Fun Stuff > CHATTER

Do My Uni Work!

<< < (3/4) > >>

Christophe:
The meter is incredibly inconsistent. When writing poems that use a regular AABB (or similar) rhyme scheme meter is incredibly important. If there was a pattern to the meter and the line lengths, or it was presented in an interesting fashion, maybe it wouldn't be a problem, but this person is all over the place.

Also, everything is too long. Way too long. The lines are long, the poem is long, the metaphors are long--this girl could learn from Haiku--condensing your thoughts into something that doesn't read like a chore. There's nothing wrong with being long, of course (that's what she said har har har), but when I was just starting out writing songs I had this problem--overwriting. Not everything that needs to be said about something should be said about something in a single line, and nothing needs to be so crammed into a single line. In fact, I'd probably say that this girl is saying a lot less with a lot more.

And, of course, everyone's comments about the images in the poem. She oughta tone it down with the cliche.

(Personally, I took an upper-division poetry course just the past semester, and most of the stuff I wrote was in free-verse, so I am biased in that respect.)

Alex C:
That's worse than NIN lyrics.

imapiratearg:
Reminds me of this.

Will:
I think the most offensive thing about this is that it's stunningly mediocre. It's not good, and it's not so completely bad as to be amusing. It's just bland.

AND NOW FOR SERIOUS CRITICISM!!

Cliches. They suck. I find them all the time in revising my own work, and it pisses me off to no end. Every single bit of imagery and every single metaphor in this poem has been used, abused, beaten to death, and resurrected only to be beaten again. The subject matter is a touchy subject because it's so personal, and I'm a firm believer that writing can be cathartic, but it you're writing something for public viewing that deals with a topic as overdone as a father abandoning a child, then you damned well better do it in such a way that sets it apart from all the thousands upon thousands of other poems that have been written about the exact same thing.

If this was something someone wrote in a journal for personal reasons, then I fully support it. Diary writing should never worry about holding up to criticism. This, however, was written for an audience, and the audience deserves better than teen angst.

I personally don't care for rhyme in poetry at all, but that's a matter of taste. However, these rhymes reek of laziness. It seems as though no effort whatsoever was put into creating this, and it was just word vomit. Also:


--- Quote ---Will I be waiting forever just for him to call?
Will I always be questioning if he loves me anymore?
--- End quote ---

This line, being the single part of the poem that has no rhyme at all, sticks out and not in a good way. Breaking meter is a fantastic way to draw attention and give profound impact to a specific line in a poem; this just leaves me as a reader going..."Meh."

I have a hard time really critiquing work that is meant to be written and read, since what I do is much more performance based, but this is quite cringeworthy.

Barmymoo:
I'm also fairly biased towards free verse (or using very, very strict rhyme and rhythm schemes) but I can see the merit in what she's tried to do. I'll agree that she needs to work on getting her lines a little more evenly lengthed. One of the things I do to improve the structure of my poems is read each line aloud and twist it round until it rolls off the tongue and the length is correct. Poetry, in my opinion, is meant to be read aloud. It doesn't matter if it's only ever read in the mind, it is the sound and the feel of the words that matters. That's what makes poetry different from prose.

I'm going to stick my neck out (cliche!) and say that I disagree about the imagery. There are places where I feel she's put in a fairly tired phrase in order to suit the rhyme and that doesn't work, but there is nothing wrong with using phrases that other people have used before if it's to create a particular effect. Very famous quotes from other works (and well-known cliche) can be used as a reference to something else which gives the poem a whole other layer of secondary meaning; I'm not suggesting that she go through her poem and fling in some lines from Yeats and Shakespeare to give it "depth" but just that she considers whether or not a particular phrase is adding anything to the meaning.

I'd say that she has two options: to stick with the uneven line lengths and dispense with the rhyming, in order to make it free verse (this would involve careful consideration of caesura and endstop) or to keep the rhymes but work on the lengths so that it feels more rigid. With a stronger structure and some trimming of the surplus words I think she would be forgiven for some of the more angsty, slightly hackneyed phrases because it comes from the heart.

(Sorry I'm a little late on this one but I love poetry, I didn't want to pass up a chance to blether on about it for a while!)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page