Published June 11, 2008
It's a poem I wrote, obviously about love. I don't think it is my best work, but I would LOVE some feed back. Plus, I haven't posted anything in a while so, here ya go.
Your words
Your words latch onto my heart. They devour me whole.
I try to run away, as quick as I can, but they attack my soul.
Your words are sweet and kind to me, cliché words, so I am told.
Those words are fantastic when nice but bleed when they are cold.
You scream at me with hatred in your eyes and make me run and fret,
but when you come back to me, with love, your words make me forget.
I tell myself time and time again it’s nothing but a compulsive lie.
You tell me time and time again, you’re going to make me cry.
I love you, I think. I love you, I think. Why won’t your words just leave?
You tell me your love overlaps all and you make me believe.
I am powerless, speechless, and I can not speak, its true.
I am on my knees for your words. You make me think, that I love you.
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140,714 Literary Works • 673,675 Reviews
Lol. Will do Eimear. =D
Hey Josh, sorry about my delayed response here- because I read this, thought about it, and then completely forgot about reviewing this. In your response there you talked about all the stuff the poem did not have. Try and be positive, think about how much better prepared you will be in your future poems. I didn't think it was awful, although it wouldn't be helpful if we didn't pull you up on rhythm and rhyme and all that jazz. Make your next attempt 'your best poem yet'! I challenged you!
Hope my ramblings helped in some small way,
Eimear
Thank you guys for the feed back!
I also thought this was not my best work. It didn't jump off the page to me either. I just don't like this one as much as the others I have wrote. It did not have rhythm, the rhymes were forced and over all it was a little cheesy I think. Thanks for the reviews.
Josh
You don't make your meaning clear here. For example, taking the phrase without "cliche words", it reads "Your words are sweet and kind to me so I am told". And that's just confusing. The "so I am told" just distorts what you are trying to say as it's irrelevant. It seems primarily to continue your rhyming scheme and doesn't add anything.
This isn't emotive enough. Fantastic when nice. Eh. You can say that they are, doens't mean I'm going to believe you - It's a case of show us that they were nice, don't tell us that they are. It's more effective.
Now, bleed when they are cold? Doesn't that come across as nonsensical? They, the words, bleed when they are cold. That doesn't have anything to do with you. They make me bleed when they are cold, is perhaps what you were going for.
But as I said, not very emotive due in part to you telling and not showing but also because the descriptions aren't very creative. Fantastic, is simply fantastic. Bleeding is simply bleeding. Why not fantastic as something? Bleeding like something? People exaggerate - It's a fact. So words by themselves, in a written context especially can just come out weak. Create something more with what you've got. Make it more powerful.
Another example where you've written something which doesn't seem to add anything to what you're trying to portray. "Going to make me cry" doesn't seem like a compulsive lie. It seems more like it's used just to make the line rhyme.
This is difficult to understand.
The endings good - as in the sentiment. Like Flemzo pointed out, there are some commas which are pretty useless. In fact the last stanza is what I would call comma happy. There are other forms of punctuation which would work better, or even no punctuation.
You have a nice idea, something good to lead up to. But everything leading up to it. Isn't really inspiring. You do more too much telling and not enough creative showing. Also, your use of rhyme distorts things.
Hello!
This is rather a nice poem, I think. It didn't blow me away, but it was ok.
After "fantastic", which is an overwhelming word, the word "nice" feels even more flat than it usually is.
No! Don't ever use a comma before "that"!
Hmm. As I said, this was nice, but maybe you could expand it a little? Make it longer and fuller? Then this piece could really be something great.
See you around,
Demeter xx
Overall, it was pretty good. The only thing I noticed that was really wrong was your rhythm, if you even had any.
Good poetry has a pulse, a sort of beat that the reader can follow as they read your poem. Think of the rhymes that you know by heart: "Thirty days hath September/April, June, and Novemer"; "In fourteen-hundred, ninety-two,/Columbus sailed the ocean blue"; "I before E/Except after C/Or when sounding like A/As in "neighbor" or "weigh"". While they aren't exactly poems (technically, they're "light verse"), they're excellent examples of how a rhythm can keep something memorable.
In your poem, some lines are really long to read, and some are really short. Some lines have a nice rhythm to it (line nine), and some lines are just... klunky (line five). Try to make them consistent in meter, and already you've improved 300%.
Other grammar nitpicks:
What do these lines have in common? They have useless commas. In context, when you get rid of these commas, what you're trying to say flows smoother and makes more sense visually.
You are redundant and repetative in this line. Obviously, if you're speechless, you can't speak, so why say it twice?
Overall, my advice is "Brevity is key". In poetry, as compared to prose, it's not the amount of words you have, but the emotional impact of those words. In prose, I can say "I hit him as hard as I could, and he fell to the ground", and it would (generally) be acceptable. But in poetry, I would be far better off by writing "My fist cracked across his face, and he crumpled to the ground". Poetic word choice is all about imagry, and the more imagry you can create with as few words as possible, the better your poetry will be.
Keep writing,
kf