Love is a Game

Hi ACM,

First of all, I loved the title of your poem. I thought it really captured what love is in a nutshell. I also have to mention that it was your title that made me want to check out what you had to say.
The emotion behind this poem is beautiful. It really captures what falling in love, heartbreak, and playing with someone's heart is like.
I loved the line "so gamble your heart away."
It shows how much someone loves somebody else so much it seems they are willing to have heartbreak.
I really like the pacing you put in the story. I also liked the style you wrote in which is free verse. That was a risk, as most writers will write love poems to rhyme in each line. I liked your risk, because I thought it stood out.
I really enjoyed this poem and I hope you continue to do great work!

Hey ACM,

It's nice to see new faces on YWS! Being that you are new, I'm going to go ahead and provide you with the reviewing guideline I use when I make a review so you can see what I'm going from to write this and hopefully you can use the advice to help your reviewing too!

The YWS Critique Sandwich

So first of all I really how you have the stanzas broken up. Each part of the poem has it's own uniqueness to it which gives the poem a good overall look. This is a great place to start with a poem because a lot of times stanzas can be hard to master, sort of like line breaks. Here, you have really well thought out line breaks leaving good clear words at the end of the lines and although you have a lot of determiners and auxiliary words at the beginning of lines, they are parts of the noun phrase, most of the time, which is good.

Picking something to critique, I feel like this poem really doesn't delve into imagery enough. You seem to jump around between the images you're trying to use and it makes the poem sound preachy because you're using more of a dialogue tone than a story telling narrative tone. This can be okay for some types of poems, or when you have a narrator that is going to be ironically incorrect, but in this sort of poem, I feel like it's sort of the opposite of what you want to do because it makes the poem tell us what we need rather than invite us in and let us discover for ourselves what is needed.

The poem starts out inviting us into believing that love is a game. THis is a familiar concept, nothing new there. It's all pretty standard. The last line of the poem is a little too cliche to really draw me into the next stanza and at that point I'm pretty sure the whole thing is going to be making the argument that "it's better to have loved than lost than never loved at all" which is a saying that I've heard a million times and used a million and two. Because of that, I'm not really paying attention so if you want to keep your readers attention, try to change up the way that you say things, or show things you want to say. That's going to catch them off guard and make them pay attention. It's sort of like if you say Milk ten times then are asked what a cow drinks, you get done listening after the third milk and don't hear what exactly the question is, you're preprogrammed to think the answer is what you were just saying.

It doesn't help that you open a stanza with another cliche line that people say in movies, after disasters, before a romance starts, after a romance ends, and every other time anything happens in life. Things will never be the same because that's how time works. There's nothing original about this either, which makes it hard to get into the negative aspects you begin to talk about in the next part of the poem.

What I'm trying to say is that I think you can do a lot better. You have a really good idea here, and I'd like to see you explore it with more of a visual description rather than this dialogue because it's hard to be original with a dialogue in poetry. Just about everything has been said before and how we think about things that are abstract tends to be how someone else has described them to us which means we're pre-set to have a disadvantage trying to come up with something to say about love.

How we can fix that is to create a story in our heads and talk about THAT specific love. THAT set of lovers, That individual who never went after love and THAT person who decided to invite them into love and how it ruined their lives but also, gave them a story to tell. Instead of using a broad scale idea, focus down and create a specific story, invented or real, and write about that. Give us details that only you can detail because nothing IS the same so tell us a story that's yours to tell. Get into the heads of the characters you want, or your personified self, and deliver a story you'd tell your most private friend. That is the story we want to read. That is going to hit home and help us connect because you're going to deliver a poem which feels real and alive like these people actually exist somewhere, and we care about them because they do exist somewhere. We become invested in wanting them to be happy when they are invited to be us, just for a minute or two, as we read the poem.

Now I'm going to issue a challenge. Thinking about it like a story only you can tell; imagine you get really drunk and you're spilling your guts about a love story, and write exactly what you'd tell the stranger sitting next to you at the bar. Post that, and give me a shout, I'd love to see what happens!

In conclusion, more imagery, and concrete details to fix the preachy nature a poem has when it's not narrative.

-Aley

Young Writers Society

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