a silvery
mixture of
old and new,
cataloguing
the fancies
of a child.
a magazine
basket,
a blurred
screen,
a favored
toy,
a multitude
of flowers,
pinks,
purples,
blues,
reds,
all recorded
in sandy
grains.
they would
shift, transform
into amateur videos
and private works of art,
relics of youth.
...
the pictures are gone,
locked away on a dusty,
abandoned hard drive.
the camera remains,
long deceased.
Points:
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Canary word: Present
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Original Text:
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137,761 Literary Works • 672,064 Reviews
Hey! <3 Guess what? You get my 100th poetry review! (Yes, I've managed to do 650 reviews with only 100 being poetry.
)
)
Cameras! I really like this exploration of youth and nostalgia. It's just... nostalgia in general is a theme I really love and something I definitely base my poetry around a lot. I love your line about "cataloguing the fancies of a child" - that's definitely what a child uses a camera for and it just makes me think of the million pictures of completely random things that wind up on my mom's phone whenever my little sisters borrow it.
I think my biggest point of critique for this poem is the flow, and particularly the line breaks in the second stanza. You tend to punctuate poetry like you would prose, which is totally fine and personally my preferred way too, but in that second stanza, you have at most two words on a line. Combine that with the commas at the end of nearly every line, and this is slow reading. The reader pauses briefly at the end of every line, and pauses much longer with a comma there. For me, at least, this wound up making the poem feel really disjointed. Especially since you routinely break up the noun and the adjective instead of keeping them together as one phrase. (At the very least, maybe ditch some of the commas, if you want them looking separate without making the reader pause quite so long.)
It's mostly because it winds up making the poem feel like a list poem. It throws out a lot of images as simply being there, without strong verbs attached. Without some thematic thing to ground them, the colors in particular just feel unnecessary. (I know this is for LMS, and I know there's a minimum line requirement, so I can't help but wonder if you were trying to fulfill that.
I think you could really dig into and expand the themes in the third stanza. This was your younger self's art - are you still that amateur? What makes this art so private? How do you view that art now?
I love the last two stanzas. They really get across that sort of abandonment that leaving pictures sitting in your hard drive for years brings. You can't bring yourself to delete them, and yet you look at them maybe twice a year. I especially think it interesting that you consider the pictures gone, and yet the camera still here.
And I think that's all I've got for this review! Happy LMSing! <3
The LMS requirements are not that extensive, thank goodness.
I'll try to improve that stanza. Thanks for reviewing it!
Sup, RippleGylf, it's your girl, Caitlin, coming at you!
I'm here to review your poem.
I enjoy photography, for when I saw the name of your poem, I was excited to read it. And I was not disappointed, let me tell you.
But I'm here to review your poem, not talk about my cringey photos. So, lets get started.
I particularily liked the following lines;
"cataloguing
the fancies
of a child"
Something about them just made me happy.
Or the way you described the photos in these lines;
"all recorded
in sandy
grains."
That was a great description!
Well, that is a wrap, peace out fellow writers!
Keep writing!