01-02-2016, 02:01 AM
Thanks for your suggestions, Emma! I quite like the different line break/lengths you suggested. I am going to hold off on an edit until/unless some more people post their critiques, but provisionally speaking I think I will structure it the way you suggest! It does seem a little more natural.
As for word choice, I actually agree with you that in general I prefer accessible language in poems. I can find it distracting when a poet fills up lines with a lot of stuffy complex vocab to show off their intelligence (although, admittedly, there are some who are just geniuses that manage to pull it off, like John Ashbery). In any case, I am not particularly attached to the word "hydrangeas". The main reason I used that is because I wrote this in a coffee shop that happened to have hydrangeas in the windows (my undergraduate degree was in biology, which is why I'm the type of nerd who can identify flowers). So it was partly a simple matter of that is what I was looking at; really any decorative flower would do in terms of the meaning of the poem. Do you have any other suggestions for a type of flower I could plug in there that would work better than hydrangeas?
As for "beleaguered", while I am open to suggestions I am a bit attached to that word, even at the cost of accessibility to some readers. I think "beleaguered" really captures the tone of what I am going for better than any synonym I can think of immediately. I feel like the word has nice connotations of fatigue and a sense of inevitability; when I hear the word beleaguered I think of people that are almost shell-shocked just going through their motions mechanically. Also, there's the nice assonance with "steam and speed" that I'd be loathe to give up. But I am still open to suggestions for a change if you have anything.
In any case, thank you so much for spending the time to read and comment!
As for word choice, I actually agree with you that in general I prefer accessible language in poems. I can find it distracting when a poet fills up lines with a lot of stuffy complex vocab to show off their intelligence (although, admittedly, there are some who are just geniuses that manage to pull it off, like John Ashbery). In any case, I am not particularly attached to the word "hydrangeas". The main reason I used that is because I wrote this in a coffee shop that happened to have hydrangeas in the windows (my undergraduate degree was in biology, which is why I'm the type of nerd who can identify flowers). So it was partly a simple matter of that is what I was looking at; really any decorative flower would do in terms of the meaning of the poem. Do you have any other suggestions for a type of flower I could plug in there that would work better than hydrangeas?
As for "beleaguered", while I am open to suggestions I am a bit attached to that word, even at the cost of accessibility to some readers. I think "beleaguered" really captures the tone of what I am going for better than any synonym I can think of immediately. I feel like the word has nice connotations of fatigue and a sense of inevitability; when I hear the word beleaguered I think of people that are almost shell-shocked just going through their motions mechanically. Also, there's the nice assonance with "steam and speed" that I'd be loathe to give up. But I am still open to suggestions for a change if you have anything.
In any case, thank you so much for spending the time to read and comment!