Young Writers Society

Hey there! Seeing as this work has already been bumped out of the green room and thoroughly seen through by a couple of other reviewers, I might not have heaps of help to offer you, but I figured I would try and give some advice in a short review.

The stanzas, or the lines, all seem to be all paper chained and folded on top of one another. In a poem, you're gonna want to see similarities poke through line-to-line, but its like every line is just a reflection of the previous one, nothing new pops up.
What I'm trying to point out is that if you found a way to bundle up all those loose, stringy, repetitive lines and tied them tighter together, the impact with the white space may show itself to be stronger. Making the poem less wordy and thick in this case might just give the benefit of the doubt.

As for the white space aspect, I'm seeing it as over-used. Every few lines it seems to be unnecessarily cut off, and there's such a shallow impact after that. It seems to me that the more you break off lines and shove some to the left, shove some to the right, it just gets scattered and less emotionally impactful. I want to be processing the poem, not just the white space. So the poem should be the focus, not just the white space. Hopefully that makes sense.
Please PM me with any questions, if anything was unclear etc,. Thanks!

I really like the white space!
I generally liked it all except for the fact that
I wished I wasn't wrong,
    I wished I made the right decisions,
      And always came out strong,
has rhyming, and nothing else does. Is this on purpose? Or not?
Keep on writing! I love this poem!

Hey, thought I'd take a look at this!

Specifics

1. I like the use of the white space in those first four lines - it almost gives the impression of there being these two people and the straight on, directly being in the middle but also off centered to the line above it was both accurate and yet ironic so I liked that. I kind of want goodbye to be on the line above though, like that's his dialogue and then the rest of the line is a direct quote from her.

I'm not sure about 'She looked at me in the eye' in terms of language though. I don't like the 'at' and it's not interesting enough. Maybe you could have something like 'She rooted my eye with hers' or it might even just be the at which is bothering me and it would sound better as 'She looked me in the eye'.

2. I like the repetition of 'with her' but I think the other parts of the lines don't tell us enough about who these people are - they're very general. How did you make it worse? How did you mess up your life? A few examples of lines which would tell us more about the characters:

with her, breaking into the wrong flat
with her, driving sixty miles south on the north road
with her

3. The second time you use the white space it's not quite as effective - there doesn't feel like there's a purpose with it. The first line works because it's a call back to her words earlier but the next couple feel arbitrary.

4.

I wished I wasn't stupid,

I wished I wasn't wrong,

I wished I made the right decisions,

And always came out strong,

Hey there! Shey here for a review!

I see this was an experiment with white space, from the jam last night. I'm by no means on expert on white space, so I really can't tell you exactly what to do with it, but I can give you my perspective, which is am extremely important perspective, because I'm your reader. So, let's jump into this.

The poem starts off with four lines. The first is aligned to the left, which is good. Poems really should start on the left, assuming the bulk of the poem is going to be on the left. Then the next line is aligned to the right. The third returns to the left, and then the fourth is on the right. To me, this alternation made it seem choppy, and to be entirely honest, I didn't like it. It didn't, to me, flow nicely.

Next you had a series of lines which progressively had incrementally larger indents, and I loved this. It looks really cool, and gives a nice effect without coming across as choppy or really even affecting the read of the poem.

Moving right along, you have seven lines that go left, right, left, space, left, left, left, right. Some of these worked well and didn't come across as too choppy, but there's one line in here I want to talk about.

Just a day after she said the
words,