Young Writers Society

Hey. I started on this Saturday night but then came 'the no water or electricity saga', so all of my reviews have been set back a few days.

Sometimes I make very odd connections between two things that I see and your poem really reminds me of a Drifters song from the 60s. You might know this song but I'm thinking of "This Magic Moment", the most overused songs in television commercial history. Probably a bad connection to make this early on because that sets a mood in both the writer's and reviewer's mouth.

I don't know why I keep mentioning these things but instead let's just take it from the top.

Have you ever stopped to think,
When will you forget this?

So take this moment, minute, minor thing.
And cherish its small power.
For this moment, minute, minor thing,
may only last an hour.

Hello there! First of all, grammar is not my strongest so no review about grammar.

But... The poem is wonderful! I really do love it. The deep meaning about memories and time. I like poems that get you to think. It makes me think about my life and my memories. So many missed chances and so many memories already lost.. What inspired you to write this? I would love to hear the story.

Thank you and keep writing!

Have a great day!

Hi there! Congrats on posting your first poem! I'm here to give a review, I'll be using different categories to organize my points: Formatting, Wording, Specificity, & Theme.

Formatting
So I know you said you were having some difficulty formatting, there's not really an easy trick to put in stanza breaks except to use coding. If you read through this article: How to Format Poetry you should be able to find what you need.

I would also recommend putting author's notes (your first and last little lines that aren't really part of the poem) in an off-set manner to make it clear that they aren't part of the poem. You could italicize them or write "Author's Note" beside them just to make it clear. I do love that you included a little author's note though, as these are helpful for reviewers to get a sense of the author and where they're coming from/what they might like in a review.

Last point on formatting is that you're capitalization/grammar was a bit inconsistent. Sometimes you capitalized the first word of a fragment sentence ("And cherish its small power.") and then sometimes you left fragment beginnings lowercased "and which one shall you loose?" You put end line punctuation in almost every line, but sometimes the commas or periods came in the middle of a sentence. This made the poem look a little less polished than it could be, so I would go back through and make it consistent. To be clear, it's perfectly fine to have all the beginnings of lines capitalized or to just capitalize at beginnings of sentences - those are stylistic choices that have different effects, but when something is inconsistent it just creates an expectation that there's some hidden meaning or that it's all just random.

Wording
So I didn't mind the rhyming for the most part, and thought it actually helped with the flow of the piece. I would say that it might be good to try to make sure you don't rhyme words with the same word ie. you rhymed "minor thing" with "minor thing" in the 2nd to last & 4th to last lines.

You use a lot of language to portray something being "precious" and end up sort of dancing around that word with different synonyms. You do the same with the word "minute". Rather than using the words quite so frequently and finding different synonyms I think you have the opportunity to employ even more meaning by using a metaphor to portray what is "precious" or "minute". That would really leave readers with some concrete image to take from your poem's message.

Overall though, your word choice was fairly strong and you did a good job editing for spelling mistakes as well.

Specificity
I think specificity is one aspect that lacked in this piece. I could sort of follow the narrative progression of the piece, but I didn't have very much concrete imagery or ideas to hold on to. This made it difficult to have any emotional attachment to the poem. For example you use phrases like "golden memories" which is an interesting phrase but it's a little empty. As the reader I want an example of this "golden memory" so that I can understand where the speaker is coming from. There were other examples, like "leave things behind" and "this moment" where I wanted the speaker to clarify exactly what they were speaking about.

Sometimes authors are afraid to be too specific because it might alientate people who haven't had that specific experience before. But it's something that has to be balanced. If you're overly specific then it might seem strange and unrelatable, but if you're too vague then it's hard to actually understand what's being said. Giving a few specific examples can trigger memories and emotional connection of a reader's own experience that allows them to better remember and understand the poem.

An example of where you do specificity well is in these lines:

"Will you remember your lonely nights
gazing into the deep black sky?"

In this review, I will not hound you for your rhymes as they're not abnormally forced. They're not unpleasant. They're amateurish, but they do not break the spine of literature and drive away in the rain.

Your message is fair and positive, grounded in a strong lesson that we all need to slow down or risk losing the smallest joys we have, which are precious to us--or should be.

All that said, you're missing connective tissue between your narration and your preaching to really bring justice to the two core elements. What this means is that, while your theme shines through, there's no underlying metaphor recurring in the piece to really zip it up nicely. My suggestion is to try it without rhymes, find that underlying metaphor, then return it to whatever state you wish. Rhyme and meter are meant to be advanced techniques; they are not the foundations of poetry.

Take this with a grain of salt.
Ty

Awesome! I love it. I wrote a poem similar but not nearly as good