07-01-2019, 07:04 AM
Very nice S1. Good use of line breaks and assonance. ‘Because’ should be lower case. You took one well constructed sentence and made it a concise and meaningful stanza.
S2 starts with ‘hit your wall’. What wall? Is N being literal or figurative? The reader hasn’t a clue yet. Perhaps move that line further down the poem, so that by the time we reach it, we have enough info to realize it’s figurative. If the reader stops to think about a line, the line needs reconsidered imo.
Who is the ghost friend? Friend doesn’t seem to go along with ‘other woman’, ‘other love’, so it seems the ghost friend is the narrator? That to me would make more sense, as in we’re just friends.
“All you could say was, “I’m sorry,” / as the tears ran down our cheeks”. Should be your closing lines, I think. The closing lines should be the strongest.
The remaining lines can really be pared down to one concise stanza. You don’t need to push the butterfly image so hard. Just cocoon and colored wings should be sufficient for the reader. The hardest thing we do is editing out all of the extraneous material from our draft - but that makes the poem tighter and keeps it from meandering around.
If I could offer only one piece of advice, it would be: do to the other stanzas what you did to S1.
Ok - I put a lot here, but I see the potential now. Glad you’re sticking it out.
S2 starts with ‘hit your wall’. What wall? Is N being literal or figurative? The reader hasn’t a clue yet. Perhaps move that line further down the poem, so that by the time we reach it, we have enough info to realize it’s figurative. If the reader stops to think about a line, the line needs reconsidered imo.
Who is the ghost friend? Friend doesn’t seem to go along with ‘other woman’, ‘other love’, so it seems the ghost friend is the narrator? That to me would make more sense, as in we’re just friends.
“All you could say was, “I’m sorry,” / as the tears ran down our cheeks”. Should be your closing lines, I think. The closing lines should be the strongest.
The remaining lines can really be pared down to one concise stanza. You don’t need to push the butterfly image so hard. Just cocoon and colored wings should be sufficient for the reader. The hardest thing we do is editing out all of the extraneous material from our draft - but that makes the poem tighter and keeps it from meandering around.
If I could offer only one piece of advice, it would be: do to the other stanzas what you did to S1.
Ok - I put a lot here, but I see the potential now. Glad you’re sticking it out.
There is no escape from metre; there is only mastery. TS Eliot