Yo. clogs here to review.
I'm going to save my personal thoughts about this for the end, and just review the poem itself for now. So, moving right along:
First, this poem lacks structure. There seem to be clear places where it can be divided into stanzas, but you haven't done that. Stanzas really help with organization. I'd say that any time you have a new "today" would be a good place to make a new stanza, but that's only with all the line breaks. I'm personally not a huge fan of short lines, and it didn't really work for this poem either. They come off as choppy. Poetry doesn't necessarily mean short lines! Try experimenting with longer lines. Longer lines can also make lack of other poetic devices more obvious, so you can edit for imagery and emotion. Poetry is all about experimentation, so just dive in and see what happens.
This poem also just lacks figurative language and emotion. The "emotion" thing is partly because I have zero empathy for the narrator (which is irrelevant anyway), but also because the language just doesn't convey any. This is really bare-bones. So here are a few things you can do to make this more emotional:
1. Make it personal to you. This is incredibly generic. "I am afraid. If I say mean things, people will call me racist." That could be applied to many different people in many different situations. Write about your own experiences. Talk about a time that you felt that "political correctness" stifled your opinions. It's more direct. When writing about broad issues, it's better to look inward to how those things affect us, because that's where the emotion comes from.
2. Use imagery! There's no sensory language in this at all. There's nothing tangible. Tie your emotions into the real world; give readers something to relate to. Again, it's just incredibly bare bones. YWS is full of wonderful poetry resources, so I'm going to direct you to this wonderful Knowledge Base article about imagery that will explain the concept better than I could.
Imagery
Now, one slightly random thing: Don't get preachy.
Today
I want you to
judge me
on my
ideas, my
Preachiness is when you start making the poem about the reader, rather than yourself. Nobody likes being told what to do, especially a die-hard skeptic like me. My immediate reaction to these lines is to say, "Hold up, that's what I was doing in the first place!" It can rub readers the wrong way if you make assumptions about them. It doesn't happen a lot in this poem, but it's definitely in danger of falling into outright preachiness. Instead of saying you want the reader to judge you based on certain things, just say "I want to be judged based on x, y, z." That way, no assumptions are made about the reader. If this didn't make sense, feel free to ask questions. ^^
The part about the "facts" was also preachy in a condescending way, because made the assumption that you, as the narrator, are supremely right and informed about the facts in our world, and as a reader, it just left a bad taste in my mouth.
I also found the part about the ancestors to be incredibly vague, as I just don't really see the connection between modern social issues and ancestors "fighting and dying" for things? It just didn't connect with the rest of the poem at all to me.
Here's another Knowledge Base link. It's a wonderful article about putting emotion in poetry, and it can help you go into more detail with your editing, if you want to:
Editing for Emotion
Ok, opinion time:
Hope this review helped.
Points: 3742
Reviews: 274
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