Hi mint! Hope you’re doing well! I’m here to review your poem 
General Impressions
My first impression was that the shape of the poem is quite visually distinct. It looks jagged and pointy, almost, with all the non-alphanumeric characters. The number of question marks made me think this was either going to be a rhetorically forceful poem or a contemplative one. I also expected it to have more of a staccato rhythm.
When I got into it, there turned out to be more rhymes than expected. It sort of reads like it could be a slam or spoken word poem (only if it were, the symbols wouldn’t be conveyed the way they are now, and I do think the symbols add character and emphasis to the piece).
This poem had me thinking and reading quite slowly, line by line. There seemed to be implicit comparisons between image and idea that I took some time to make sense of, but are interesting and make sense when you connect the pieces.
The title is also clever – I read it as ‘not just a number’
Themes and Interpretation
I think the themes I can read into this are 1. The nature of humanity and 2. Reductionism and 3. The effects of the Internet on sociality.
1. The nature of humanity – The end of the poem seems to show the speaker’s doubt that human beings are more complex than computers or computation. The interesting thing about the poem (and this relates to the first two themes) for me is that the speaker seems to answer their own question. They say people can’t be reduced to numbers in the fourth stanza, but they also wish things were that simple, which could say something about the speaker’s nature and the nature of people. (?) That was the interpretation I had after thinking through it the second time, anyway.
2. Reductionism – The code analogies seem to point towards the idea that people are being reduced to just numbers and that this oversimplifies what people are like. Later stanzas also convey how companies reduce human beings to the profit they can make off of them.
3. Internet and sociality – The poem also seems to convey how the Internet affects how people relate to one another in the stanza that begins “we scroll on screens”. Even though people are meant to be more than true/false, right or wrong, creating echo chambers online can force people to think in that binary.
Another thing I noticed was the “what must we be” line in stanza 8. To me it seemed kind of ambiguous – are we being asked i) what must we be to escape? Or ii) what must we be instead of escaping?
Structure
I liked the consistent use of round brackets to separate the counterpoint to the main speaker. The stanzas with round brackets stood out, so I could see that they were meant to provide opposing arguments, in a sense.
I also liked the subtle alliteration in this stanza:
we scroll on screens
how long 'til we hear ourselves scream?
we're screening out what we don't want to see.
I thought it led well into the more emphasised, obvious end-rhymes that came later:
but hitting the escape key
doesn't free us from reality.
what must we
be?
Another thing I thought was good about the structure that while there were sometimes abrupt lines, I could still find meaning in them because of the surrounding context. That way the abrupt and short lines could reflect the aesthetics of programming languages but still fit with the flow of the poem.
((echo chambers.))
{curly braces} wrap around \backslashes\
escape
For example, having the ‘escape reality’ part come after the ‘echo chambers’ part made me think there was an implicit analogy: echo chambers are an escape from reality. Not sure if it was intentional, but I thought that fit with the themes and enhanced my experience of the poem.
I think the relatively short stanza lengths also help the poem overall, because they avoid overwhelming the reader and allow the code symbols to stand out, breathe and do their thing
Continuity
Something I noticed about the continuity/ flow of the poem was that sometimes the poem’s specific topic seemed to jump around. I can kind of see the development from true/false binaries to “echo chambers”, but then I felt like the introduction of the data selling aspect was a bit sudden. I wonder if it would enhance the poem’s cohesion to echo topics from earlier stanza in the second-to-last one? Or to add a new stanza that brings them all together?
As for some smaller comments, I wasn’t sure how “how long 'til we hear ourselves scream?” fits in meaning-wise with the surrounding lines. Does it mean to say: if we were in an echo chamber, we would hear ourselves screaming?
I also thought it was interesting that the first line “tapping on silver keys” is the only place that refers to the physical aspects of computers as opposed to software.
Overall
This poem gave me a lot to think about, and that’s cool
As a whole, I think the poem is strong in terms of stanza structure and the way it sounds. If you’re planning to revise this poem or working on future poems like this one, one suggestion would be maybe to try identifying the most important point(s) you want to make/ story to focus on. That usually helps me when I want to refine a piece by cutting out lines or phrases or when I need to tie it all together in a final stanza. Let me know if you’d like more feedback on something in the poem, or if anything I wrote didn’t make sense!
-Lim
Points: 41664
Reviews: 542
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