partial-asterisms above us

Still thinking of this one.

Hey fraey, here's the comment (whoops, it became a review) that I owe you from the RevMo Contest from September! Sorry for the delay, and thank you for your patience!

This is a very neat concept for a poem - like if I'm understanding correctly an "asterism" is a group of stars that people orient themselves with or are just familiar to them, and then I'm not sure what a partial-asterism would be. Is that like a phrasing you made up yourself?

I'm interpreting a partial-asterism to be something that's part of a collection that's familiar, and poetically or metaphorically would be a partial reference like half a famous quote, or half an image that is known.

Then you use all these phrases in the poem itself with hyphens where I think you're trying to create new words, or interesting pairings that are becoming partial-asterisms themselves - because they're "half a reference" to something familiar. Interesting, interesting!

I'm not entirely sure about about what the technical rules are for hyphens, but it doesn't really matter, because lots of folks in poetry seem to throw them in interesting ways anyways - usually I think this is done to 1) create pairings of words or emphasis that wouldn't be possible without the hyphen, or 2) to maximize word economy (ie. I made pancakes and added chocolate chips, vs. I made Chocolate-Chip-Pancakes - bad example, but you get it!) or 3) just to create a symbolic link between the words to emphasize continuity or connectedness.

I think in your first two lines the use of "fairy-like" and "midnight-blue" is too predictable. People use those pairings of words with hyphens with some regularity. See if you can push the image a bit - like "fairy-dream starlight" or "periwinkle-whisper blue", just if you're really pushing the hypenated words, as a reader I want to immediately notice your creativity and what's going on.

The 2nd pair of two lines I liked better, I'm wondering if you could make "weary-old home", "soft-treasured" and "worn-down" a bit more interesting though - even if they get a little whimsical, the poem is about stars after-all so I think you can totally do that! I really like "silk-spun galaxy" that's one of my favorite pairings you have.

So like I said, I really like the poem on a conceptual level, I just want to see if you can push it a bit further to really make it pop.

Overall as far as interpretation, I'm going to say I think this poem is a love poem between an earthling and someone (or something) that lives in the sky (maybe the love is even a star). This could of course be a metaphor for someone who feels like the subject of their love is too far for them to access or connect to, either separated by culture, values, physical distance, or even mind-set or some other reason that's gotten in the way. Perhaps one of the one whose from the galaxies is too imaginative and not very "down-to-earth" and the earth one feels limited and as revealed in the second to last line, they may even feel limited by their own mortality or physical capacity.

To connect it to the concept of partial-asterism, perhaps the speaker feels like a partial-asterism - they're in love with a galaxy/person but they're stuck on earth. Their mind is in the sky, but they can't get there - so they end up being a half-reference, half-recognizable, incomplete-constellation - which if the whole point of an asterism is to be a full recognizable reference point, I'm not sure a partial-reference would be much good at all!

I'm not sure if that's what you were going for, but that was my interpretation.

I like the background you have, though I think the poem is strong enough to stand without it too.

A few final thoughts:
I don't get the glove reference in the third to last line, it seems a bit out of the blue.

And since the title uses "partial" if you did feel like expanding this poem, you could use incomplete thoughts/sentences to highlight the partiality even more! I think that'd be an interesting next level of a twist.

This is a great poem, I want to try to write one with a bunch of hyphenated-phrases, I'm inspired by this!

Keep writing fraey, you're good at it!

- alliyah

Hello again.

This is a really cool piece of poetry! I love how you combined a visual image with the poem that you had written - combining that with a different font choice made it feel even more whimsical than it already felt. As @Corvus mentioned before me, the text was a little hard to read thanks to it being a similar color to the background, but that's something that can easily be fixed.

Were those kennings, by the way? I thought it was just interesting adjective choices at the beginning, but by the end I was getting flashbacks to learning about kennings in British literature last year. If they were, nice job on coming up with them! I can't come up with kennings on the fly to save my life, but all of the ones you came up with felt natural and unique.

The only one that felt a little off was "earth-grave" but it fits what I think of when imagining kennings - I don't think it really needs to be changed.

Speaking of natural, I love how natural this poem felt. Describing the stars already makes me feel connected to nature, but the rest of your poem - especially when paired with that background - reinforced that feeling.

I've tried to come up with more constructive criticism for this, but I can't think of anything else. This is a really strong and interesting poem, and I hope the others ones I'm going to read today are just as impressive.

(I'm sure that they will be!)

Hey there! Toboldlygo here for a review! Let's get this piece out of the Green Room!

First of all, I love what you've done with this piece! It's a lovely poem! I'm going to go over what I think of it generally and then give a couple more nit-picky lines.

The overall sense I get from this poem is wistfulness and sadness and melancholy retrospect. It's a beautiful, beautiful piece and I love the emotions it evokes in me when I read it. It's like a sigh, a whisper, looking back into the past and conjuring a vision of the future all in one. I think that's really spectacular and wonderful to read.

One thing that I think doesn't quite make sense is the last line. It actually seems to be telling me that the two people have different endings after death. One will be in the grave, and the other floating out in space. Does this reflect two different beliefs? Is one atheist and the other more spiritual, for example? Or is this some reflection about being separated by death, with one person gone and the other still living? Is one a regular person who will be forgotten by time, while the other is a legendary or heroic figure who will live forever in the public memory?

The second verse, "these constellations of figure-shiny beacons were your weary-old home," seems rather hard for me to follow. The word order and the hyphens confuse me, actually. My mind thinks that saying "shiny figure-beacons" would make more sense than "figure-shiny beacons." I read beacon as the subject and shiny and figure as being description of them, so the way it's written makes it harder for me to follow. The same with weary-old home, I think a comma between weary and old would make more sense. However, it is your poem, your artistic liberty there and you should do what you think makes the most sense. I'm just giving you feedback on what impression it leaves in the mind of the reader.

I am also not really sure what the title is supposed to convey. It doesn't really strike me as being pertinent to the piece, nor does it lend itself to any atmosphere or setting for it that I can perceive. I might just be a bit dense, but that's my impression is that there is a disconnect between the title and the poem.

As was commented already, I think lightening the text slightly (keep the same color but make it slightly lighter) would make it easier to read against the background. Where the text crosses the galaxy can be a bit hard to read.

Overall, a lovely poem! Keep up the good work!

Happy Writing (and Happy Review Day!)

Toboldlygo

this is a lovely little poem I like the way you used the background to add the poem. my one word of advice is to avoid using a text color so similar to the background. the lack of capitalization took me by surprise but is in keeping with the tone of the poem.

you seem like a good writer and I would like to read more from you.

~Corvus