Hey Steggy,
So I picked this one.
Overall I really like the voice you're using, but I think you do need to go backwards a bit. There's a pendulum in poetry as we try to find a balance between too much and too little, and I think you finally hit the too little so you need to swing back towards too much.
Basically what I'm saying is you don't have a lot of data, cold hard facts, tangible objects, things like that, in this poem. You're being really wishy washy and you're not really giving your reader something to hold, so you've got to go back towards metaphors that make your lines longer, and your thoughts deeper.
Over time your poetry has transitioned from something where you're in the very tangible world of wind storms and romance, to something more ethereal and soft. You're talking about wrath in a very gentle way, you're not describing things with metaphors that are very long. If you do have metaphors, they're just three lines, max, and then they're gone again. This loses some of the detail that you might want to really analyze a piece of poetry.
When I had you read "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost, the reason you could get so much out of it was because he was discussing the way the sunrise plays with nature in a way that was visible and tangible enough that you could grasp any metaphor you wanted from that. He was talking about how just for a moment, there is Eden on earth, the Holy Garden, everything is perfect. Once that moment is gone, a leaf is just a leaf and nothing is as beautiful as it once was. How you picked up on the greed of wanting it to stay beautiful, and that it's things you're happy about, or just happiness in general, is because of the suggestions and lean towards expanding an idea in a poetic way.
Here, you have an idea, but you're not showing it. You're doing the second part of Frost's poem, and writing the stuff we analyze rather than writing the poem. This could be because of several reasons, you're not interacting with nature as much as Frost did, you're not writing in Frost's era, or simply because you're being conversational like Collins. No matter what the reason, the problem is the same, we don't have enough depth to really follow you in the metaphor.
When you're creating an argumentative paper, you have to choose a point, and then enforce that point with showing evidence. When you show the evidence you have to relate that evidence to the point you're making. Right now I jumped from talking about one subject to another without relating the two causing a break between what you're reading, and what you understand. You may be able to follow how these two things relate, you may not. The point in writing it this way is that you need to see that sometimes people don't follow your train of thought. It's your job as a writer, to guide them down the path to agree with your train of thought as you develop it in your writing. This goes for novels, poems, essays, short stories, and even just plain old songs. You can't say a nutcracker is an ant and expect everyone to be like Yeah! I feel you! because they're not going to be. They're going to disagree. A nutcracker is a toy that comes out at Christmas and is creepy. The Nutcracker is a play. A nutcracker is an evil beast that sleeps under my bed. All these things are different paths that all your readers may get distracted with as they reject your conclusion that a nutcracker is an ant.
You have to start out by saying, while you might know of a nutcracker as these other things, one of the features of an ant is to be a nutcracker. They actively go seeking nuts and have to crack them in order to break them down and bring them into their tiny ant hills. [No idea if this is true.] This makes them more of a nutcracker than the tall wooden toy which people call Nutcrackers which can't actually break nuts. [Again, I don't claim any of this is fact].
You have to interrupt their random direction that their connotations drag them towards, and bring them back to you, collect them into your writing, and make them believe and follow. You, as a writer, are their Shepherd, and they are really, really, obnoxiously easily distracted, sheep. To get them from point A to point B, you have to draw out their path, connect all the loops you jumped through, and then astound them when you repeat yourself in a new and unique way that yes, an ant is a nutcracker and you never knew it.
In Novels, this happens because of plots. If you started a book and found out the end early, then you have to follow the plot to understand how that writer got there, you can't just assume. You'll never know if you're right. You might be able to figure it out eventually, but you won't know their lives, how it happened, or why it happened. In a poem, you have to do this with your metaphors. You have to draw out your metaphors in a way that makes them clear and crisp, and deliciously delectable so that when your reader reads them, they understand how you got there, and why you're disagreeing with what "they say" because really, no matter what you're writing, you're in a conversation.
That conversation has two sides, at least. There's always someone playing devil's advocate, and you have to convince those people to come along with you for this journey just like those who are willing to follow because you wrote something in words.
Points: 1883
Reviews: 806
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