Face the Facts

I wrote a completely different poem now

Hello.

After reading your poem, I found it a bit bland myself. The rhythm is alright, and the flow is alright, but the poetic devices are lacking. Poetic devices are what makes a poem's language rich, and hide a message deep inside folds of metaphor and things left unsaid.

Right now, your poem very bluntly says an idea. While this is just fine if you put the message of the poem first, it's not so fine if you want to put the poem first. There's a school of thought in writing that your first goal is crafting something of good quality, with any messages you want to give coming secondary to the actual quality of work. If you put the message first, you risk having a work that's only one-dimentional and feels preachy.

I also found your explanation of the poem not really matching with the poem itself; it's unclear the two men live inside of us. This can be fixed by going into more imagery in the poem. Lengthen it, and start hiding your message behind layers of language. Since you know about poetry, try reading this article for a refresher course in poetic devices. I've been writing poetry for a few years and sometimes I forget all of the language tools I have available.

One piece of Gal's advice I'm going to repeat is this:

Start with an image. A single description of an object in front of you. Devote to it your imagination and time; wrap it in meaning beyond itself, turn it into a symbol and use it as a vehicle to draw out from the wellspring of the reader's mind a meaning to the object. Then, and only then, will the point of your story actually get through.

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TmB317,

Yeah, why not just tack on "The sky's the limit!" onto the end of this poem. Maybe even "Follow your dreams!", that's a good one.

This entire piece wept cliches out its pores from beginning to end. Person A is rolling in wealth but is emotionally and spiritually dissatisfied. Person B is materially downtrodden but has a heart of shining gold. The two become best friends, and there's an entire stanza at the end of the piece consisting of nothing but preaching.

This poem needs to be shelved at once. The point of poetry is not to dictate values into your readers' faces. The point is to help them understand these values on their own through the abstract medium - by presenting images that correlate with ideas and a unifying theme providing the backbone. Right now, you have maybe a good central theme but absolutely nothing else. Start with an image. A single description of an object in front of you. Devote to it your imagination and time; wrap it in meaning beyond itself, turn it into a symbol and use it as a vehicle to draw out from the wellspring of the reader's mind a meaning to the object. Then, and only then, will the point of your story actually get through.

The fact that you couldn't come up with better names than "the man with nothing" and "the man with everything" isn't doing much to impress the reader either.

You're not in church, so stop acting like it and start writing a poem worthy of being read with more than a grunt of approval from any garden-variety audience.

Hope that helped,
Galerius

very nice message and definitely true.. keep writing

Nicely written .

I love the way you compared the two men, very realistic and thought provoking. It really made me think back to how I’ve acted to others and how I feel myself. You bring up a very good point about how our materials and wealth mean nothing if we have no love and aren't truely enjoying life. The poem clearly portrays that point without being very 'in your face' about it.

The only thing i didn't like/wasn't sure of was the end; was it meant as part of the poem or simply an after thought? If it was part of the poem why did the formatting change so drastically? and if it isn't part of the poem I would consider separating it in some way so that it's clear.

Overall though, very nice

Xoxo – DraconiaxLesoto