The Morning After

[UselessBlueprint]

Hey UselessBlueprint,
Thanks for the feedback. I'm a little confused with some of what you said though. Are you saying that this poem isn't poetic enough, or suggesting it would be better written in a more formal form. or both?

Thanks again,
Richard

That might depend on how you define "poetic." I might go a little beyond mild critique to explain, so just stop if you feel it's too much.

No complaint against the form, free verse is free. But for me, being free verse means that you, as the poet, must work extra hard to ensure that whatever form your poem does take has some reasoning behind -- poetic or otherwise. I often see arbitrary line breaks in free verse -- people tend to use them mimic a pause in their own thinking or speaking, which would probably be natural for the reader anyway. To me, that sort of reasoning doesn't add much. Now perhaps I'm missing something in your poem, but I see the line breaks as excessive and mostly arbitrary here. When that happens, any well-executed line breaks lose their strength. Example: a good line break occurs at "notice you had stopped / long before ..." -- it forces a hard stop that echoes your scene. Other breaks seem to only extend the line count and stretch clauses out, such as "I had / in years" or "nervously crawled / out from ... " Does any of that make it less poetic? It may depend on your definition, but in my opinion, it does not make it any less poetic.

My other criticism, that it feels more like narrative than a poem, might have been partially due to a lack of coffee. It's nowhere near what my first reply makes it seem like. But I still maintain that I want a poem to use language (not just poetic devices, but language) that echoes its contents. The story that's being told her just doesn't feel supported by the mostly static word choice, and it feels more like prose with imagery (a short story, perhaps) than poem. And that, in my opinion, does make it less poetic.

Now these are just my opinions and critiques -- I'm no expert so take my words for what the words themselves are worth.