11-27-2022, 10:58 PM
I agree with a previous critique on the penultimate stanza. There's nothing I find to be missed cutting all that fluff out (though maybe "tufted" can stay), and in fact I'm kinda tempted to then stick the last two stanzas together, making the ending a bit less melodramatic (not that it's too melodramatic in the first place), as well as shorten the second stanza ("although / the wife calls her Pepper."), making the whole piece a clean four tercets.
The piece is itself too short and obvious for the title to need to register, I think. It just has to be functional, drawing the eye or pegging the poem for what it is, and right now I don't think it accomplishes the latter, while the former.....I dunno. It's as long as a line in the rest of the piece, only it doesn't really say anything....yeah. At the very least the piece could comfortably exist without *any* sort of title.
Overall, I like it. Feels a bit weird for me, though, as I'm right at that age where I'm the one leaving the nest, and as much as I like sympathizing with most everyone, I feel like the peculiarities of my family (or perhaps our country in general) means "empty nesting" doesn't have that same oof. On the other hand, the poem really doesn't have that much oof, and I mean this in a good way: it's short and obvious, which in this case means kinda schmaltzy, but *because* of all this, it's a treat. Maybe people my age, where the speaker lives, just need to call their parents more xD
The piece is itself too short and obvious for the title to need to register, I think. It just has to be functional, drawing the eye or pegging the poem for what it is, and right now I don't think it accomplishes the latter, while the former.....I dunno. It's as long as a line in the rest of the piece, only it doesn't really say anything....yeah. At the very least the piece could comfortably exist without *any* sort of title.
Overall, I like it. Feels a bit weird for me, though, as I'm right at that age where I'm the one leaving the nest, and as much as I like sympathizing with most everyone, I feel like the peculiarities of my family (or perhaps our country in general) means "empty nesting" doesn't have that same oof. On the other hand, the poem really doesn't have that much oof, and I mean this in a good way: it's short and obvious, which in this case means kinda schmaltzy, but *because* of all this, it's a treat. Maybe people my age, where the speaker lives, just need to call their parents more xD