Another Girl

Hello, I'm Katie. I really liked this! I think the other YWS member caught pretty much everything. I love how you put a lot of emotion in to it. I could really relate with it. The only thing I would say, which has already been said, is that you need to describe what it is like there. Setting is important as well! Great job!

Katie

Thank you very much for that wonderful review! I will go back and edit this. As I have said before, I've just begun to dabble in poetry, so I don't know exactly what to do. Also, thank you for the article. It was very informative.

Hope you have a great day!

-Kate

Hi Wonderingkate,

Don’t be too embarrassed by this, the most amazing thing is that you’re so willing to improve on your poetry. In this poem in particular, I like how much emotion I can see and feel in it. Sometimes you can read perfectly composed poetry with amazing structure and word use but find it lacking in feeling, emotion and tone. You’ve done that very well here, the sadness and slight bitterness, the broken hope are all clear. Nice work here.

What I believe you can work on are the other elements. The structure of the poem is effective and by no means unusual, I would suggest that you can re-arrange this, though. Take out your repeated stanzas and instead use that space to expand on your idea, who is the ‘you’ here, and who is the narrator? Tell us a little more about the situation. I’d suggest keeping that stanza;
“My heart aches
My stomach flies, and
My legs crumble
All from the thought of you”

As the final stanza, it will be effective and hard there, leaving your reader with good impact.

One point I’ll stress is the use of punctuation. Many times people forget that poetry can use – and is often better off using – punctuation just like prose. What helps me in this regard (as was suggested to me by a YWSer early on in my writing) is making your poem into a paragraph and seeing how it reads. Now, it’s important to remember that your poem can be read differently to traditional prose and your sentence structure can be very different. However, including some periods, commas and correct use of capitalization can really help with the flow of your poem; it’s your reader’s guideline.

Finally, I’d like to mention techniques. There are a great many different techniques at your disposal in poetry, so many I couldn’t possibly mention them all right here. Description and imagery are, I believe, the most important of your techniques in poetry – that is, in general poetry. This wonderful article on imagery can help you, if you’ve the time and inclination to read it: topic19225.html What I suggest is adding some description to your poem. You have all the emotion but we’re missing the bigger picture, we need some colours, sounds and actions to jog us along. Where you have the repeated stanza, tell us how the narrator’s legs crumble, is it like dust or like rubble. Is she a broken husk of distrust, do her eyes narrow and tear from the anger and misery? Those last ones sound a little emo, but I think you can catch my meaning. If not, feel free to pm me at any time and I’ll explain further.

You’re on your way to an awesome poem; you have the tone and the emotion absolutely awesome. The only things I can suggest your work on are mentioned above. Don’t be too embarrassed like this, as I said earlier, it’s really not as bad as you think and I rather like it.

*Hearts* Le Penguin.