Young Writers Society

Hey LadyBug! Incoming review!

Short and simple, but your poem sure packed a punch. I am a music appreciator and I don't know what I would do or who I would be if I couldn't feel the same way about music. I can also see how certain events in life can affect the impact some songs have. I know that feeling all to much. With that said, lets get on with the review!

I'll start with critique.

I feel the pressure of growing up; I think they lied to me
I've been sad for too long now; I was promised it's be a phase

a gray knot of pain when in me when I woke up, and all my childhood friends

Hey, LadyBug! Wist here with a shorter review for you today.

I must say, your work did a fantastic job of capturing my attention from the very beginning. The idea of breathing in music was an interesting take on its own. But then, you only added to it by weaving in the constant metaphor of sentimentality and losing childhood. As someone very close to graduating, it certainly hit close to home. You've done an excellent job of taking a new spin on something so many relate to, making someone old and familiar seem fresh.

I especially love your use of repetition in this piece. Repetition is one of my favourite poetic devices, especially when each repeat is just slightly to the left of the previous one to keep the poem from diluting its message. Also, I like your choice to curse in the 15th line. Curse words, when used properly, can emphasise a line or idea, and you pulled that off nicely. It was a good payoff to the tension you had been building from melancholy to betrayal and anger.

All in all, I loved this poem! The feelings behind it are universal but written in such a way they're slightly unfamiliar. Your stylistic choices only added to the mood and message, making the entire piece well-rounded and enjoyable.

Happy writing!
Wisteria

Hi there, LadyBug! I'm dropping by with a review for you on this very poignant poem!

The biggest thing that stands out to me after reading this poem is that you take two very distinct veins of imagery - music and food - and weave them together until the distinction between them is kind of blurry. It makes for some really interesting image-combos, and a lot of the images that end up being created are reminiscent of synesthesia for me. What I really love about this is that you end up engaging all the senses over the course of the poem (*smells* like decaying flowers, visual descriptions of rusted and shiny, a beat that *tastes* of food, physical touch descriptions like a gray knot of pain, and even a bit of implied sound with people talking to the narrator towards the end). I often find that a lot of poetry will only selectively engage a couple of senses, which can make it feel a bit more flat or less 3D; but when you pull in a bit of everything it becomes a lot more immersive! So that's something that this poem does incredibly strongly!

In terms of interpretation, I see a couple connected themes. For one thing, a lot of the feelings the narrator describes line up with depression or feeling depressed; lack of hope, consistently sad in a way stretches far longer than just "a phase", not taking joy in things they used to (such as music), lacking appetite. And then on top of this, I see a lot of clinging to the past + fear of the future. Which for me, as someone's who on the edge of some big life milestones and transitions, I can relate to a painful amount. One of my biggest fears (? I don't know if that's quite the right word, but I can't think of a better one) right now is knowing I'll probably lose touch with all of my childhood friends or at least grow apart pretty imminently. :/ So waking up and just having all your childhood friends gone really strikes a chord for me. Clinging to the past also shows up earlier on in the poem, when the narrator talks about smelling decaying flowers that only hold any significance to them. The narrator seems unable to let go of things that no longer serve a purpose in their life, ie a dead and decaying flower, and is just not able to move on in general.

I enjoyed the repetition of the phrase "I can't _____ music." a lot. The fact that the verb kept changing made the repetition feel like it was building up to something, rather than just a stagnant phrase that keep repeating over and over if that makes sense!

I find the stylistic choices you made to be interesting. You've chosen a font for the poem that kind of imitates how handwriting looks, but then at the end of the poem you left in the "|" that shows the poem has been typed on a computer. Which feels a bit contradictory to me - why would you choose a font to look like handwriting, only to give proof it isn't actual handwriting - and I'm interested if you had a deeper meaning there? Like perhaps it's meant to reflect how to an outsider, the narrator appears to have grown up/is imitating the way "grown up" people look and act, but in reality it's all just a charade. Or it could be just entirely for the aesthetic, which is also fair!

The capitalization is a bit inconsistent; in some places you capitalize the first letter of every line, even if the lines break mid-sentence, but in other spots you use sentence case instead. Personally I feel like if everything was in sentence case that would feel more natural for the poem, since the language and tone you use isn't at all formal or stiff feeling, but capitalizing the first letter of every line does tend to come across as both more formal and more stiff.

Other than that, there are just a couple places where I feel like there are some unnecessary filler words that take away from the flow of the poem. First one I'm pretty sure is just a typo -> "a gray knot of pain when in me when I woke up". The next one is the standalone line "Why?"; I'm not sure what the narrator is specifically asking about, and it doesn't add any meaning as far as I'm concerned. It also feels a bit out of place, since there aren't any other rhetorical questions used in the poem. And finally, in the last line "When I'm really just rusted." Really just right next to each other, when neither are particularly descriptive words, makes that line feel diluted down (at least to me). I would at least get rid of "really", and potentially even "just" as well. For a closing line, it's especially important to be as snappy as possible!

(Also just a small side note - works that include the f-word fall under an 18+ rating for language, so if you could bump the rating to that, that would be greatly appreciated. ^^)

Overall though, I don't have any critiques about the poem at large; everything I pointed out is pretty minor! I thought the imagery was fabulous - varied, cohesive, and original. The theme was definitely relatable and there were a lot of places where I had an internal ouch moment because of how well the line hit home. You made great use of repetition, and also the variation in line length made the poem more interesting to look at and to read! Great job overall! I hope this review proves useful for you, and if there's anything you'd like me to elaborate on just let me know c:

Best,
Seirre