Hi gabrielle23. I am The Raven, Knight of the Green Room, and this will be my debut review as a Knight of the Green Room. My review will be divided into the sections 'What Is Good' and 'What Needs Improvement/Suggestions'. Now, let's get down to business.
What Is Good:
1) It is an enjoyable read, with a subject matter that is relevant in modern society. Your poem is thought provoking, reminding me of certain things.
What Needs Improvement/Suggestions:
1) I agree with the reviewer below. The formatting leaves more to be desired. However, what I do not agree with is that it must be formatted into a regular poem's form, as in into lines and stanzas. While you could do that if you want, there is another way to do this. You might want to opt for a Prose-Poetry format, which is basically poetry in prose form (no surprise there), but is far more smooth sounding and high quality than a regular paragraph from a prose, with all the devices found in poetry found in the paragraph. For this, you will need to turn your lines into sentences. For now, your lines are just joined together one after the next with no proper punctuation and grammar.
I'm more in favour towards the Prose-Poetry format, as it is not as common, giving you the advantage of uniqueness and the attention it could garner. Moreover, from the looks of it, your poem does look like Prose-Poetry, mostly because you're not using far too many poetic formal devices, nudging it towards the Prose direction.
2) Your grammar's beginning to falter even more at the end. Here specifically:
We bought this upon ourselves
Bought should be brought, unless you're critiquing modern day consumerism and capitalism.
wait for our sentance
Sentance should be sentence. It's a spelling error.
3) A major issue I have with the poem is that you're telling us rather than showing. This is especially apparent around the middle, with an entire chunk doing whatever it says on the tin...
Men showing love But not the right way Children having sex Teenagers doing drugs
Here too:
We bought this upon ourselves contributing to the destruction that had already began generations before us.
The beauty of poetry is that each line is a condensation of multiple layers of meaning, but in these areas, I feel like I am being bashed overhead with a single meaning. Try to write it slant, and I know that you have more to say, so why not load those lines with even more meaning?
4) This point is related to point 1) of this section. I believe that your poem could benefit a lot from devices to deal with sounds, such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhyming - you could try selecting softer sounds too, like all the 's' and 'f' sounds. This will make your prose-poetry smooth sounding, and easy to go through, as well as creating associations between parts of your poem. These two lines are good:
Teenagers doing drugs
And people giving hugs
To me, with the magic of rhyming, it seems to indicate the changing of times, the replacement of hugs with drugs as years go by. You should have more of this kind of stuff.
I'm afraid that's all I have for you at this moment. I hope I've helped. Keep writing!
and wait for our sentance... -> Should be: sentence
Points: 291
Reviews: 57
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