11-29-2025, 09:41 PM
Thank you for your feedback! i have made slight modifications based on it. i am uncertain about whether to make it more clear "what it is about", partly in fact due to your feedback --- it was inspired (i thought) by one thing (a scene i saw play out on a rainy night), but then your interpretation (not what i had been thinking of) showed me that it was definitely also about something else, deeper; which it was, i just hadn't realized/remembered that. Which, had i "clarified" things in the poem, would not necessarily have occurred.
One practical question i will ask, which i realized was an issue when i wrote it --- "on this island north is not north anyway" comes across as abstract, but in the context that i am writing in (i live on an actual island where the streets that claim to point north are in fact pointing north west, with all of the other cardinal points similarly skewed) it has a very concrete meaning. Which readers will not get, i know, unless they also live here. So are references like this, liable to be clear to people in one context (like, if this was read in my city), but not otherwise, to be avoided or embraced?
One practical question i will ask, which i realized was an issue when i wrote it --- "on this island north is not north anyway" comes across as abstract, but in the context that i am writing in (i live on an actual island where the streets that claim to point north are in fact pointing north west, with all of the other cardinal points similarly skewed) it has a very concrete meaning. Which readers will not get, i know, unless they also live here. So are references like this, liable to be clear to people in one context (like, if this was read in my city), but not otherwise, to be avoided or embraced?