papers and inks, star and umbrella

dammit you made me cry with this one. I read it as a girls pov writing because of a guy, even though it's written the other way around. I could relate because of my love...well, past love who I still am in love with.. anyways thank you, thank you for posting this beautiful heartbreaking piece I love you for this random stranger keep tugging at my heartstrings

Hi there!

So I like the blend of the story of the relationship between these two people (although towards the end I wondered if the speaker was maybe talking about themselves the whole time) and how you blended it with this rain/umbrella metaphor. This is unique and memorable and was a good way to structure the poem.

I'm going to give you two areas that could use a little improvement; redundancy and flow.

1) Redundancy
There were a lot of points especially towards the beginning of the piece where I didn't feel like the information was necessary to portray what your were trying to say. A lot of this was due to information that was being repeated in slightly different ways. For instance in these two lines: "dropping the umbrella/
down"
adding the word "down" doesn't add much but break up what the reader is trying to follow.

Similarally it feels like the entire first three stanzas are mainly trying to say "the rain stopped" -- while it's great to embellish concepts in poetry (this is what makes it sound exciting and beautiful sometimes) embellishing in ways that don't add new meaning or images just distract from what you're trying to say. This is something I personally struggle with as well, keeping things concise and only giving the information necessary for the poem. So sometimes I go through and try to make each stanza absolutely concise so that it's just saying one thing one time, then moving on, just the bare bones and then you add more embellishment if necessary. I think this method makes sure your lines are actually saying things and aren't just serving as filler.

b) Flow
The next aspect that could be improved upon is flow. For me, the lines felt really stilted in some places. I wondered if maybe this was even intentional to maybe mimic rain? If the stilted flow was intentional, you may want to play with the formatting and white space even more to make this obvious (maybe make the words fall like raindrops in some places?) If the stilted flow was not intentional I would suggest limiting the variation in line lengths. This is a fairly easy way to eliminate a lot of flow problems. Particularly in those places where you had one word per line, I think it's an interesting formatting choice, but it also destroys the flow.

Overall
Overall I enjoyed the meshing of metaphor and narrative. You used a lot of poignant images in this poem that created a really somber and expectant tone. The speaker sounded like they were sad, but also like they were fed-up, and I enjoyed how much personification and attitude coming from the speaker of the piece.

I look forward to reading more of your work in the future, please let me know if anything didn't make sense in my review or if you have any comments/questions.

~alliyah

Hey there! Shey here for a review!

Overall, I really enjoyed this poem. It's not the type of poem I go out of my way to read, but this was a nice read nonetheless.

I'll be upfront and admit to not being a big fan of romantic poems. To me, they tend to be redundant, the same idea with slightly different words and figures of speech. It's hard to be unique when half of poets in the world are writing with the same idea in mind.

Thus, I suggest you definitely keep unique-ness in mind. This wasn't a bad poem by any means, and as I mentioned previously, it was quite enjoyable. But, in future romance-themed works, maybe try to find some metaphor or cool figure of speech that you want to run with. You definitely had the right idea in this poem, with the rain/stars thing. I'll say that it's a little overused, but it's great nonetheless.

Rhythm was great throughout this poem. Nothing immediately sticks out to me as too long, or too short, in regards to syllable count. That's awesome, since it's difficult for a poet to have a flawless rhythm throughout a poem which is, I think we can agree, a relatively long poem.

Overall, great poem! Keep up the great work, cause I look forward to seeing more from you!

Heyo, it's me here to review! Wonderful poem, I quite enjoyed it. Now as far as a theme, I feel it gets slightly confusing towards the middle, as it just seems like filler space with some random words to me. From my perspective, the poem shifts from idle talk about the weather, which I also take might be linked metaphorically to the emotions of the subject of the poem, to talk about wasted time on what I'll also assume are stories or some type of writing. While I always find it nice to leave the reader assuming, I feel like I'm needing to assume a little too much, filling in the story myself which may lead to me getting the wrong message. That's my biggest complaint I suppose, I'm just left to fill it all in based on the title, description and general gist of the story. The only complaint past that is that I had to use the description to try understanding the story. It is my opinion that a description should not help the story if possible, so that's just another thing I would look out for, since not everyone is interested in the description.

In terms of punctuation and spelling, I'm pretty bad with poems and proofing them, but there are a few things I would look out for. None of the I's are capitalized, but since not a single one is as such, it may just be a style choice. Another thing that might be style, but might not is the line, "that fancy foolish looking glasses." which I would think would be "those fancy foolish looking glasses" and the line " looking for the words you craved, inside the foolish blue umbrella" which might be me misunderstanding the wording but I would think would be "looking for the words you carved inside the foolish blue umbrella"

Both work now that I think of it, it just doesnt work well with my brain since I dont usually see that kind of expression or wording often. Other than that fantastic job, keep the writing coming!