Young Writers Society

Hey, so this is not bad, you have some good ideas here that need to be built on and improved.
I am going to be harsh but hopefully it will help and you don't mind to much.

So, while I was reading this poem it went through stages of being really light and fun to being rather sad and dark. I don't know if this was intended but I felt as if you had to many different moods and tones. Focuse on one and portray that through the writing, by flow, language, imagery etc.
You want this to be a serious, emotional poem but I found it hard to take it seriously, for example this line
"Hoping there is a clue,
even an old,
stinky shoe."
I couldn't take seriously, I actually laughed at this. Now, I don't know what you meant by this, I think it's about being happy with finding any sign or clue about how to grief and so on, but I simply couldn't take it seriously.

Also, you need more emotion. I found it very hard to connect in anyway to this poem and what the person was feeling. I think it is because you are very vague with who the persona is grieving and the spirit itself, while this may be intentional because you want to talk about people everywhere finding it hard to get over a persons passing you could still have used genric terms such as mum, dad, brother etc. It would make the reader connect more to the poem if they could relate to a person in it.

You need to watch your grammar and punctuation, there are several places you need to fix up. So just read through and do a bit of an edit.

I could comment on a few more stuff but the stuff I have is the main things. They aren't specifics, rather general things to work on. So if you want me to go over more specefic things PM me and I happily will.

Overall you have a good poem with a nice theme that I think has a lot of potential, the more you write the more you will improve. It is about realising your weaknesses and improving on them.
Great job and keep writing!
Nargles xxx

P.S feel free to PM me if you have any queries or questions or just need some help

Hey there, Secret Journalist, I'm June,

I think it's really cool of you to write a poem about a feeling that I'm sure many of us can relate to. From a strictly literal standpoint, there were a bit of things about the poem that stood out to me. Let's have a look, shall we?

• Your rhyme scheme is spotty, at best -- I'll be the first person to admit that I'm a huge advocate for people ditching rhyming in poetry because freestyle tends opens up a new world of creativity. However, if you ARE going to use rhyme, I would strongly recommend restructuring this poem so that the rhyme is coherent and contributes to the overall meaning of the poem. If you're having difficulty, you could think of attending one of the YWS poetry workshops.

• Present your ideas in new, innovative ways -- everyone one has endless gardens of creativity to pick through when it comes to poetry. Getting your message across clearly is one thing, but getting it across creatively sometimes has the potential to create a double-layered poem that both narrates a story, but illustrates your feelings.

I think that your poem was okay, but there are a lot of places where the poem just doesn't flow. I think you stayed a little too long in some spots, mulling over the same idea, when instead, you could water the plants of your imagination garden and let your images do all the talking.

xx June

Hmm. This poem presents an interesting situation, and maybe presents two interesting situations. I'm not sure. The beginning and the end of this poem make me think of a single character and a single event where this person had to deal with the death of a loved one and didn't want to move on. I was ready, especially from this point:

But even by moving on,
would that leave
the deceased justice?
To me,
the spirit is still there,
it really just is.

I thoroughly enjoyed the poem. I thought the way the poem was structured helped to convey the continuous process of moving on.
The question at the end is a creative way to terminate the poem as well.
Although unusual, the poem is also structure chaotically, but I presume that this is to further convey the disorganization of the state of mind of the speaker in the poem, and therefore it's a good kind of chaos, if that makes sense. It's not a traditional poem with a structure rhyme scheme and that was a really interesting aspect of it.
The poem creates feelings of sympathy in the reader because of the tone it is set in.
As far as grammar there is only one mistake that I've seen and it's just the missing apostrophe in the word *it's* in the 9th stanza.
In conclusion, good job

I thought this was a good way to show the thought process behind "moving on'. It was able to capture the fight between emotion and logic well. There wasn't a particular pattern you stayed consistent to through each stanza, which in a poem like this, does to further illustrate your point. I think that you also did a good job depicting the role of the spirit of the deceased. The only thing I can think of that would improve this would be to indicate the "they" who you refer to more definitively, being as it seems that "they" serve as an impetus for your thought processes through the poem. Overall, very good.