Hi herb! Lim here to review your poems!
General impressions across all three
These poems come across to me as being slightly mysterious. They don’t go into specifics or locate the speaker in a particular space (maybe except the last poem’s mention of a “mirror” and a “sky”), which is partly why there is a sense of mystery.
They are also focused on the speaker’s monologue. They follow the speaker’s thoughts that start from a particular topic, such as how human beings relate to mathematical theorems, and them seem to branch off from there in a different direction. However, the speaker’s thoughts are also expressed in relatively few words per idea, which leaves a lot up to interpretation.
The first and third poems aren’t very heavy on the senses. The second poem dives a bit more into sensory imagery with the similes and metaphors evoking sounds, but the main point still seems to be the speaker’s message not the imagery for its own sake.
None of this is a criticism – just my description of the type of poem these are.
Interpretations and themes of the poems
1. humanity thm
Here’s how I interpreted the poem based on the tone of the speaker: At first the speaker sounds like they are lamenting the structure of the theorem. They ask, in a rhetorical question, if they can use the theorem to “forget . . .anguish”. I think the speaker wants us to answer ‘no’.
But then from “converse works as well”, it seems like they start genuinely questioning how their emotional experiences work, suggesting different candidates for ‘x’ and decide they “must prove” something. Then there is a further shift that leads into a discussion about humanity being unfair, where they sound more accusatory/ critical of humanity in general. Perhaps they link it back to the individual self in the last lines “if something is human / then it cannot truly be fair” which are in the singular, but I struggled with this interpretation because the beginning of the poem doesn’t seem to be about ‘fairness’ in this sense.
Another (two) interpretation(s): the speaker is criticising the need to prove one’s emotions as an unfair demand set by society. The first half of the poem about the speaker’s anguish/ the forgotten memory is ironic – the real message is that people have parts that can’t be reduced or ‘proven’. The second half of the poem perhaps implies that a society that expects such things to be ‘proven’ is unfair OR that because human feelings can’t be proven, humans can’t be fair (in the sense of objective) about anything.
2. what is
The general themes I get from this one are humanity, significance (or lack thereof) and perhaps indeterminacy. On one level, the poem shows that human emotional expression like laughing or crying has many different aspects, which the speaker cannot grasp in an easy to define way. For instance, a “tear” can be productive and gentle like the rain, or destructive like a flood, or completely neutral like a waterfall’s “white noise”. Life as a human is like being on a “playground” where things aren’t definite or have a fixed purpose.
On another level, the poem seems to suggest the insignificance of human beings. The speaker always ends the contemplation of one thing with a dismissive sort of line like – a tear is “but a waterfall” and “white noise”, a laugh is “a sound made in desperation”, and the world is “just another playground”. The use of “mannequins” or “a model” also plays down any sense of humans being agents/ having free will.
3. i am
This poem doesn’t refer directly to humanity or the world at large. Instead, it apparently focuses on the self. At first the speaker seems to be filtering out some part of themself but then they reincorporate it by the end, suggesting that there are things beyond the “positive” that make up a person. One thing that I might interpret is that this poem, like the other three, portrays authentic emotional experiences as being essential to humanity/ personhood.
Structure
For all three poems, something I liked was how you’ve structured the line breaks. I thought they sounded natural when read aloud and where they sounded more abrupt they created an interesting effect, like:
if this
then that
The line break creates a staccato sound which reflects the potential harshness or reductivity of the theorem.
I also appreciate this section from that poem:
i must prove
by columns
and
columns
and
columns
The one-word lines make the poem’s shape look like a column, which is neat.
Splitting off the “and” from “columns” also creates a pause between them for emphasis (that’s a lot of columns!).
I also appreciate that you’ve created some regularity of the structure in each poem. For instance, in both ‘what is’ and ‘i am’, the refrains ‘what is X’ and ‘i am a X’ help to unify all the individual parts. Likewise, ‘what is’ is built out of question and answer pairs, which creates the contemplative tone and also portrays a sense of indeterminacy or fluidity in the speaker’s world (like things may not be what they seem, or might be more than one thing).
While there isn’t a structure repeated throughout all of ‘humanity thm’, the use of mathematical symbols is consistent throughout – signs implying equivalence are used in a poem about ‘defining’ things to assigning traits to things. In this way, the use of mathematicals makes the poem distinctive, while helping to convey the message.
Language and Imagery
Something that could have room to grow is the development of the ideas. The themes/interpretations section of this review is really long because I felt like the poems were kind of cryptic. It took me quite a while to arrive at an interpretation (or multiple) for each of them. That could just be me, of course, but I thought I'd go into two parts I found confusing.
In ‘what is’, I found it hard to relate the parts about tears and laughter to the image of the playground in the end. The metaphors for tears and laughter have to do with 1. Nature and 2. The speaker’s personal struggles with genuine laughter. Meanwhile I got the sense that the “playground” was about something else entirely – the insignificance or perhaps immaturity (?) of the word. So the three sets of images felt unrelated to each other and it was hard to see how they all fit in the poem as a whole.
I had a similar problem when reading ‘i am’, where the shift here felt almost too abrupt:
i look at myself
seeing the boy who was there
trying to reclaim those fragments
but
i am a person
not to you
but to myself
i look in the mirror
knowing that i can be myself
diving into my day with no fear
How did the speaker get rid of their fear? Did they successfully reclaim all the “fragments”? The word “trying” seems to imply they haven’t succeeded yet, but in the next few lines, the speaker talks as though they have succeeded.
Overall
I think the poems are strong in aspects of form. They all have a consistent style that makes them fit each other as a collection. You’ve used devices like repetition and line breaks to help convey tone and meaning. The spot where I think they have room to grow is in how word choices (and word choices in sequence, specifically) convey the meaning of the poem. I think there’s potential to be just a little more specific to clarify meaning and give the reader more ‘ground’ to work from.
Hope this helps! Let me know if anything there doesn’t quite make sense / you’d like clarification on!
-Lim
I'm back to review another awesome poem for you.
What I usually do is separate them with ~ or -. Take this recommendation with a grain of salt, though. The poem is perfect as is.
Points: 41664
Reviews: 542
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