Young Writers Society

Howdy doo Jo, Dogs here with your review today. We got a lotta work to do so lets dive in shall we?

Ok firstly, this is not in a poetry format. This is just a block of text like a short story. You need to create stanzas and lines. A stanza is composed of several poetic lines that are broken up strategically to help create flow and rhythm. So the first couple lines should look like:

"When life brings you down
and you feel like you have no were to go,
and your looking back and seeing
all the memories flowing through your mind."

Something along those lines, building off of that that sentence is a huge run on and is still lacking a little poetic feel. So then describe what the memories look like when you're looking back, are they amorphous blobs of color or are they a trickling river of images? You need to clarify this for the reader so we can see what you are seeing. Your job as a writer is to create an image so strong for the reader that we see the picture you've painted with your words. You lack that excellent imagery you'll find in several poems. To help create that imagery you can use metaphors and similes. Those two are you greatest friends to being an amazing poet.

I'm not going to go into the large amount of grammar and spelling errors you use here, but if you're having problems with grammar and spelling I'd suggest you copy and paste your writing into a word document and use the spell/grammar check there. It'll help your writing a lot trust me.

So please let me know if you correct this piece into a more poem like format and I'd be more then happy to give you a review . Keep up the good work!

TuckEr EllsworTh

Hey there! Okay, so I don't think my review will be as long as the other two that got here first. It probably won't be as indepth either. However, I wanted to review something and yours popped out.
At first the whole thing kind of through my off, and you have some mistakes and typos, but after reading the whole thing I decided I really like this.
I would have liked it better if it was broken up into lines and stanzas. Having a bunch of lines makes poetry easier to read, rather than just staring as a big scary paragraph. Plus, I think that poetry is artwork when it's spread out into different lines.
For the most part, you're piece had great rhythm. I could have sung this instead of just reading it, because it fit together so well and flowed so easily. There were even a few places that rhymed just enough to make me know that I was reading a poem.
I also liked the ideas and some of the lines, but I think you need to make it a little more clear just what you're writing about. What's the theme? What's your purpose? We know your motivation, your reason was tears and crying and sadness. But what are you going to say about tears? What is your main thing that you want us to know by reading your poem?
Anyway, hope this helps. Keep writing!!

Hi jolene15, a few thoughts here:

It feels as though you have some sort of beat poetry, or stream-of-consciousness goodness going on here. What's good about that type of poetry is it's wonderful flow of words and a mood that doesn't really care about the standards of others. It's inspirational because it takes all the good aspects of let's say a Baptist minister who stands up and just lets everything out, with everyone around saying "Amen!" as the points of truth are let out. I find it really interesting that you have "True" capitalized here in that sense.

Giving your poem a spine

I certainly don't mean this in the sense that it needs to be courageous. That is already evident. But what this poem needs is some form. Right now, with the layout it has, it is lifeless. Now poems can come in paragraph blocks, but I find that those poems are usually playing with form rather than ignoring it. Lines in poetry aren't always for show; they really do emphasize what needs to be emphasized and they create drama and suspense, even if it is only a little in some cases. I think your poem would be much improved if you formatted a little.

The Imageless

Words that convey big ideas can't be thrown about in poetry because they are big ideas that require a little bit of explanation. For example:

All the sadness and disapointment we been through is turning into hate.

Hello! I love me some poetry so how could I resist reviewing this? (Oh look I rhymed! Don't mind me, I am very easily amused today).

Specifics

1. What's that random capital in the middle of a sentence? I'm guessing you had some line breaks here and they've not come out in the pasting so you'll want to put those back in. As they're missing, I'll try not to comment on that area of form for the moment but if you do want advice later, drop me a pm and I'll be happy to help out!

2. Prose vs poetry. The line-breaks aside, I find a lot of your lines could benefit from a little extra flow. When you ask people what makes something poetry instead of prose, you'll get a whole heap of answers but the easiest way to put it is 'flow'. This is comprised of rhythm, it might be affected by rhyme. It might even be alliteration or imperative tone that's giving the poem its edge. I'm going to take your first line and try to show you what I mean!

When life brings you down and you feel like you have No were Nowhere to go