Poetry Critique Thread

Much better, in terms of readability. But I disagree, and you misconstrued my words. Or perhaps I was unclear. But I wouldn't suggest writing it entirely free verse. You're saying you use all those techniques, which is exactly the point I'm trying to address. Poetry, whether you like it or not, finds its impact and profundity in its musicality--and musicality is sustained repetition. You just absolutely need some baseline that carries from beginning to end. Jumping through all those forms in a piece is too sporadic, there's no familiar ground, it's constantly changing, and that's not music. You have no heartbeat, you have no life.
I hope you understand what I'm saying here.

The contrast in the first two lines is nice, but it feels trite and cliche overall. I've heard the second half verbatim before.
You're doing a good job of incorporating diverse types of imagery and reference. I don't know that it has any sense of direction yet though. Also, I'd add some punctuation to break up the constant enjambments, and not capitalize the start of each line.

I do. I feel like I need the various forms for the allusions I'm trying to make. Would adding an underlying rhythm that was common across the different styles help, or do you think I should restructure the 3rd section?

To give up ones dreams
In seasons they go
Not grandly forego
But Fall from the trees

One by one bye all.

lighght

Preachy Poetry is a bad habit. Show us -why- something is bad, rather than complaining about... dubstep?

You lose what remained your ideological thread (or at least I do) in stanza 3.

Your linebreaks are decent for beginning, but work on a way to use them less as punctuation and more as a semantic division and subversion.

>(Buttercup)

why was this included?

>any damn place.

the curse softens the blow

>Alongside other bodily fluids

does shit count as a fluid?

>Meter both poetic and physical,

the wordplay only seems tangentally related to the work, try to avoid that

this does feel super prosey

>filling/morning/crying

suffix rhymes like these are better off being buried or not being there. they draw attention to themselves, but not in a meaningful way.

I'd try to cut the pretty hard and start building from the bones. Do that like twice.

Do you see what you did with the large space gaps in some lines? That's acceptable play with form. But not constant changing of the absolute base form. DESU, it'd be great if if the dude who writes the very stylistic and free-form poems were to drop in and give his two cents on this. I wholly believe great poetry arises from establishment. That person is more of a modernist, and would probably give you better advice toward what you're trying to achieve. I'd hate to discredit or dishearten you when another modernist may help you build better upon the directions you're trying to take.

>this does feel super prosey
One of the sections is prose poetry, so that's inherent.
>filling/morning/crying
Didn't even mean to rhyme those. I will definitely bury them, because you're right, it looks sloppy.

Love; of Circumstance:

Ican’telloveverightowronlyesolelyesorryes

I'm certainly not disheartened, and the critiques you're making seem very valid to me. I had every intention of restructuring this poem before I even made this thread, so I appreciate the input. I honestly feel like my ambition to talent ratio got out from under me on this one.

Speak of the devil, there you are my man.

Pretty good stuff here, I really don't believe you should keep pandering here. Idk if you plan on ever trying to get published, but most places don't accept what has already appeared online.

Wasn't a big fan of the 'lifted out of his pulpit' phrase, though the image is great. Absolutely loved the final lines and imagery; they felt very large in scale yet still connected to the very baseline imagery you painted. As something I'm always striving for in my own work, I always feel a tad envious (as well as proud, I'm not all cynical) when someone else achieves it so well.

I agree with that ratio. It's not easy to give hard advice to someone who has put the amount of effort it takes to write something in the scale of your piece. Most of my poems are between 100-250 words, with my longest being 329, and a few of those have taken me weeks just to be content enough to move them from my 'WIP' folder to my 'Nearly Completed' folder.

The days move by slowly
The weeks slip on past
I stand now in the present
Wishing it would last.

The months drift by slyly
Turning seasons into years
Another year makes us older
Try to hold back the tears.

Our pets and our parents
Our siblings and friends
Stand now in the present
Before we all reach our ends.

Make your time precious
Please just make it last
For the time must come always,
When we drift into the past.

r8 & h8

>he months drift by slyly
>Turning seasons into years
>Another year makes us older
>Try to hold back the tears.
>Our pets and our parents
>Our siblings and friends
>Stand now in the present
>Before we all reach our ends.
>Make your time precious
>Please just make it last
>For the time must come always,
>When we drift into the past.
i literally felt this in my heart

As the brightness of day sinks beneath the earth,
As the darkness of night veils the horizon,
As the coldness of air sets upon the world,
So does the anguish of loneliness upon my heart.

Finally I can breathe,
Finally I can move,
Lastly,
I can see.

The darkness of night has illuminated all things;
All things that the brightness of day has obscured.

The darkness of day is no longer there;
No longer there to protect me from the brightness of night.

I am in sollitude,
I am in sovereignty,
Yet,
I still persist in agony.
pls give advice boys. im in desperate need of it

Any of you guys want to help me with my poems? I've got a whole bunch

They arent edgy trash either. Exclusively written in meter, attempt to have a rhythmic flow. Use poetic techniques

After some help or even a strong critique

I can, but if you really want help, it might feel like i'm being mean.

A bit patchy

But alright

I might go into more detail, I'm at work and getting hammered

This reads like a jumble of stock phrases from greeting cards. You need to use some imagery and then if you are writing a poem. Merely adding line breaks, does not a poem make.

and rhythm, not them

I'm not after you to be nice and friendly. Read my poem, shred it to pieces and I'll work on it

This is a sonnet for my girlfriend (so kind of meant to be gay)

Besides the two lines with flow issues. What do you think?

Is love so part and parcel within life?
For years I wondered why romantics wrote
In older verse i Found a spiritly strife
For modern faithless poets I would vote

Towards the depths i delved so ever harsh
And once I reached the mordern murky pitt
I came to see how smiles were so Sparse
All but slithers ever slim would admit.

To bright and golden hair i think so strong
And perhaps wonder with a muse like her
That maybe with romantics they'd belong
And kinder words of love they would prefer

In age i found that many lack the gift
in fawning, now I lay far from the rift

Damn niqqa. You are harsh. I love it

He is correct though, I would of been nicer

Obvious last stanza needs fixing but yeah, r8 h8

what u think of this los negro?

Last line of the first stanza (rest is good). It lacks a bit of flow, but I like it. Makes things seems a abrupt, kind of like an odd emphasis

Rest of it needs work on the flow, rymthmicness

Can't be better help, I'm at work at the moment, Maybe later

thank you man

Thanks anons. Maybe ill fix it up a bit

Are you capitalizing Found and Sparse as a form of personification. Dickinson frequently did this, and that's how it comes across here, but it seems unintentional.
The first two stanzas are decent. The rest is much too on-the-nose.

With a splintered heart,
And a fist full of ash,
I play my final part;
A cold glass gash

My veins like the strings,
On a forgotten old guitar
And then I strum; they sing
Cries are only heard from afar

What do you mean by on-the-nose?
like too direct?

Here is the total list of concrete images
>murky pitt
>bright and golden hair (cliche)

Textbook Cliches:
>part and parcel
>bright and golden hair

Typos:
>verse i Found L3
>were so Sparse L7
>In age i found L13
if they were on purpose, it didn't work

The rest is empty rhetoric. Here's a sonnet of mine that is about love (to see about how much imagery I use, and to allow you to gauge my worthiness of critiquing your work)

Last two lines of the second stanza seem a bit aburpt.

Basically, I think you need to obfuscate your intent with the latter half. It's hard to toe the line between spoon-feeding your reader exactly what you want to say, and writing some poem/cipher that no one can understand.

>obfuscate
very helpful advice. love it

thank you user

Sorry. Copied the version with the typos over. But you get the jist

I appreciate the critique, golden hair cliche is kind of fitting. Girlfriend literally has golden hair, kind of think it would work if i took out the part and parcel cliche (which I don't think is particually big, but there definetly isnt room for two)

Expected the imagery, it is a sonnet, imagery should be used liberally, i probably shouldn't write sonnets because imagery in copious amounts isnt my strong point

I'll have a look at yours in a sec (phone posting)

More of a shakesperian sonnet fan. But your work is very solid

Here is another

Obvious golden ain't great. But these are for my girlfriend, she likes how I adore her hair

Uneased by dark and dismal dawn's, I reach
afar and feel a lonly void each side-
And with a careless grasp i Cease the screech
A Coldness washing over like a tide.

The void, it grows a haunting bitter feel.
Familiar with the scathing burn by now
I give myself a stirring morning speal-
And fight the early freezing chill somehow

The morning fades and brightens just as prompt.
For weeks the golden muse of mine had left,
But within murky depths of love I'm swamped.
For her Returning soon I cease bereft.

And with a golden head of hair at rest.
Departing once again, I shall protest.

Never done any kind of poetry so here's a haiku.

Rains pour on the day
Half hour heavenly silence
Night serenity

You need to proofread your poetry if you want critique. A lot of the people in this thread probably have English Degrees, and it's insulting.

You biased on rhyme schemes?

Also, a little cliche is still a cliche, excusing one is admitting you can't be assed to put in more effort. You can talk about her hair without cliche (and still mention its color) Image and music are the most important aspects of poetry. You can write in meter. Now show us something. Talk about her boobs or the back of her knee or hazel flecks or how she walks like an ostrich.

Pro tip:
Modern writers of haiku in English do not use the 5-7-5 rule. The reason being that Japanese on are much shorter than the average syllable, and wordiness detracts from the intention of a haiku (juxtaposition of concrete images for dynamic effect). Here's an example I wrote recently:

dirt path
along the gravel ridge;
the birds use it too

Makes sense. Wordiness did cross my mind I have to say.

I posted the copy that I didn't correct minor mistakes on again. Apologises

>english degrees
I should probably get one.

This is a good start. This will be a piece of advice you'll not want to take, but THROW 5-7-5 AWAY. It's not an important part of haiku. In fact you should aim closer to 4-6-4 to get closer to the restrictions of Japanese writing. Here's what you need to write a bonafide haiku

>Seasonal word
this doesn't have to be a little season, but rather a temporal marker (what time an image is placed is important in crystallizing it)

>Cutting word
there needs to be a definitive moment of juxtaposition, a place where the TWO images you offer are compared, their liminal space. This is often a punctuation mark or implied in english.

>Lack of self
Including the self is a different form called a senryu, consider it if you want to write one, but haiku about about an image, not a person (although a person can appear deep in the metatext like in World of Dew)

You fill most of these requirements, but striving for the rest of them will show you how nuanced the form is.

Haha, beat you to it. Im glad there's another haiku nerd, though.

Whilst we sit in the back not to be seen
We see everything that is not to be seen
Everything that is allowed not, to be seen

As we look in awe,
We realize that what we formerly saw,
Was nothing but an illusion;
Forged as an institution.

We see misery in its purest form
We realize that Janus dwells amongst the mortal-born
We realize that Janus dwells, born, inside his mortal form.
as a wise man once said,
r8 & h8

as a wise man once said r8 & h8

is not poart of the poem

Thanks for the tips. Appreciate it.

Best one here desu

Thanks bud, I'm not especially worried about publishers, because I post images (and delete them from other internet forums).

I'm glad you enjoyed it. Here's my best, what do you think of it?

So does this guy's fit those qualifications?
I thought 5-7-5 was the only rule.

Bird could be seen as seasonal, but that'd be stretching it. Here's some of mine that has them all fairly clearly (not to say they're especially great, I lack the understatement other user has down pat)

I want to be the child of a WASP
Throwing it all away in a stupid moment
With a beautiful boy
Who has delicacy in his face
I want to fall with grace

shiny leaf
floating in a puddle
is stepped on

by me

"How to Write a Poem"

Drag a line across the breadth
of human experience;
garland it with hand-scrawled swag
and petal-blots of ink
which, when they settle, spill beyond
their bounds in febrile veins,
tangle with their neighbours’ tendrils
to make a daisy chain
whose gilded cores gleam with light
of life and truth and pain.

Bump. Legit next generation author of the masses

cool, user. Have you considered giving a specific color to the leaf? It could clue use in.

Um ponto, fogo e então o Sol
O Sol, o nada e então um ponto
Pisca uma estrela no céu:
coração não bate como antes

...

Sounds like you're trying to rap but you're bad at it nobarz/10

SO META

If you're gonna do this at least be fun that's what makes technical rappers like Aesop Rock and MF DOOM great

I wasn't sure at first but I like this. But maybe keep it all third person?

Truant

So he went as he used to,
unchaperoned,
in brief exploration of carparks
ejecting empty cans
at the kink in each K turn.

He sang the old songs,
wiped his lip when he forgot
the words and fantasized
about night time in the cities like London,
and cat eyed women on motorcycles.

Not himself in these departures
of course,
but as some single man he
could not be again unless Sandra
left him, died, or something.

See? he'd like to shake
his finger at her-
if your self is just a
story without a narrator,
or a camera stuffed

in the mouth of a drunken
bird who follows
you home,
then it's just one more thing
to be disposed of.

How can you say you live
in the best of all
possible worlds
when you have to go
to work in the morning?

Out of Breath

The bow, drawn taut, warns me
it will snap; splinters will
erupt, the arrow drop
its potency. I could pound
the wood to make pliant
the coiling sinews, but blood
and sap would fill my grooves
and damp the break.

This bow is used to strain.
It is an instrument of strain,
resigned to spasms
of archery, bent easy at the press
of a tussock in flesh wrapping,
harbouring well the unfelt energy
it bleeds into wood and twine.

>>(Buttercup)
>why was this included?

To complete the iambic pentameter. And if anything, I thought maybe referencing an old pop song in the middle of a stanza concerned mostly with science would tie in with the art as science as art theme, but idk, sounds gay af now that I'm saying it out loud.

>>any damn place
>the curse softens the blow

Again, I wanted to complete the meter and didn't know what else to put in that spot. Could I take out "damn" then and the sudden break in meter would make the line resound more, being the poem's conclusion...?

>>Alongside other bodily fluids
>does shit count as fluid?

I think you're getting too caught up in a detail of pure rhetoric, especially for a poem, but if you've ever had to pick up dog shit, it is surprisingly squishy to the touch, so I would say yes. And the difference between the solid and liquid state of a thing is a continuous, not discrete, amount, no?

>>Meter both poetic and physical
>the wordplay only seems tangentially related to the work
How so?

I've finished work bitch niqqas. Let's get some poems going

Another sonnet. Tried to do something a bit different here.

The master plays and gentle pulls at strings
A humble man i sway at masters whim
To left and right and up and down it brings
Me gently with Until the falling scrim

A thoughtful touch is all masters makes
And with the touch commands a guiding sway
At ease I lay consumed, I never ache
He guides me well, i never disobey

The master hides behind a darkened veil
In time I learnt the truth behind the strings
Is love that guides, Abstract but never stale
Embracing love and Everything it brings

For love to guide, it reaks of beauty pure
And love to live by, prompt I shall adjure

Here I try to expand on the experimental further

My thoughts of love elude
The papers lines beforth.
I draw a shameful blank
This poem I try consort
Although I lay confused
I take a solace in
This awful meta poem
And comfort that it brings

I'll rate some others and/or give feedback

Also:

>complaining about...dubstep?
>You lose what remained your ideological flow (or at least I did) in stanza 3

The dubstep hate is preaching to the choir, yes, but I meant for it as another small little rhetorical flourish in the greater point of the poem. This is supposed to be that art and science have both more or less turned from the concrete and representational to the theoretical and abstract, making it hard to immediately find beauty in either, but more so in science, which, despite having at least at some point a kind of beauty more comprehensible than that of modern art, which I meant to show with all the wordplay in stanza 3, has always been used in death and destruction from the very beginning (hence Newton's laws putting people six feet under and relativity vaporizing Hiroshima and Nagasaki). So it's not easy to say, for me at least, which of the two disciplines is shittier, but one of them has to be or else everything is shit.

Maybe I just need to throw in a few more verses in there to elaborate?

You can't write a poem about golden hair. Yeats already did it. Anything you do will exist in his shadow whether you like it or not whether you read him or not.

You have a pretty good point actually

That and the Irish airmen poem are the only ones from him i remember. I'm my defence they are solely for my girlfriend, although still poems so I like to contribute, who literally has golden hair. Is golden hair that big of a cliche though?

I reckon this is pretty bad and simple, but I wanted to do something with the metaphor:

I wrote my love for you
upon my earnest heart
in bands of black and gold
Of ink so fine and pure
it cost me half my soul
drew blood, but I was bold
And shared with you my all
and saw my sole mistake
I should've written in fucking pencil

You're right, my kigo would have been bird. Kigo are often simply a reference to an animal, rather than something like "this Autumn night," since it's implied that the speaker of the poem is out in the warm weather viewing the animal. I like to keep them subtle. Also, haiku actually do use the first person at times. The differentiation is that sennryu are commentary on human nature, while haiku examine the natural world. Matsuo Basho often refers to himself in the first person.

Here's another of mine, which admittedly toes the line between the two forms:

close my eyes
for a nap -
the blossoms are gone

Whitey, whitey, whatchu doin?
Why yo appropriate ma shit?
Whitey, whitey we wuz rulin!
An yo lived in som caveman pit!

Whitey, whitey, bitchass cracka!
Yo stole all ma technology!
Whitey, whitey, we will crack ya
with da tru egyptology!

I call this composition: "Amputated Anuses". Should I have used a meter? I feel like the first two lines have a good beat going but i couldn't be arsed (heh) to keep it going

Saw-blades in my rectal cavity, sliding up and down,
they claw my thighs and make me cry:
teardrops of cum ooze out my anus, fuck me wider
you saw-blades, i’m begging for a pounding,
Hacking, chafe me, peel my skin away,
then mutilate the flesh beneath,
I’ll orgasm when you’re done.

I wrote a follow up. This one is called "Chainsaw in my asshole"

Try widen up my fuck hole bitch, rip the sides to shreds,
cut my fucking asshole off, and then my penis head.
Shove it in this orifice, now it’s been removed,
like stuffing in a roasted chicken, penetrate my hood.
I take it both ways, anus or no, just shove it all inside me
fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck ree.

You need to lose the adjective at the beginning, as they almost always weigh down a haiku/poem. You also need to rephrase the passive phrase "is stepped on" to something with stronger verb usage.

Please leave, you're not funny.

Give me a For Dummies guide to poetry.

The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser. It's like getting writing tips from a grandfather. Also check out the Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms.

I forgot to mention The Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver, which is easily the best brief introduction to poetry I've found. Mary Oliver is an exceptional poet.

Thanks. I may mess around with perspective as I'm revising.
This is really good. Very good sense of purpose. The imagery is vivid and suggestive. If I had to give a critique, I'd drop some uneccesary articles which I think are detracting from what is mostly a very compressed and tightly written poem. I'm not necessarily saying to drop these specifically, but maybe play around with removing the article "the" in lines 5, 8, 9(you should just remove this one), and 21. Also the article "a" in lines18, 19, 20, and 21. They don't actually change the meaning of the lines any, so you shouldn't need them there unless they are essential to your rhythm.
I like the conceit you're using, but I don't know that you need to say "bow" at all. Your descriptive imagery can manifest the object without it's needing to be explicitly named, and it feels redundant.

"its needing to be," not "it's needing"
Fucking autocorrect

Just finished this last night. Really feeling good about it

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

’Twas about seven o’clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem’d to say-
“I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.”

When the train left Edinburgh
The passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow,
But Boreas blew a terrific gale,
Which made their hearts for to quail,
And many of the passengers with fear did say-
“I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay.”

But when the train came near to Wormit Bay,
Boreas he did loud and angry bray,
And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

Using archaic language to sounds more "poetic" is almost always a bad idea. That said, I actually think you're using it fairly well given the historical content. Make of that what you will. The refrain is very nice in particular. The second verse is weighed down by a lot of cliches.

Add some punctuation and lose the edgy profanity for a start. I would also suggest reducing the number of adjectives you're using. They often weigh poetry down more than adding to the imagery.

I'm far too self-conscious to write serious poetry, but I'll post some of my silly limericks.

They were mostly responses to other people's limericks, so when someone posted:

A milking machine is a boon
To a farmer who keeps it in tune.
But forget how to work it,
The thing'll short-circuit
And the cow will jump over the moon.

I responded with:

There was once a farmer from Perth,
Who toyed with his milk-pump in mirth.
His cows were ignored,
as he hopped aboard,
And it milked him for all he was worth.

As for ones which weren't responses, there was this silly one:

There once was a limerick which started:
"There once was a limerick which started:"
It was drenched in self-reference,
to it's rhymes, hold yea deference;
Surprise! It's already departed!

The rhyme-scheme is truly atrocious,
But the poet's the apotheosis
of genius in men,
and pulls it off again
until he can't any more. "Fuck."

And one more about how shit I am at writing limericks:

My ambition is making me nervous,
for I feel it does me a disservice.
When I try to be rhymin'
names like Greg Freimann
or others like Garrett P. Serviss.

What causes me even more angst...
...Uhh...
...Fuck...

What makes me even more angry
is when I have to split words like Shangri-
-La just to finish,
my prose now diminish-
-ed, and unable to end with a bang. Re-

-vealing my faults as a poet.
So why to the world do I show it?
I just wanted to say,
just like you were gay
to not be afraid if you blow it.

So next time a word causes problems
and you find yourself rhyming with 'lob gems'
or other such nonsense...
...uhh...
remember everything's 'bon' whence
you pretend it deliberate, you knob-hems!

...

Is this a poem about trying to kill your dog?