I disagree. This way, there's a nice dactylic meter to it.
The-CUS-to-mers-SIT-on-his-LAP-on-his-THRONE.
Poetry Critique thread
James Brown
Jayden Cooper
I'm charmed and giddy with joy. I feel like my ten year old self, reading Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss. Now, you're not Dr. Seuss. But I like you. I have to check out this Silverstein.
Levi Morris
Not him, but how do you expect to learn meter? The best I can tell you is to sing your poem as you write. This way, your mental word machine's output gets limited by the cadence that you want to achieve.
Camden Price
>I gripped most of it, but please tell me more acutely what this is depicting and what it's about. I want to understand it better.
You got me. I'm an insecure asshole who usually posts a poem from an accomplished but obscure poet in the same thread as my own. Just so I can tell which criticism to ignore and which to take seriously.
It's by Abdulah Sidran (the guy who wrote Kusturicas early movies.) It's about the mountain path the fleeing Jews took out of Sarajevo at the start of WWII. He was widely derided for the poem for being too melodramatic and cliche, I kinda like it. Once got to ask him some questions about the poem at a panel my school organized, from memory:
>they put up a sign: no smoking.
According to Maimonides: everything that is in accordance with reason is good. Warning people not to smoke at a gas station makes sense, so it's a little marker of goodness along the way.
>Dead air.
Everyone got scared because they were approaching a cliff, not because the cliff itself but:
>Stones and snakes.
Rocky terrain = deadly snakes, in local folk wisdom. The only two deadly snakes of the region are the the European sand viper and the horned mamba. The rocks in the region are mostly quartz and silica (which make the soil acidic) and both those snakes hate acidic terrain. The only snakes among the rocks are harmless - but look a lot like the former two. Also a nod to the primeval: people are more scared of snakes than people with machine-guns looking for them.
>Men of great honesty...
Engraved on a grave at the entrance of the old Jewish cemetery that is along the path.
>This world is a torch, lit by both ends.
Again, Jewish philosophy: You're not safe in the past or the future, so you cower in the present - no matter how nasty.
>Down there dona Klara...
From up there you can see a popular bathing spot on the Miljacka river, one of the women in the convoy liked to spend her summers there.
Andrew Rivera
HAH! What you thought was poetry was actually (c)rap music! Fooled again, shitheads!
Austin Reyes
My take on your poem:
>The engine purrs to idle life
>My path what once so clear
>I teeter on a tattle knife
>For I shall walk no fear
>My love is of my God, I think
>I feel it, is it there?
>In my mind I start to shrink
>This'll be my final prayer
Joseph Parker
What the other guy said, but unironically. There are two types of poets that I've seen that piss me off.
>NO NEED RHYME, RHYME NOT NECESSARY! (Often because he can't rhyme for jack shit)
>I RHYME ALL THE TYME. I RHYME LIKE A LIME! (Often his rhymes suck jack shit)
If you're a patrician like me, then you rhyme, but you're actually fucking good at it.
Jackson Mitchell
Best one here. Everyone else is a raging faggot who can't into /poetry/.
Alexander Phillips
I wish I couldn't see the towers from the outside.
Argon, I'm told,
And I'll find the rest when I'm later.
Robert Roberts
I really liked it, but I don't know what it means. Sparknote it for me, please...