03-31-2015, 06:58 AM
This appears to be an elegy for lack of a better term, or maybe a reflection. It is not written very clearly, causing the reader to stumble in any number of places, causing disruption to the poem. Example "Today she’s inches from my feet." How does a person end up being inches from another person's feet? Is she dead, in the ground, is she sunbathing. I think the writer meant this to refer to something specifically, but what that is, does not come across. If she is in a coffin, she is not really inches from a person's feet, more like two feet. If in the ground, she is several feet below. For me it seems the writer is trying to be coy about what is going on. Why, what is the purpose? I personally dislike having to guess at what the writer is saying or describing. Things should arise naturally, not as the result of some type of artifice. What I get from this is, one person knew another at a young age, it seems more in passing. This continued to occur as they grew older, except on occasion there were incidents where they were closer, either emotionally or physically.
Assuming in S1 the rock is her tombstone then:
Yesterday, I thought of her,
her lifeless rock it woke and heard;
(my) every line and every word
was: “I once knew her”.
Instead of a straight out guess (as it currently is), you clue your reader towards what you mean to be saying. I'm not saying this is what you meant to say, I just thought it the most likely. By the end of the poem I no longer cared what the poem said, nor did it elicit enough interest for me to care to try and figure it out, I've only done this much as my due diligence necessary for the critique. Had this been in a magazine I quite sure I would have stopped before I was half way through. In S2 especially, this is done without enough skill to create the necessary energy to pull the story along. Plus there is just to much cuteness. But first the example of lack of energy:
"But we never read in text-books" (no meter no rhythm. Although the next line is in iambic trimeter, it is this first line that sets the tone and it reads like straight prose.)
Now cuteness:
"Back then I’d use a phone to talk to God (back when, what God?)
and she could flash the firing squad." (fine but it makes no sense, seems more of a forced rhyme. BTW was she flashing her tits or her panties?)
what do these lines have to do with one another? Damned if I know. (God damn it Jim, I'm just a country poet, what do I know about this newfangled Watusi poetry. Give me poetry with red blood, not luminous purple or electric green. What do I know about a naked cowboy? Out here a barbed wire fence would be holding his jingle balls and before too long he'd be singing "aud lang syne" in three part harmony!)
Unlike S1L1 the first line here does have a meager hint of rhythm. The second line is in iambic tetrameter.
Although this would need major rewriting, the core idea of "I knew her" could develop into something nice, that could have universality.
Dale
Assuming in S1 the rock is her tombstone then:
Yesterday, I thought of her,
her lifeless rock it woke and heard;
(my) every line and every word
was: “I once knew her”.
Instead of a straight out guess (as it currently is), you clue your reader towards what you mean to be saying. I'm not saying this is what you meant to say, I just thought it the most likely. By the end of the poem I no longer cared what the poem said, nor did it elicit enough interest for me to care to try and figure it out, I've only done this much as my due diligence necessary for the critique. Had this been in a magazine I quite sure I would have stopped before I was half way through. In S2 especially, this is done without enough skill to create the necessary energy to pull the story along. Plus there is just to much cuteness. But first the example of lack of energy:
"But we never read in text-books" (no meter no rhythm. Although the next line is in iambic trimeter, it is this first line that sets the tone and it reads like straight prose.)
Now cuteness:
"Back then I’d use a phone to talk to God (back when, what God?)
and she could flash the firing squad." (fine but it makes no sense, seems more of a forced rhyme. BTW was she flashing her tits or her panties?)
what do these lines have to do with one another? Damned if I know. (God damn it Jim, I'm just a country poet, what do I know about this newfangled Watusi poetry. Give me poetry with red blood, not luminous purple or electric green. What do I know about a naked cowboy? Out here a barbed wire fence would be holding his jingle balls and before too long he'd be singing "aud lang syne" in three part harmony!)
Unlike S1L1 the first line here does have a meager hint of rhythm. The second line is in iambic tetrameter.
Although this would need major rewriting, the core idea of "I knew her" could develop into something nice, that could have universality.
Dale
How long after picking up the brush, the first masterpiece?
The goal is not to obfuscate that which is clear, but make clear that which isn't.
The goal is not to obfuscate that which is clear, but make clear that which isn't.