Young Writers Society

Sorry man I don't mean to sound rude but I thought of this:

1. Describe summer.
a) The weather
____________________________________________
b) The condition of your school
____________________________________________
c) The condition of your neighborhood
____________________________________________

2. Make what you have written into a poem.

It's like everything we already know. Nothing special at all. No expressing how you feel at all. Everything was just so...obvious that it felt like some normal statements bundled together rather than a poem.

Keep writing, but I think this needs more thought.

Was I a little mean :0

Wyatt16,
Let me start with what i like:

I love your sensory detail!!!!! And the vocab you use is marvelous!!!!I am in Florida myself, so i know how Georgia may be like!!!! I also love the flow, all the sentence structures and grammatical aspects of this piece is great!

Now with what you can improve on......
I love this piece and all......and i don't mean to sound rude....but was this piece just about summer? I mean, i was reading it and i kept thinking, 'something else has got to happen!' And of course, by all means, you can write about whatever you want. If you want to write about summer, have at it! I'm just stating how i personally felt when reading your piece. (And if I'm being rude, please tell me! I will immediately apologize!)

Besides the topic though, it was a great start!!!!

With love,
SpencerReidIsMyLife

Hey Wyatt,

So I'll lay down here what I was talking about in chat. I like that this is an observational poem, I feel like it's a comment on Summer (obvs) but also on the kind of world you live in. I particularly like that I get the sense of a hot, flat summer where things feel like they're 2D rather than 3D because the heat really gets you down. The grass bits also make me feel that way, cause I tie grass really strongly to heat.

What I think might not be working here is firstly that I don't feel like this poem ends. That's part of the difficulty with purely observational poetry, where can you find the final piece of the puzzle? Well, I think you can find it here by rearranging some of the lines. I want to suggest to you that you can move the "it will be perfect" line to the bottom of the poem. I'm suggesting this because it indicates that all of what is being seen and thought about revolves around riding the bike around, seeing and feeling these things as you do. By doing this you give the reader a sense of narrative and of purpose, which is sometimes difficult to do with poetry as it's such a short medium.

Next I want to suggest that you get rid of "The sun will be out during the day" because I think it's redundant, and doesn't tell us anything new. We know the sun will be out and we know it's hot because you've told us "The heat will rise", which is a line I really like. I think you just don't need it in this poem that is already so direct. In the same way you could consider losing "Grass will grow quickly" but I actually like that line so that would be up to you, I'm not suggesting you take it out cause I think it fits nicely there.

You're doing some interesting things with capitalisation here, you don't have to capitalise every line in a poem. I personally prefer to capitalise according to regular punctuation rules, so at the beginning of a sentence or using proper nouns. It's up to you but I think it's a bit distracting to see them like that and I think it detracts from what you're saying and how you're saying it.

All in all, I quite like this poem. It's very simple and straight forward but it's not putting me off. I future I hope you explore and experiment with imagery and narrative but right now, at this point, I think it's a rather sweet poem.

Thanks for posting it here!
- Penguin.