Hello TheDarkWriter!
First off, I'm going to drop this here just in case you've not had a chance to look in the wonderful, amazing, most information packed place on YWS, The Knowledge Base! How to Format Poetry This is an article I wrote about how to format your poetry on YWS so that you don't have to have all of those extra spaces and you can actually make it look all neat and pretty!
Onto the review~
I have to say that I really love the specifics you give in this, the location, the feeling of friendship, the way that friendship plays out, and the use of different visuals that are definitely unique to you are all things I usually have to encourage people to start doing when I first see their poetry on YWS, but you've already got that down, so keep it up!
I will say that there are some things you can improve. First off, I think that you get a little bit too wordy in some of these sections, because you're repeating actions and some of the images actually contradict one another, which makes it a little awkward for me to read, but that's not the thing that I really would like to see improved. For me, the thing I hope you can fix in this poem is actually some of the obvious wording, and I'll give you an example, "As long as we're together, no one can ever tear us apart." Now, this really is kind of like, well, yeah.
If two people are together, then it's unlikely that someone's going to be able to tear them apart if they really want to stay that way. It doesn't add anything to the story. It's also a line that I've heard a lot, but it's usually "nothing can tear us apart" rather than "no one" which, while this is a different play on the same words, the new play doesn't work for me. No one can tear them apart because they are two people holding onto one another instead of one person trying to separate two people. I mean, it seems obvious.
I feel like you could come up with something more personal for this section too, like maybe a foreboding foreshadow of their future separation which we don't get to right now, but we see coming in the future. Either that, or cutting the line out altogether could help the poem by eliminating some of the space that's just, rather obvious.
Now, this is really the only line where I see something that obvious, but I do see other places where you're adding useless phrases, like "as the sun is scorching above us" because what does that have to do with the poem? We don't come back to the sun, and it's obviously bright out, but it feels like filler, and I don't think this poem needs filler. You already have filler with the line I mentioned earlier and the end of this stanza, "We are together, just you and I" because why is that important too? I mean, when it comes right down to it, I think the point of the poem is the way in which a selfie is taken, not the friendship of these two people, and I get that form the detail you've gone into about the location, the angle, and the dramatic faces, even mentioning acting with Broadway (which is a place, thus should be capitalized) and yet, we get down to these lines and they're about friendship?
I think the poem would be more interesting if the girls were taking these pictures when it was freezing outside and pretending to have a good time because that would put the importance of these things in a selfie much higher than having it be a warm happy day. Then again, I don't take selfies, so I guess I can't really critique that side of things much. I don't know what goes into them.
Either way, I think you need to make sure that your focus is clear in the poem. Either pick one or the other, and work it all the way through. Right now this poem is either about friendship that's going to go away, or the selfie, and according to the title, it could be either.
I really hope that this helps you and that you keep reviewing and posting on YWS.
-Aley
Points: 1883
Reviews: 806
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