Young Writers Society

This is Kaos here for a review!

The scribbles made me witness ugliness
like discovering zombies.
I squeezed the paper until it suffocated
and dumped it in the dustbin.

This was a good starting off point to the poem, especially with the second set of lines here which feel smart in terms of imagery. The first line could use a comma after it. The second line could /potentially/ be confusing in the meaning of it, but I personally didn't find it that way.

Black-and-white drawings became my victims
using tracing papers to produce a similar result.
Dad’s towering figure wiped the grin out of my face;
his bat-like eyes stared at my crime.
Beating-with-hangar punishment ravished my skin.

The first two lines felt a little bit awkward with how they're worded to me. I think it would benefit if you added a comma after "victims" as it makes the stanza flow better. The last three lines are a little harder to understand why they're here but my interpretation of them is the narrator/you were drawing and tracing and the narrator's/your father caught you doing that, but I couldn't quite tell. If you were using the "bat-like" eyes as to say that the father was blind, I commend you because I don't think I've seen that done before and it was subtly used.

Tracing papers went into flame.

This part of the poem made it more obvious that the father/your father was angry at you so it does a little more for clearing it up.

Japanese drawing style directed my hand
to shape big eyes and focus on the face.
Human anatomy vanished from my dictionary.
Perfection, exaggeration, and unrealistic: my goal.

This kind of felt like a shift in gears for the poem, but it does do well having/being tied to the start of the poem. I thought that this was a more clever way to say that you started drawing in the anime style, but that's just what I got out of it. The last two lines also worked well with me and I didn't really find any problems with them.

There was a competition in sixth grade;
I longed to rival the pretty Chinese-Malay artist
who captured life and played with colours.
Emulation started by using rainbow pencils to give breath
but the champion clad with extra drawing classes
grabbed the first place and second went to me.

This was more of the complete shift in gears of the poem for me. It starts to be more direct instead of focusing on imagery. For me, I didn't really prefer this stanza due to it being now too blunt about the topic after being such a subtle poem. You kind of went from a thing that said in a smart way, "I started drawing in an art style that isn't realistic" to "I won second place in an art contest". I felt like you could have expanded on the drawings being unrealistic and them not being the same proportions of humans or anything of that sort. It would have been interesting to see what you came up with, and then you could have this.

Devastation hit me in secondary school
like a monster painting crushing my bones.
Water colour was compulsory because pencils
were for children. I lowered my gaze, my hatred.
Brushes and liquid were kids difficult to control;
they disobeyed me (violet turned to washed-out purple).

The first line is fine but I felt like you could have expanded on the second line if you wanted to, describe the monster or the bones being crushed. I liked the idea of the stanza overall, we start to get taken through the life of an artist (the narrator/you) but it feels a little weird to have all those stanzas before this that don't have to or don't really go in chronological order with the life of the artist /unless/ the first few stanzas were all the way up to sixth grade and if so, that would make sense, but if it is, you need to make it more apparent. I think that this poem /could/ potentially turn into a sort of timeline throughout the life if you do it this way (was it already intended this way?) because of it going through natural phases of the artist.

The metaphor of watercolors and children works really well in this stanza. I also felt like if you wanted to add something about calm children or loud children and the types of colors that they would be or describe could work here. Or the children that do listen being something of a pale color whereas the loud or disobeying children get all the attention because of them disrupting things. I'm just throwing some things that you could work in for this metaphor to carry it on.

Black-and-white portraits won my attention.

Exam messaged me that it would arrive soon
(worst person ever).
Preparation for his arrival forced me to neglect
drawing/painting. Tortured eyes and brain to get ready
for thick textbooks, hundred exercises.
Writing seemed more fun, only needing
a laptop to type and edit and save.

The line before the stanza is good at transitioning and telling the reader without having to drag on for a long time.

So this stanza was probably one of my least favorites of how it was executed. The (worst person ever) part of this stanza didn't really collide well with me because there was no sort of personality in the other stanzas and now it shows up. I didn't really care for that you made the exams a person or a he that much. The middle of the stanza is probably my favorite part and then with the second half of the stanza you start to describe how you/the narrator starts to like writing and I thought you could have done this in a different or more artistic manner? That's just my thoughts on that.

During graduation I realized I had buried drawing/painting.
What could I say? Commitment was hard
(but painting, once done, stayed eternal and unchanged).

The "drawing/painting" really gets on my nerves on how it's two things when you can just say art instead. It'll flow better if you do too. I felt like that you didn't really need to have the last line in parentheses, but rather you need a comma after "hard". I felt like it shouldn't be in parentheses because it essentially is the end of the poem and you putting the last line there is basically saying that the last line is "Commitment was hard." if you choose not to read them.

I hope I helped and have a great day!