03-06-2016, 04:25 PM
Since you see yourself as a 'novice' (from the Latin for 'new'), I'm hopeful that you won't find the feedback here too discouraging.
The poem you have posted has the following flaws:
1) It tells a story as a straight story. You must ask yourself why you're not writing it out in prose, because the poem reads at the moment like disjointed prose with line breaks. What makes a poem a poem? A good place to start is http://www.firesides.ca/poemtips.htm, which is a link I stole from ellajam here.
2) Sticking to the theme of content, the story seems to be an apocalyptic fantasy of a future worldwide flood. You could have done a lot with it. For instance, you could have thrown in an allusion to the Biblical flood, or hinted at global warming and how a future flood is inevitable, or both. You could have talked about the 'rain of fire' on Dresden, and the 'rain of chemical weapons' on the Kurds. There are many kinds of rain, and many layers you can wrap around your central theme, giving it depth, enigma, and a lasting quality. You did no such thing, and what you have is a plain tale full of loose ends and loopholes (why were rockets fired at the sky? how on earth can there be rain everywhere at the same time? If there's a low pressure zone somewhere there's a high pressure zone somewhere else!!). The loopholes prevent me from taking your tale seriously, and the lack of a secondary meaning prevents me from liking it in any other way.
3) My comments on the first stanza below. Similar observations could be applied to the rest of the poem.
The poem you have posted has the following flaws:
1) It tells a story as a straight story. You must ask yourself why you're not writing it out in prose, because the poem reads at the moment like disjointed prose with line breaks. What makes a poem a poem? A good place to start is http://www.firesides.ca/poemtips.htm, which is a link I stole from ellajam here.
2) Sticking to the theme of content, the story seems to be an apocalyptic fantasy of a future worldwide flood. You could have done a lot with it. For instance, you could have thrown in an allusion to the Biblical flood, or hinted at global warming and how a future flood is inevitable, or both. You could have talked about the 'rain of fire' on Dresden, and the 'rain of chemical weapons' on the Kurds. There are many kinds of rain, and many layers you can wrap around your central theme, giving it depth, enigma, and a lasting quality. You did no such thing, and what you have is a plain tale full of loose ends and loopholes (why were rockets fired at the sky? how on earth can there be rain everywhere at the same time? If there's a low pressure zone somewhere there's a high pressure zone somewhere else!!). The loopholes prevent me from taking your tale seriously, and the lack of a secondary meaning prevents me from liking it in any other way.
3) My comments on the first stanza below. Similar observations could be applied to the rest of the poem.
(03-02-2016, 02:44 AM)mackzmike Wrote: Charcoal vapors permeated ...... you don't need to describe clouds as 'charcoal vapours' because it doesn't add to up a rich image, and is confusing moreover. You mean 'charcoal coloured vapours', but 'charcoal vapours' makes me think of sublimated carbon, of soot particles, and I'm thinking smoke before you know it. When I read the next line I realise it's 'charcoal coloured vapours' and I'm thinking 'why the hell didn't he just say "clouds"?' Talking about everyday things in a fancy way is not poetry.
salmon-colored skies, ...see, if charcoal coloured vapours i.e. black, low lying, rain bearing clouds have 'permeated' the sky (spread everywhere), then the sky can't be salmon colored.
thunder rumbled, rippled ....entirely cliche, but not everything can be original, so ok.
and cracked the heavens, ...'heavens' for 'sky' is cliche, the idea of thunder or lightning 'cracking the heavens' or 'splitting the sky' is cliche too. can't have 2 cliched lines one after the other. Note that it is still possible to get away with a cliched expression by changing the word order, splitting it across two lines in an interesting way...basically, anything that makes it less boring.
flushing down a rain,
steady and insidious,
like madness. ... on its own, the 'madness' here sounds random. I am not sure, even, if madness can be described as 'steady and insidious' - at least in a percentage of cases, it progressively increases over time. However, this analogy apart, I suppose the reason you introduced 'madness' in this line was to anticipate the 'madness' that the world engages in later on in the poem. It actually doesn't work, because the apocalyptic scenario you paint is so extreme (and scientifically questionable, ref. above), that burning down a building or two (how, I wonder, in the incessant rain), and overthrowing corporate empires, doesn't strike the reader as being insane acts. The only 'madness' I discern in the poem is the firing of rockets into the sky. But in a world where trees flake 'like ashes' in the rain, even that may not be a particularly unreasonable thing to do.
~ I think I just quoted myself - Achebe