Hey Ruro,
I realized this poem doesn't have a really good review with a lot of content comments. First off, I'd like to say that after reading your poetry through all this time, I really feel like you've improved a lot by the time you wrote this one. You've come into your own when it comes to poetry and I appreciate that about you. You grow. That being said, in this poem in particular you have managed to really tell a story and create a setting which is hard to do in poetry, and not something you could have done when you started. You've created a situation which draws us into the lives of these characters, and that makes us attached to them regardless of what actually happens in the poem. This is a great base to start with and you do a very good job creating it quickly within the first stanza.
Onto the critique.
I have a few things I'd like to critique, first, the beginning of your story is a little confusing because of the language you use, second, I think you need to consider your punctuation and decide if that's really what's best for the poem, or if something else could support it better, and third, I'd like to talk about parts of your narration where you get a bit too philosophical and it interrupts the story.
I feel like even while you do this great job creating the story, you add too much detail when you've already established the story. In the first two stanzas we have established that you're not using punctuation or capitalization like normal. That's fine, but you jump ahead in the plot. When you say "a happy life/beside a man" I expect that the doll has already been given to someone who will love her forever, not that she is still with her creator. That means I'm entering into the next section expecting that Papettomasuta has returned to her where she is placed and is editing his creation from afar. This isn't really the case. Instead, he's still trying to get her placed which is unclear.
I don't want to take away from the fable sort of feel from this poem. I think you do that exceptionally well and I think it should remain with that sort of note, but I think you need to look at editing that section to enter into a different tense. It's going to be something simple like a single word here or there that you'll change or add. Look over the section and determine exactly what can be done to establish that she's waiting to live with a man. It might not even be in the second stanza, but the third. Instead of saying "one day he sat in front of her" say something like "One day he took her from the shelf" Not only will this give us more of a size reference, but it will show us that he's controlling her completely and that she's not currently living happily with a man like she was made to do, but waiting to live with one and hasn't been selected yet.
The rest of your story is not misleading at all. It's very clear and the dialogue between the two is direct and provides a simple understanding of what's going on. The next thing I'd like to talk to you about is actually the punctuation. While you use a lack of punctuation well, I don't think it really benefits the story. Right now the problem is that you have scattered punctuation. Quotation marks are still punctuation, dashes are still punctuation, so you're not eliminating all of it. This makes some things a little more confusing than they necessarily should be. Your decision to use quotation marks and dashes, but not commas, apostrophes, periods, and so forth is odd. Because it's odd it draws too much attention. I can guess that you used quotation marks to indicate that the story was using dialogue, which is necessary. In a normal story, we would have all of the punctuation though, so there's no reason to avoid it. Because of that, I would recommend you keep your capitalization, which makes sense, but add in mild punctuation.
If you do this, you'll add support for words like "can't" and give us more of a feeling of urgency from the Puppetmaster when he's scolding his creation for talking back to him and it will create more of a sense of "story" in the poem as people will be reading it in a familiar system of language. You can keep the lack of capitalization with punctuation because right now it is very clear that you're only capitalizing names, and that works for this story because the names are very important pieces of information. This works. Like always, if you try it and it don't like it, you don't have to keep the new version, and I really do encourage you to go with what you like. This leads me to the last piece of advice I'd like to offer.
Right now you have a couple lines like "or that's at least what Matusa had in mind" and I feel like these lines sort of undercut the power of the image. I think the best way to dismount a poem is with a strong image, and leaving it with a saying like that doesn't really make it that strong in my opinion. If you'd left it with an image or a line which told us that it hurt Ningyo more than Masuta understood, then I think it would be a very provocative part of the poem. For this reason, I think you need to cut out any lines where you are judging what he's doing and instead, show the inner workings of pain that Masuta has caused his creation. This is really going to shape the identity of the poem as one where after the story is over, you have to ask yourself "What was the moral" and instead of reiterating a line back, it's going to vary and all be very good morals. People are best at finding meaning in a story that makes their stomachs churn. Don't be nice and wrap this up for us, make us work for that wrap up and don't close the door. Instead, make us search for our own closure.
Overall, I think you could make some of the lines more powerful, mostly the three word lines, but you've got a very good way of telling a story here, and I really appreciate that about this poem. You've managed to work in the language well enough that coming back to the poem, I'm not concerned about people getting confused about that. Instead, I feel like you're taking too much faith in the reader away. Instead of delivering their cake to their laps, make them actually get up and get a plate. That's going to be a lot more rewarding for the poem and I think you're going to find that it hits deeper with an image at the end.
Aley
Points: 1883
Reviews: 806
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