Published October 4, 2005
Hello all! This is my first post ever here, I just joined, and I figured I'd post a few poems. It's important to me that I get honest feedback, because I am trying to get into a very competitive writing class.
Thanks!
one:
A blue sun, frying like an egg in a purple cloud-shocked sky,
Melting and dripping and raining into lakes of green below
That stir and swallow the drops,
staining their original colors
And sinking to the bottom with rocks and lungless birds.
two:
Underlash moons, like eyes bruised
Black and gaping like a skull
That doesn't know it's dead and never buried...
Pick up her bones, and brush the soft smooth dirt crumbles
So that they flake off and fall to the ground in spirals.
three:
She was born in August -
The empty - armed woman with leaves in her hair
and no words in her mouth...
Slender and free,
She will hypnotize you.
Her hair on fire, she falls backwards through time
And so brilliantly unafraid of her sadness,
she moves like disaster
Skin on bone; she knows her effect on you.
four:
A scissor-boned zombie jesus queen;
her Porcelain sparrow voice sharp but sweet
Singing of crooked skies and milk-eyed men
That climb through her window in the night.
five:
Your legs are streaks of stars that dangle from the moon,
Pale and faint-hearted, like a saint, you cry tears that spin out into space
The small suns around you burn and their sawdust sparkles in your hair
You reach out a long arm and slide to an empty spot
And you light up; you shimmer and shine and melt into a star.
six:
Crisp, polar days
Deer-legged children bolting through forests
and hundreds of packed, thundering hooves
crashing on the ground like dizzy stars
Leaves pull from branches and fall to the dirt - ridden ground in their wake.
That's all! I hope you enjoyed, please let me know what you think!
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140,610 Literary Works • 673,552 Reviews
if only i could write poety that well...sigh...I think it speaks volumes
I know you heard this before, but great metaphors! Your imagery is also very nice as well.
very good
nice use of metaphors
cant think of anything else
so keep up the good work
your friend Conor
Suzie, I think they are separate poems, not numbered stanzas. Am I right, kwestion? You might have been better off posting these separately to allow your readers to really digest each one.
Right there are FOUR, count them, four different figurative ways to describe this person. You've described her as scissor-boned, a zombie, "jesus", and as a queen. How on earth are we supposed to know what you're talking about under all that frosting?Metaphor. I agree with Suz and Fangala--the metaphor is overused and too complex. You want your reader to think, but you don't want his brain to explode either. It's not a good idea to create image after complex image because it's hard to follow...a poem should have a good deal of continuity.
#4 is an example, I think, of where it goes much too far.
The same goes for the rest of the poem...there's so much fluff you've lost the original raw beauty of it.
Imagery. Definitely some good stuff, but, like metaphor, it can go overboard. Poems on LSD are no fun to read.
That's just awesome; superb image. I dislike that the sun is blue--wouldn't the image work better with a yellow sun, as eggs are yellow on the inside? But what follows...
is less awesome. Here you're getting too, erm, hyper in the description. It's hard to take in all at once, this blue sun and purple sky...slow it down, tone it down.
I'm not quite sure what "underlash moons" means, but "eyes bruised/black and gaping like a skull" is a fantastic image, strong, dark connotations.
Good beginning line, but the second line messes up the image for me. I want to see just the image of the legs like "streaks of stars" but the "tears that spin out into space" make it less cool...it sort of takes away the initial impact of the first line.
Description. In all of these, you could spend more time on action and less on description. Description gives us a time, a setting, something to hold on to, but something in the poem should happen to show us what the poem is trying to say.
In poem #6 here, I can see the image, it's good. But I'm not sure what I should take away. Why should I care? What about this is significant? Am I going to walk away from the poem saying, "Well that was a nice image," and nothing more? You want your reader to walk away from the poem thinking.
Good luck getting into that class!
-Colleen
You're going to put everyone in that writing class to shame.
This was great; I agree with Suzanne that you have an amazing grasp of metaphors. However, you go a little overboard. Metaphors should be thrown in carefully and sparingly, not chucked around like you just want to flaunt your amazingness. Is there any way you can make this easier to understand? Your verses are beautiful, but they seem like nonsense. For the sake of the reader, make things make sense.
Your first verse is my favorite, the one about lungless birds. Beautiful.
Keep it up!
You have an amazing mastery of metaphor (I love the boiling sun most of all) but your stanzas have a huge issue. One does not flow into the other, and I feel that your numbers are your way of covering up the fact that each stanza is really a poem unto its self rather than coming together to make one poem, as they should. I suggest you fix that, and dash the numbers out all together. There isn't much of a purpose to them otherwise, as far as I could tell, and I think the poem would benefit from being one continues flow, and I believe you can pull it off.
You also were hasty to follow the usual punctuation pattern of each stanza being one sentence, even if it isn't:
I liked this stanza least of all, especially the first line. It seemed like a gathering of nouns-turned-adjective for the word "queen" and I do not see what you are trying to mean by any of that line. What is this stanza try to say? I haven't a clue. And one thing I just caught on to: you do not capitalize "her" in L2 but in nearly all other lines you capitalize the first letter. I think you should make up your mind (as I notice it in other places now) to capitalize every line, or only where it is grammatically fitting? Try to be consistent, otherwise it looks like you're only being strange.
Don't take this at all the wrong way, it is a very good poem and I believe it has potential, it just dives off at the end, and there is no flow because of your set up. I think I would also like to see more of a meaning behind it, something for the reader to feel/believe/respond to by the end, and perhaps more imagery to pull me in? You have a lot, but you could also have a lot more. It's a great rough draft, a really, really good one. I'm sure you can clean it up in no time and make it hundredfold better. ^_^
Best of luck on getting into the class! I do not doubt you will make it.
This made me smile, was it supposed to? Hehe. You have a very different style, I like it. especially the first stanza - the way you used description there surprised me, but it's great. Love the first line, especially. Great job.