All You Do is Lie

Oooooh man. Here we go.

I won't lie, I did not like this. Not one bit. There is nothing here that can be described as "good poetry". Everything wrong with this piece boils down to one thing: failing to connect with the audience. This is all about you, something you experienced, and I as a reader took nothing away from reading it. The most glaring problem is your failure to use poetic devices. Allow me to expand;

1. No metaphor or imagery. There is nothing here that goes beyond what is immediately apparent in the words. You've just plopped your idea down on the table for anyone to come and see. It's cold, it's obvious, it's sterile. The reader can take one glance, take in everything you mean, and walk away almost without thinking. There is no layer other than the one you're presenting. Nothing clever, nothing for us to chew on, nothing for us to mull over and think about. Basically, it's too simple. Don't hear me wrong, a poem isn't necessarily better if it is more difficult or complicated (although it often is); the problem here is it might as well be prose. If you can write it in prose don't bother writing it in verse. I mean, you've basically restated your title over and over again. I read the title, thought "Ok, so the speaker is talking to someone who lies to them", and that was it. There was absolutely nothing new that I didn't figure out from the title.

2. Nothing for the audience to hold onto. This is similar to the above point, but the difference is important. In this piece there is the subject ("you"), the object ("I"), and the action (lying). That's it. Nothing else. I don't know "you" or "I", and I know about lying in an abstract sense and from my own personal experience. The problem is that even after reading the piece I know nothing more about either of the three things than I did before I read the piece. It's made worse by the fact that it's a series of questions and statements made by one person I don't know to another person I don't know. Rhetorical questions (and in my personal opinion, questions in general, especially those that are immediately answered) have absolutely no place in a poem. All they do is alienate the audience in the most cringe-inducing fashion possible. There is no reference in the piece to another piece of literature, or a scene or thought or emotion that I (i.e. your audience in general) can relate to. All I can do is listen to you tell me what's going on, and taking your word for it. I don't want you to tell me what's going on, I want you to show me what's going on, and show me something I didn't see at first. Better yet, I want you to show me your experience, show me something new, then force me to see something new in my own experience. I want to be a different person (even if only slightly) after I read your piece than before I read it. But no. I lie to people, people lie to me, you lie to people, people lie to you. Same as it's always been. Reading your piece had absolutely no affect on me or the way I thought whatsoever.

3. You're too worried about form and not worried enough about content. What you say is far more important that how you say it. Basically, cut the rhyming rubbish and ditch the thesaurus. Let me make this one hundred per-cent clear: if you cannot write a flawless line that says exactly what you mean to say while rhyming do not rhyme. The same goes for using a thesaurus or rhyming dictionary. If the word you need doesn't immediately come to your mind you don't need that word, find a better one. Say what you need to say, form be damned. Don't sacrifice the integrity of meaning for a moment of (questionable) cleverness.

It is clear you don't have much experience writing poetry. That's totally fine, everyone starts out here. I know I definitely did To improve, you have to do two things: write more, and (most importantly) read more. How many poems do you think you've read in your life? And I mean really read, really taken apart, really soaked in? Probably not many. The problem with many people who write (especially writers of poetry) is they don't read enough. This means they have poor taste, can't tell good stuff from bad stuff, and thus can't produce good stuff. Stephen King once said "if you have no time to read you certainly have no time to write." My advice? Read 30 poems before you write your next one. Good ones too. Famous poets you're into, the more experienced poets on YWS, anyone good. PM me if you'd like some suggestions. Really read the poems. Spend time thinking about every line and every image. Soak it right up, understand every layer from every angle. Enjoy it like a meal at a very expensive restaurant that you'll never be able to afford to eat at again. Notice things. Steal shamelessly. Learn. Then put pen to paper, and only call it finished when you've squeezed every drop out, and it cannot possibly become any better. Then put it on YWS.

Yours,

K.

GOOD STUFF
1. Layout
2. Flow
3.meaning and emotion
4. The way you turn back the repetitive line " All you do is lie, And it kills me. Now all I can do is die" to " And you will be gone. Because all you did was lie, An now all you can do is die. It ended the poem very well.
BAD STUFF
1. The first stanza was really repetitive
Other than that it was good.
My rating:5*s

Keep it up!

w&w