Up In A Rush

Hey Cowboy,

So overall I feel like this poem really rushes through itself, and I think that part of it is because of the short quick sentences, the quick phrasing, and the short lines.

Personally, it's a pet peeve of mine to have a poem centered like this. It makes it feel too, Hallmark and it takes away from the natural beauty of the lines and the white space. It's sort of like the difference between a centered photograph vs an off center photograph. If you look up information about the Rule of Thirds, you'll see what a difference that can make. A centered poem does the same thing, it allows too much room for the eye to travel off either side, it makes the poem unstable. In art, horizontal lines give a sense of being grounded, while vertical lines provide an openness. Diagonal lines create motion. The best combination is both, but with centered images, you've just got a bunch of diagonals with nothing to ground them. You have to have a mix of all of it, so having some motion with one side and horizontal and vertical at the bottom of stanzas and against the right side really cleans up a poem.

Still, poems that are circular in logic, can look very nice in a centered format.

Onto the actual review.

Like I said earlier, I really liked the quick clipped phrasing. It wouldn't be appropriate for another poem, but for a needy, pushy, almost abusive ex who just won't accept that a woman has a right to dislike them without them accusing her of being a bad person, it really fits well.

Moving on to what I think you might be able to improve, there's quite a bit. In summary, I think you should work on your punctuation and capitalization, the rhyming, the repetition, and the repetition.

Punctuation and Capitalization:

I wrote a guide a while ago about punctuation and capitalization and I'm just going to send you that because I think it'll help clear up what I'm talking about. Basically, I really don't like the style you chose for this poem. Having hard end punctuation at the end of every line really makes the poem feel choppy and halted, sort of like it's a bunch of hesitation. You don't need that many commas in this poem. You can also sentence capitalize this because you are such a grammar fiend and it'll look really clean and crisp.

Capitalization in Poetry

The Rhyming:

So rhyming is hard. It might feel like it's coming naturally, but you had a lot of lines that were either the same word repeated, or a word that was so obvious it made me want to sigh when I finally got there. A couple of the sentences you had to use because of the rhyme also just didn't make sense. This is where person15 and blueRaven2239 are both getting the feeling of a lack of clarity. For instance, you ended up mixing metaphors in this sentence here: "You leave me, Like a worm on asphalt, Striving to get to the dirt, But being burned up like a slug in salt." because you go from a worm to a slug. That's going to make things more confusing than the metaphor should be.

Some examples of rhymes that just don't work for me are:
that/brat
calls/fall
me/happy
out/trout <-- This made a really weird sentence
asphalt/salt <-- and this
you/blue
me/honeybee <-- same with this
rush/bush <-- and this

The rest of them just sort of felt tacky like I'd heard it a bunch before.

The words you repeated in the poem at the end of lines to "rhyme" are:
without you/without you
me/me
me/me
you/you/you/you
back/back
me/me

So, on top of all of that, you also didn't maintain a rhyme scheme through the poem. You jump around, sometimes it's abbb, sometimes it's abab, sometimes it's abba, sometimes it's abcb, or abac, so it really doesn't feel like you put that much effort into the rhyme because of that. I'm not saying you didn't. You had to have spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to make asphalt rhyme with something, however was it really worth it?

In my opinion, poems work a lot better without rhymes than with them because despite it being a thing that poems do, that identifies them as a poem, even singers find rhyming all the time tacky. If you listen to popular songs on the radio, there's one called "Stressed Out" that talks about that very subject.

So in total, I'd say just nix the rhyming in poetry altogether. You have the freedom to do that in this day and age, so take advantage! Say what you want to say however you want to say it, and if you do want to rhyme, you can always rhyme words inside lines instead of putting them at the end. That gives you the option to rhyme, but not get stuck with a rhyme scheme, which is a wonderful thing.

The Repetition:

If you do a word cloud of a poem, you should have only pronouns, and proper nouns. I took the liberty of doing a word cloud for you because I wanted to show you how this can work to your advantage. There's a word cloud generator at the bottom of the page.



So, what you're looking at is the popular words in your poem up there. I can understand Don't because it's used in a lot of things, but I think the ones you need to concern yourself with are those which actually have synonyms like leaving. If we go to Dictionary.Com about this, we can see some of the synonyms for leaving are 1, 2. abandon, forsake, desert; relinquish. 9. forbear, renounce. 10. ignore, forget. 11. bequeath, will; devise, transmit.

With so many of them, it's sort of a shame you ended up using leave or leaving 6 times in your poem. My rule of thumb is to avoid using a word more than 1 time in the same stanza. This keeps the writing fresh and forces you to crack a dictionary once in a while, or at least right click and check the synonyms. It really helps expand your vocabulary and, at the same time, encourage a better understanding of the situation because you'll develop a set of words with certain connotations as you describe what's going on which will change slightly for each synonym you use, which provides a clearer picture of the whole.

Summary:

All in all, I think you've actually got a pretty clear poem here, but you have some basic problems that are tripping you up, repetition is probably the biggest thing, so really use your vocabulary and try to avoid using the same word more than once in a poem, but if it can't be avoided, at least avoid using it more than once in a stanza. This just applies to open categories like nouns, verbs, adjectives, not things like "the" where there are only so many words.

Also, here's what I wanted to share with you:
Poetry Tutorials Article Index

This is an index of articles on YWS that have a bunch of information about poetry. There are other indexes too! YWS has a wealth of knowledge just waiting to be explored, and I really hope you take advantage of them to help you give people things they can improve by suggesting articles to read, and for your own enjoyment. You can even write articles yourself! Just read the guidelines, and after you write an article, send it to a mod under "YWS Team" at the bottom of the page who is in Resources and green. They'll edit it with you and then I can link to your articles too!

All in all, I hope this helps. I mean, really I'm reviewing your work to give you an idea of where you stand right now as someone just joining the site. Usually I'd only tell you one or two things that you're doing which might need some help, but because we were chatting and you wanted a review, I gave you the whole kit and kaboodle. All in all, there's not that much wrong. The more you read, review, and write poetry, the better you'll get. You don't have to heed a single word I said and you'll eventually come around to a better way of connecting with your audience on your own, as long as you keep posting so your audience can keep commenting.

Find what works for you, that's the biggest thing.

Oh, and if you do have some time to review my stuff, I'd love to see what you think. <3 Just don't try to do it all, that'd be way overwhelming.

Aley

I like the rhymes, but it's hard to tell what the whole ting was mainly about.
U should totally write more but put more effort into making it make more sense.
Hope you get more reviews in the future

I love the phrasing I think there could've been more effort put into some of the parts.
also in some parts I couldn't understand what you where trying to say.

But all in all this is amazing work I absolutly love it and would love for you to write more.

as for this review I don't think it was totally nessecary. Good luck on future posts and i would love to see more from you.