Thoughts on this poem I wrote?

Shitty. Do better.

Ok I'll try. Any specific feedback?

Go ahead

It's quite mundane, I don't think it will derail unless it is so awful anons flock to jeer me and it becomes a copypasta. Lol, could happen.

He was higher than the dive
and he knew that he would never
make it down alive.

autobiographical film flashes for innocent eyes.
Azure lapping, clip-clapping in June breeze
provided no relief.

Crowds looking on with jeers for bubblegum
were as good as chain link fences with barb wire hair.
He chose to push flowers.

And the

Stratosphere

whistled
by

while

wind whipped

rapidly

In ears

Deftly
Defeating
Fear.
Houston, we have Splashdown.

And slapped, stung, red ribs.

>Any specific feedback?

Make it less shitty

I kinda liked the image you painted of the talking papers

The rest was kind of boring and didn't really give me anything to latch on to

Also I liked how it was recorded on vocaroo and posted on Veeky Forums

Before I start, bear in mind that none of this is mean-spirited, simply constructive criticism.

Do you write a lot of poetry? Because it's very clunky, and the diving syntax comes off to me as gimmicky, and this is coming from a huge Cummings fan.

The end of your stanzas is always the weakest. Laconic≠poignant. Try and hold the attention of the audience through your stanzas. I'd recommend making them at least 3 lines longer, because there's never enough time to flesh out an idea, especially if you start with something as straightforward as the first stanza.

I'd swap the focus between your first and second stanza. Make the first one about his setting, about the pressure on him, the things he sees. My first impression of the stanza as it stands was melodrama and pompousness.
Why did you capitalize Azure?
The tone flies all over the place.

>never make it down alive
>no relief
>He chose to push flowers.

but then all of a sudden we get

>Houston, we have Splashdown

That one was hard to read. Again, some fairly pointless capitalization. Stratosphere? Ok, he's high up. Show us that.

Deftly? Show us.
Defeating...
Fear? What fear? Those two meager little stanzas? Why would we punctuate that? He's falling, the fear is out of him, he's in the moment. If you jumped from a diving board (metaphorical, literal, whatever) you're not thinking about how scared you are then. You let the wind take you.

I enjoy the final line, but overall the severity of the poem doesn't do it for me. It only came to my head a little later that it might be a suicide jump.

Regardless if it is, you need to elaborate on your ideas more. Something as big as a dive should have more to it than this. What does he feel? What is the impact of this on him, his environment, why would he do this, what could be the aftermath?

Again, not trying to be rude, just giving my opinion.

No, no. Thank you. I wrote that drunk and high watching a shitty sitcom and turned it in to a college class and the teacher liked it and said I should try to get it published in a campus amateur thing. I thought it wasn't good. It threw me for a loop. I do not write poetry as often as I should, but I do have other poems I like much, much better, but this one got the most positive feedback I've ever had and I never understood it. Maybe my other ones are that much shittier :(

lmao post something you're proud of. Besides, college is like the most opportune time to learn and face criticism. Getting published at a young age doesn't always work out.

Hey .. not to sound needy, but mind giving me some of that in-depth criticism?

Lol mine was just so easy to criticize op. Your poem is actually good.
I'll post something else but you should do op too, it is his thread after all.

A mans reach
Must exceed his grasp
Or what's a heaven for?

Ya sure. Just post man this is Veeky Forums not a seminar room.

please see i like it

Im retarded ignore that

Here's one I like much better

How to Eat a Chocolate

It should be slow.
A nibble at a time
and a moment on the tongue
so that you can remember
Remember the multitudes of magnificent,
chemical compounds that make up
a single nibble of cocoa beans:
washed, cured, roasted, ground, boiled and mashed
made into cocoa butter and lecithin
And remember it's
mixed with milk extracted from a mother cow
twice a day
every day
promptly at
3 o’clock
and
3 o’clock
every day
by a man with worn and cracked fingers
from cold mornings and hot afternoons.
drip by drip, the labor is his fruit
and remember
its mixed in with sugar
refined from canes
who
abide in horrid humid conditions
no human should have to labor in
simply to harvest such frivolity

It should be slow
so you can remember your first bite
The first time Santa left you one in an overdone sock
Remember
the first one your first love gave to you in an overdone box
The first one your mother gave to you
In a love that's never done.

I'm having a hard time writing about this one because it seems scatterbrained. This is why I didn't post anything the first time.

What is the first part? Why does he trail into a room, where the lamps are already turned on?

So the first part, I'm assuming, is about yourself as a writer and a poet. The trash litters the room, imagery of a lone artist, Gothic messages in vaguely Chinese proverbs telling you to interact more.

I don't like that second stanza. It comes off as self-congratulatory, especially seeing as how you really haven't contributed anything except for some general imagery and trope-y motifs.

There's nothing wrong with tropes, but you have to be careful that they don't dominate your work, otherwise what's the point of contributing your idea? Again, this is preference, and everything operates off of established ideas, they're simply just expanding upon the axioms.

Who is the "wretched sister' of Sunday? You keep jumping between the abstract and the realistic, and yet the two never really seem to connect. It's like looking at a surrealist painting in a museum and then reading the artist's description to the right of it. The reader is left disoriented and annoyed.

>these words when the time comes.

The words you mentioned earlier? What correlation does that to the third stanza then? It's like you skipped over it. First stanza was one idea, second stanza praised it, third stanza went a whole different direction, and the fourth stanza went back to the first.

>I do not see any other way

Other way to what? What is your struggle? Why is your mouth being mutilated? I still have no clue of the significance of the aforementioned room, and it's even reflecting in my attempted analysis of this. I'm sorry, but I have no clue what I'm reading. If you could offer up a few points of reference for me, I could give you something better.

This is actually pretty good.

>remember Remember

I don't think that's necessary. It's chocolate, not your father's dying wish. The next line about chemical compounds is definitely not as romantic as the previous would suggest.

>And remember it's

What?

>mixed with milk extracted from a mother cow

That's just a rather crude line. I wouldn't single it out as you have, nor would I put so much detail into it.

Then you have the real emphasis on the food-making process, which is just a strange choice considering what (I'm assuming) your real focus is going to be in a second.

>by a man with worn and cracked fingers

Just doesn't sound very good. Show, don't tell etc. Repeating that he works a lot is great, but it doesn't impact me. Nobody eats chocolate with an idea for all of the effort made into it and all of it's ingredients. Shouldn't it be the opposite? Wouldn't it make more sense to highlight one's ignorance of the process of creating this indulgence?

I can't really sympathize with the man who made the chocolate, especially with the charity commercial style presentation of

>horrid humid conditions

Like, horrid doesn't even seem that bad. I like humid weather. Horrid humid sounds like some cartoon villain as well.

>harvest such frivolity

Argh why did you wait until the very end to say anything at all?! We know that chocolate is made in factories, so wouldn't it make sense to question the consequences of this instead? That first stanza felt like a long, stretchy waste of my time.

>It should be slow

I don't dig the repetition. The first time you said it, it had nothing to back it up. The second time you said it, it still had no verification. Why is it that I should take the time out of my chocolate eating to think about some man who made this?

What draws me to think of his worn fingers, and why would I assume that making chocolate is something he cherishes? You've ended up with a romantic poem about the fact that chocolate is created by some Hercules who struggles day in and day out in "hot afternoons" (so, like Texas? or summertime France?) for what?

The poem is insulting for the first stanza. The second stanza tries way too hard. There seems to be a recurring theme where you always focus on some insignificant little detail in an attempt for universality, but it's alright to talk about something a little bigger like a first love, or Santa giving you a chocolate (?)

You have to be sincere. Why do you think it's important people consider things while eating chocolate? If you want to talk about the labor conditions, make a PowerPoint or elaborate on the conditions. If you want to talk about a significant emotion associated with your chocolate, make your entire poem about that first love and giving her the box of chocolates.

Don't wrap up all of the human connection in favor of mother cows. If you look at everything simply as a consequence of nature, you're going to have a hard time down the road connecting to your audience.

Dude. Thank you. You are giving me a lesson in revision right now, something I've never been taught (Obviously). Wanna do another? Lol I learn from honest criticism and bad mistakes.

Our heroics are dying.
Replaced here and there by
Efficiencies and algorithms.
Could there be an Achilles with reason?
And what would Joe Montana be
without the Back from behind victory?
If we always choose the best path
then the destination is clear.
But if Odysseus is home in an hour
then there is no Odyssey.