03-05-2025, 01:33 AM
Critiqued as if this piece were to be submitted for publishing:
It would be more interesting if you punctuated the whole first stanza properly. End the second line with a colon, put commas (and eventually a period) after all the other "straights". Normally we would advise not capitalizing the first letter of these lines, too, but it does seem that you've read more modern pieces, so I leave that off.
For both stanzas, however, you need to cut out some of the images, since they just don't make sense. For the first stanza, I'm not sure how proverbial "straight brows" or "straight rooms" are, especially since all the good brows I see have noticeable arcs in them, and then it sorta falls apart with the second stanza, where a good chunk of the images are already considered to be beautiful in general: "scarlet curls" and the media's obsession with redheads, "winding roads" and that one beatles song, "round cheeks" and "curved smiles" because if either of those are straight you basically have a cartoon rather than a flesh and blood person....
The last "for publishing" note I have is that all the italicizations, as well as the final period, are completely unnecessary.
Critiqued in a more general sense:
This is kinda cute, but that's the only impression I get from it. Kudos if you're the first one to think about doing a "concrete" manifestation of the contrast betwern straightness and queerness, but for something like that to be memorable, to truly provoke or deeply affect the reader, you need something more. One such "more" would be to be more outrageous with your imagery, first naming queer things that a lot of straight people already find disgusting, then dedicating a few more words in describing them. At the very least, my first thread here, which I believe I also made as a teen, didn't even have any cuteness or cleverness going on, so you do have that!
It would be more interesting if you punctuated the whole first stanza properly. End the second line with a colon, put commas (and eventually a period) after all the other "straights". Normally we would advise not capitalizing the first letter of these lines, too, but it does seem that you've read more modern pieces, so I leave that off.
For both stanzas, however, you need to cut out some of the images, since they just don't make sense. For the first stanza, I'm not sure how proverbial "straight brows" or "straight rooms" are, especially since all the good brows I see have noticeable arcs in them, and then it sorta falls apart with the second stanza, where a good chunk of the images are already considered to be beautiful in general: "scarlet curls" and the media's obsession with redheads, "winding roads" and that one beatles song, "round cheeks" and "curved smiles" because if either of those are straight you basically have a cartoon rather than a flesh and blood person....
The last "for publishing" note I have is that all the italicizations, as well as the final period, are completely unnecessary.
Critiqued in a more general sense:
This is kinda cute, but that's the only impression I get from it. Kudos if you're the first one to think about doing a "concrete" manifestation of the contrast betwern straightness and queerness, but for something like that to be memorable, to truly provoke or deeply affect the reader, you need something more. One such "more" would be to be more outrageous with your imagery, first naming queer things that a lot of straight people already find disgusting, then dedicating a few more words in describing them. At the very least, my first thread here, which I believe I also made as a teen, didn't even have any cuteness or cleverness going on, so you do have that!