Young Writers Society

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and many other just as pleasant greetings that I don't have time to list. Anyway, Wolf here stopping by to leave a review and get this out of the green room hopefully.
I am, to say the least, a bit confused by this poem of yours. I love your title, that is infact what led me to click on this one. Perhaps there is a bit of a hidden meaning I'm not getting just yet.
I'm kinda just left asking "what?" because your title and verses don't seem to line up.

Hiya illy7896! The title of this poem intrigued me so here I am for a review ^^

My first impression is that this is one of those poems that isn't exactly pretty to read, per se, and I mean that in the best way possible! The images are kind of gritty, unique, and in some cases a bit uncomfortable, but very interesting and vivid for sure. For example the lines "like the grit and grime / Of my beholder's feathered eye" make me envision the gunky stuff around your eyes when you wake up in the morning, which is definitely not a nice image, but definitely very striking.

I do get a bit of an absurdist vibe from this poem overall? The images all feel pretty abstract and to some extent, a bit disconnected from each other — and a few of them don't make much sense, literally or metaphorically (especially the last couplet; a clock doesn't typically smell like much and a scent can't really "fall"). This is not at all a critique!, I actually personally really enjoy absurd poetry. I just wanted to note that that's how I find it, so you know how it's coming across to readers and if it has the intended effect ^^

Visually, I like how you've formatted the lines moving back and forth on the page -> it creates a feeling of movement and development that I really enjoyed while I was reading.

One thing that kind of confused me was your use of capitalization. It seems intentional to me, like the whole poem comes across as quite polished so I think you made intentional choices with how you capitalized stuff? The rhyme and reason just isn't super clear to me (which could totally be a me thing haha!) For example, sometimes you capitalize the first letter of a sentence, sometimes the first letter of a line is capitalized even if it isn't the start of a sentence, and sometimes you don't capitalize the first letter of a sentence. In case that explanation isn't super clear (I'm not always the best at putting stuff into words), here are some examples:

example of first letter of a sentence capitalized: "The soil of my own earth;"
example of first letter of a line capitalized: "Of my beholder's feathered eye."
example of first letter of a sentence lowercase: "like the grit and grime"

It's really not a huge deal, but typically it's a good idea to keep capitalization consistent throughout a poem. For example, a poet might choose to only write in lowercase in a poem to come across as more familiar or intimate, or they might choose to capitalize the first letter of each line to come across as more formal or perhaps detached. If you're interested in a more in-depth look at capitalization in poetry, I definitely suggest checking out this interesting YWS article!

One teensy little wording nitpick I had: "Fed up of" makes more sense as "Fed up with" ^^

As a whole, I quite enjoyed the different images you painted in the short span of this poem! You use really strong verbs like "spat", "churned", "recycled", "ponder" — verbs are such an underrated way of creating vibrant descriptions, and people usually fall back on adjectives instead, but you don't do that at all here, which is awesome c: It's always better to use one strong verb than a weak verb and two adjectives, as a rule of thumb!

I think my favourite chunk of this poem is "The soil of my own earth; / recycled, / churned / within this never-ending heart". To me it describes someone who is restless and constantly changing and unable to stay the same or feel the same. "Never-ending heart" especially is such a beautiful phrase <3

Overall, this was a really interesting poem and I enjoyed reading & digesting it! I hope this review is helpful in some way, and if you have any questions at all about anything I brought up feel free to ask ^^

Keep writing,

whatcha