs, adjectives, etc without sentences, or even just letters scattered about to form a single word or words. This started changing back around the the American Revolution in the 1770s+ and continued to change throughout time and always will be changing. Poems are in constant flux about what makes them. In that way, a poem does not NEED sentences. Some poems don't even have punctuation!

Myth: A poem's line is like a chapter's sentence
This one is partially true but it does NOT mean that a poem's line Must Be a sentence. In fact, there's a type of line-thing called enjambment which means to have more than one sentence on a single line, like a leftover sentence on the next line with another sentence after it. Poem lines are unique unto themselves however, they should have their own value.

Myth: Poems must rhyme
No. Very few people are good at rhyming in poems now-a-days because there was a school of poetry called the schoolhouse poets who constantly rhymed and they sort of over-did it, so now people hear rhymes and they don't like them. In fact, most poetry readers today roll their eyes when they start to see rhymes. It's one of the reasons Robert Frost's poetry isn't that popular now.

Myth: Every line needs punctuation at the end
No. This one has changed since they began to write without rhymes and things. This type of punctuation is still used sometimes, but our attention span actually isn't long enough, often, to follow through with reading the next line if you end each line with a punctuation mark like a period, comma, hyphen, colon, ellipsis, exclamation point, question mark, etc. We oftentimes need to have our lines tag down to the next line so that the readers will continue the poem.

Myth: Poems need a cadence or meter
Just like the last myth, poems used to have this, but they don't now necessarily. While you worked towards something called a Limerick, it's not necessary for there to be a cadence or flow to the poem at all. It's your choice and some poems work best in a speaking voice rather than one with pace.

Those being said, I feel like you did some good work towards getting the ideas written down and now the best thing for this poem would be to re-write it without trying to sound poetic! If you did that, even keeping the same ideas and themes, you would probably write a much clearer poem that would be more interesting if you tell us, or talk to us about what it is you're saying.

For me, the thing I like most about poetry is the conversation. I love being able to feel like I'm sitting down with someone having a conversation and they're using all of these beautiful or imaginative symbols and allusions to really get their point across. Here, we have some rhyme gimmicks which changed your sentence structure [ex. "To reach for their dreams is everyone's want" vs "Everyone wants to reach their dreams"] and that falls flat.

If you re-write this, I'd love to see it.

The Sole Purpose of Life by: Himawarin (@outvaders could you get them this message too?)

This poem reminds me of an article mostly because it feels like there's not enough detail here. You might be interested in this Naval Gazing which basically describes what it is. Now, I'm not saying that you are naval gazing, but I feel like this poem could be taken that way.

Poems fall into that category when they don't feel like they bring anything very creative to the table. In this case, the poem talks about suicide, but we don't get any of the specificity of the individual character and we don't hear anything about the visual or audible. We just get this very brief internal thought, then we go into the repetition of 'slit' which makes the poem vivid and descriptive, but it doesn't actually provide much content. For instance, I could assume that they're in the bathroom cutting off their hair. I could assume they're cutting up tissue paper. I could pretty much assume they're cutting anything because there's nothing very concrete here.

I'm not saying to make it concrete however, I don't think a poem describing the act of suicide would be very different. What I want instead is actually for the message of suicide to take a back seat to these other tones in this poem.

Out of the entire collection, this poem stuck with me the most because of the line "We only live so we can suffer" which I feel is an apt description of life. I just wish the poem had gone into that in more depth. Talking about depression and/or suffering can be a strong message that touches a lot of people. This, not so much. The bigger the audience you can touch with your message, the more the poem will connect.

I would like to suggest that you take this poem and pick out one or two lines you really love, then start a new poem with those lines or line [if you pick two lines, they don't have to be next to one another]. Give us more detail about the situation, the causes, the reactions, the feelings, and show us the idea in this line. I think that might give you a wider reaching creation.

Beat, **** Me, I'm gay by: Destroy_Me_Hard (@outvaders same here please?)

I'm going to review all three of these together because I feel like each poem fits together with its neighbor well enough, and that my comments are about the same things for each of them. I won't quote from any of the poems because this is YWS and while we might be able to put that sort of material in a poem, book, novel, etc. we can't have it in reviews.

First though, a comment about "Beat" because I have to. I must say that the first line in this poem is quite well done. I love the syncopation you had going there and I like that you didn't overdo it in the rest of the poem. Still, it verges on inappropriate for YWS...;

Now then. I feel like all of these poems end too soon. They feel abrupt like they are only there for shock value rather than poetic value. A poem should be something that uses literary devices or figurative language to create an idea, thought, image, or affect on the reader that's deeper than shock value. If we look at poems by poets like Sylvia Plath with "Daddy" we can see the shock value is there as she talks about her father like a nazi when he wasn't literally a nazi, but that's not the only thing the poem is doing. It does other things too. It presses the inquisitive minds to deeper thought.

If you want to get that yourself, try talking about a different subject OR, expanding on the subject you've picked. For instance, I feel like you're balancing on the edge of something a bit deeper with the end of "**** Me" lines 3-6, but lines 1-2 take away from that as they introduce the topic in such a crude manner, it turns the reader away. If you took them off, the poem would lure the reader into a false sense of scrutiny before introducing the actual topic of discussion, and you'd get a bigger response.

So, hopefully if you choose to publish on YWS again, you pick something I can talk about easier in a review, and I do have "Birdcage" to review still, so we'll talk again!

(Untitled) by: @Kokorohane [I find myself in a maze again]

This poem really surprised me. It's probably the poem I like the most poetically in the collection. You've managed to get rid of most of the problems I saw in your first selection by this poem and I love that progression in your writing personally. I still don't like the end punctuation. I think you need to utilize enjambment, but you've got a solid idea that's talked about thoroughly with this metaphor of a maze. I love the ways that I can examine and contemplate this poem.

One of your strongest things about this is that you're utilizing things we know with things we don't. You're not giving us the easy out of knowing what this poem is about unless we know the theme of these poems as a whole, and you're providing us with enough context clues to figure it out, but you're making us work for it. This is good. Clarity isn't always king.

If I were to "improve" this poem I would suggest that you start reading more modern poetry. Today poems tend to be short and sweet in their lines, couplets are very common in poems today, and short lines too. You might also want to explore different punctuation and capitalization ideas, so here are a few articles for that.

Capitalization in Poetry
Punctuation in Poetry

In other words, KEEP WRITING LIKE THIS ONE. I like this.

[line 11 might be missing a word between "I" and "the one" I think you wanted to say "I am the one who is lost" but you missed the "am".]

Birdcage by: Destroy_Me_Hard (Yeah, hi @outsider =D could you please?)

This poem is a lot better than the other selection. You're delving into the content of the poems more and looking for ways to symbolize things more vividly. I can only imagine this is talking about school or prison, but you're doing it in a way that gives the option of either one. That in itself makes a strong suggestion that if it is school, it's like prison for you.

It could also be society as a whole, and the need for order and conformity within society.

That being said, I feel like you can continue to work with some of the metaphors a little longer than you do and my suggestion for your continued improvement is to try to write like this usually, and then go on to talk about just one metaphor for a little while. Work with it, develop it, then rewrite the poem to just include the best metaphor or metaphors you can.

For instance, what does it really mean to have your wings ripped off? What do the wings represent? If you introduce what you're saying your wings are, then we might be able to develop more of a dialogue about how the removal of that affects people in our society today.

In other words, keep it up, and try to hone in on a few symbols, or just one symbol in a poem until that symbol is really potent. Editing is the cat's meow.


Alright folks! That's all I have today. Hopefully your feedback gets to you.

A note from Himawarin*

Hi! Welcome to the Kira Kira Poetry Club! Writing dark poems and getting in touch with our own brokennesses is the premise of the entire club, because the only things glittering in this club are the blades we hide under our beds. I hope you guys keep in mind that some of the poems here were written with the deepest scars of our souls in mind, which were reopened and used as the source of our ink and inspiration. Each of the poets here --Kokorohane, Destroy_Me_Hard, あんどれい, and me! – have different experiences and facets in their writing that make their poems offer something unique to the viewer.

I hope that from here, you see us not as weeaboo teenagers trying to be edgy and cool, but as human beings trying to find an audience to express their deepest insecurities. We are all depressed in the inside here, and we have been twisted by society in no shortage of morbid ways. We have no mouths, but we must scream. By publishing these works in Young Writers Society, we hope we can rip a new one out for ourselves.

Thanks for reading!
--Himawarin*