Young Writers Society

Hello there! Thank you so much for requesting a review c:

I'll be centering this review around each of the three stanzas to work through how the lines work together or seem more separate in the overall poem!

The title being "Blank Blank Blank" made me wonder what this poem would be about, but I didn't realize that it was based around a "blank screen" so I appreciated having some anticipation towards the poem at the beginning.

For the first stanza, I think you did a good job at painting a picture of someone staring at a blank screen in this case, but the image easily brings to mind "blank page" as well such as in a notebook. I would say probably to not reuse "blank" in the opening two lines unless it will be used in the third line as well, such as "blank white" as an example since repetition sticks out if it's not used in specific ways, if that makes sense. In three instances, especially in a poem titled "Blank, Blank, Blank" I think you could get away with using "blank" three times!

In addition, your punctuation use, as well as lack of punctuation use, is interesting to me since the short lines especially of "blank canvases/ blank pages" and "in time / no words" kind of feel disjointed in the flow of the poem. I'd recommend to either reformat those lines or maybe set them in a separate stanza. To me, the short lines carry a different tone than the more descriptive lines and images between them.

blank canvases
blank pages

then continuing with the rest of the lines. Does that distinction stand out to you? If it doesn't, that is totally fine. It's just something that has caught my attention in this poem.

I do find it interesting that you end this first stanza with the first demonstrated "typo" and that there are two different styles of showing the typos, either with strike-out or with italics. I would say that there maybe should be another typo in the first stanza to indicate a change in tone/style, but I can also appreciate the visual appearance of someone getting frustrated/irate/feelings changing over time while trying to write in this screen and thus producing far more typos at the end rather than the beginning.

Moving onto the second stanza, I find it interesting that you left the typos in here! Yes, the typos are indicated with italics, but for the first and last stanza, the correct spelling is given. I appreciate the simplicity of picturing a single cursor on an open, blank document, which can pretty much mean any kind of platform/software that allows for writing, since I'm sure the majority if not everyone on this website can relate to. This section feels more like the writer is more focused on the feeling of not being able to write, such as feeling "judged" by the cursor on a blank screen, and there is not anything they can think to write, or simply they don't know what to do in order to be able to write.

I think that this second stanza might need a little more detail in order to fit as well with the rest of the poem -- it focuses so much on the single cursor that I feel like either would work better with another image/metaphor, such as maybe the reader's physical reaction to this idea of being "watched" or something along those lines. In addition, I would say to watch out for the use of repetition in this stanza as well, with how "hurt hurt hurt" is repeated, without any typos and without any other formatting, but the ending line is "wroiet write wirte" with both misspellings in italics. I just recommend to use a careful eye to look through the specific choices make and try for consistency within formatting/misspellings/anything that seems relevant!

Finally, for the last stanza, I feel like there are some combinations of the feelings and images felt in the past two stanzas. There are varied typos and some re-type/correcting the misspellings, but for others there are not. I'm curious as to why these specific words "pixels" and "to" were retyped, while others "knight/braek/conjouring" were left within the text as is. I do like the view of the reader being able to feel the frustration of not only has the writer been unable to write, their laptop dies and now, they have to wait until it turns back on with enough charge.

There are good visuals in this last stanza, with describing the laptop and what feelings I'm sure plenty of people have when they are desperate to finish something but are also so utterly done with not being able to write. For me, the italics on the "ill/ive/ill" seem to work well because I can "hear" that inclination as if I was reading through the poem. I also like how the writer seems determined to not give up, even with everything that has been happening and unable to happen, as in writing words on the screen. I too hope that this writer can defeat the blank screen.

Overall, I really liked your creative use of punctuation, spellings, formatting, but I do just want to emphasize on how you're implementing this techniques into a short poem style. I can truly relate to the speaker in this poem about dealing with writer's block/unable to write. Well done! Feel free to ask me any questions or any part of my review. Thanks again for requesting a review, I hope this was helpful!

Thanks c: