2008-08-16 - 10:47 a.m.
you're not competent enough as a writer to effect relevant criticism as your writing is largely unexamined. your themes are tightly packed like sardines and suffer from the grandiose fever that often strikes young writers hoping to cover as much ground as possible with as few words as possible. sometimes it pays to explore the extent of one theme vs. trying to sandwich many themes together into too few words. the end result is the modern day axiom, devoid of texture but chock-full of cliched, overlapping meanings.
also you have a few striking sentences which suffer from the dominant, disjointed nature of your work. these little promising bits of structure are diluted by the deformed glee found in attacking multiple themes at seemingly random intervals.
slow down.
address each theme in full, as much as possible.
breathe.
let your work have enough space in it to be absorbed by the reader.
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i'm not sure if this is meant to be a poem or a story, but it fails on several levels.
first, it has logical fallacies which undermine its credibility and make it seem like an emotional feel-good inspirational poster.
second, it has fatal grammatical errors which destroy the flow of the narrative.
third, the work betrays the writer's self-satisfaction found in the novelty the reader is supposed to experience from being immersed in the cliched theme of equality. and this is only worsened by the cliched handling of the reader's experience.
even though the work had its major flaws, i thought some of the sentences were ambitious and inviting. as a whole, i did not enjoy the work at all, but on a technical level, i did enjoy the energetic approach conveyed its structure.
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first of all, your cornball assumption is that writing is a collective sport. most "community" efforts SABOTAGE great writing. which is exactly what's happened to your writing. my critique is more relevant than you care to understand. your writing is CLICHED. as a cliched writer, you wouldn't understand that. so of course my critique is irrelevant to you. as a writer, my critique is only relevant to competent reader. my critique was never meant to be a writing lesson. you are like most writers-- childish and obtuse in your understanding. you think that writing is GIVEN to you. you assume that pounding your fists on the table long enough will bring you a piece of chocolate cake.
but i'm a writing parent. and as a good parent, i will never give in to the demands of the demanding.
and making excuses for your writing is worse than making excuses for your life. writing is an inexcusable undertaking-- either write or don't.
and i'm not as much a poet as i am an editor. poetry is much more difficult than prose. which is why all of my poems are unfinished and lack particular substance. when self-prompted, i address that lack in meticulous baby steps.
and a common mistake you make is assuming that words don't speak for themselves; nothing is hidden to the trained eye. which means your eye is poorly trained and will result in poor conclusions.
i've entered a writing community, but like the mechanics of myspace, i intend to violate the structure. i intend to be underage and subversively post the exact dimensions of my writing jaws.
your hypocrisy is comical. you tell me to give substantial reviews, and yet your review of my work is a joke-- before you can give competent advice, you need to learn how to take it. before you can give a lecture, you have to have learned something yourself.
don't try to educate a writer when you lack the necessary education to be proficient at it.
and as i said before, and as your deaf ears have obviously missed again for the nth time, this is NOT a free writing course. this is called a critique. your writing suffers from lack of TRAINING, not lack of secondary critical exposition.
and your criticism is insubstantial and irrelevant because you lack the necessary understanding of the difference between structure and context. they are NOT the same thing.
and i find your hypocrisy comical in that you cannot separate your own ego from your own cliched garbage; i was being polite when i called your writing 'cliched'. it's more accurately summed up as GARBAGE. it's borderline teen angst writing structure. i at least tried to suppress the urge to throw out the entire mess and work within the mediocre structure you've erected. but if we intend on calling a spade a spade, you may as well burn it and start over. you need VISION before you can write effectively. otherwise you're just dictating emotional nonsense to a passive audience of spineless reviewers.
another tip: avoid reviewing my work-- you are too dumb to critically assess my writing. work on honing your hypocrisy until it numbs the last few remaining brain cells in your tiny head so your amateur attempts at condescension will sound cute & fuzzy instead of resembling a dying fly flaunting its funeral, failing to arrive at its expiration date soon enough.
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what this lacks in construction, it almost makes up for in idealism.
throw away the word "passion". passion is too broad a term and belongs in a narrative, not in a poem. i would give you license to use such a word if you were a competent poet, but you're only a motivated poet. you need more practice. and even a competent poet would like shun such an all-encompassing term.
with poetry, you must divide your senses between epic word choices and narrow, decisive words which direct the reader's progression and emotional state. this word leaves robs the reader of proper leadership. lead your reader towards the heart of your meaning. don't let the reader make the decisions for you.
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my attitude is dictated by your writing.
improve your writing, magically, my attitude improves.
i know the concept of reciprocation is a profound one.. but it's worth investigating.
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in my experience, i've found that the best writers often ignore the findings of mediocre writers. to them, diplomacy is to good writing as garlic is to good vampiring.
and if i were shooting barbs at you, i would have to consider you a threat to begin with.. mediocre writers often mistake truths for personal attacks. this is due to the fact that the most meaningful truths often attack us personally.
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there is the perfect idiocy and the perfect storm. you've only mastered one of the thus far.
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well if you're employing "competent" in the context of monetary gain, i'd remove the term completely. i look at competence in terms of accomplishment. your poetry is interchangeable, i.e. largely irrelevant, as it's been printed before in dozens of familiar forms... and really, you degree is the LAST thing you should be admiring in the mirror, especially where competent writing is concerned.
but again, i'm not privy to your context, so i'll concede that my use of the word is inaccurate as it applies to your situation.
a exceptional writer doesn't necessarily agree or disagree based upon consensus. otherwise he is a diplomat and no longer an exceptional writer.
an exceptional writer pioneers. competent writers may follow and perfect. and aspiring writers fill in the large chasm between literate and literary, with consensus plaguing them all the way down to the borrowed, sentimentally poisoned eulogies etched on their headstones.
and lastly, an exceptional writer is immune to offense. which means there are very few exceptional writers, even among the exceptional, as offense strikes at the foundation of all our petty delusions of grandeur.
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i have a habit of hating poems because so many of them inadequately attempt to capture the intense feelings of the 'poet'-- this is one of them.
i suspect that at some point, the emotions and thoughts become sublime and subtly divorce themselves from the meat of the words without the writer even realizing it. this is the problem with context. it's such a close friend that we often mistake it for good friend. but context doesn't speak on your behalf. you must speak on ITS behalf; YOU must bring others into your experience. you have to be master over your words. your emotions are not powerful enough to draw the reader into the correct context. YOU must do that with words alone.
poor writers think in emotions and ideas. great writers think in WORDS. you must learn to think in words. you must learn to spout EVERY WORD out of your mouth before you learn how to edit. don't edit first. edit LAST. your words suffer from pre-editing. they haven't had a chance to provide any meaningful context related SPECIFICALLY to YOU.
e.g. stars "ALWAYS" fall from the sky. but they don't always fall for YOU. THAT'S THE DIFFERENCE. make the stars on the page fall for YOU. not for their own sake. i don't need to read about stars falling. but i DO need to read about the stars falling FOR YOU. this is a seemingly insignificant detail, but great writing is plagued by the voice of the most minute, subtle details.
if your human eye can detect 500 shades of grey alone, your words must at least portray/resemble the nature of such precise observation.
stars fall for everyone. i want to know how they fall for YOU.
that being said, i do like subtle details such as the "three-quarter moon" which highlight YOUR observation, YOUR experience.
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this seems more fit for a story than a poem. even the breaks in the structure are either confusing or ill placed. your line breaks do not match the intention of the words which makes it even more confusing.
i think the story itself is fairly powerful. but the revelation of "night terrors" is too clinical. this is an intimate revelation. not a medical anecdote. i would thoroughly personalize the description of this powerful revelation, especially since the heart of the poem (story) hinges upon it.
and if you're set on structuring this as a poem, you should rethink your approach. as it stands, this is almost a simple, direct narrative, devoid of striking imagery. the 'poetry' is found in the simplicity of the skin surrounding the revelation as currently depicted. but you could either expand upon the imagery or redo the structure to accommodate relevant breaks in the narrative style. use the breaks to impose emotion rather than simply mirroring the structure of preceding and successive lines.
with much work, this could be a promising piece.
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i hate reviews like yours that are given by knee-jerk reactions deeply ingrained in hack writers who don't know anything about writing. your advice can be found at the back of a writing comic book.
and if the other advice you received was "better", why hasn't it improved your writing to any significant degree?
i can go into specifics about the flaws in your presentation, but then i'd be pretty much giving you a free writing course. you seem to think that relevant criticism can fit within a summer vacation essay. writing, like most things, is a matter of TRAINING. not simply gleaning one little tip here and there. great writing is a matter of VISION, not construction. and that requires TRAINING.
training involves EFFORT, and i don't train people for free. you'll just have to be satisfied with my mediocre review just as i have to endure your subpar vision; we both have our crosses to bear ...
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i didn't understand it... but more importantly, i didn't like it. i wanted to like it. but i didn't.
there was a lot of explaining taking place for a 'poem' .... now, i don't believe in the aristocracy of systematizing experience into 'prose' or 'poetry'.. but i do believe in the value of arrangement. and i'd say this was poorly arranged, even though i enjoyed a stray line or 2.
i don't mind mysterious writing. but i do mind mysteriously insubstantial writing (like James Joyce and his atrocities.) i can stand being pulled in an uninviting direction. or i can stand being confounded as long as i can appreciate what's confounding me... but there's a jarring juxtaposition of explaining against painting (and not the painter in your poem).. i feel like there's an indecisive battle being fought between explaining to me that the grass is green and letting vast strands of nymph arms play gilded pictures of frozen joy against my feet. there's a waffling of realms-- i am simultaneously outside the experience AND taking part in it. that indecision robs all the enchantment from your invitation to an experienced reader to lay all discretion aside and just trust the writer.
like anything dangerous, meaningful or attractive, you should/need to pick a direction.
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honesty is the most undiplomatic of policies and constantly ruins my friendships with other 'writers'.. but i enjoy writing more than writers. i wish it would be the other way around since writing is guaranteed to die once you stop staring at it... and such lack of staring can have quite the opposite effect on writers..
but i've made my choice.
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"He took a step back from the big
canvas, folded his arms and patiently
analysed the outcome so far of his work."
this is a narrative. it EXPLAINS something to me. a poem, while it can explain something, it should more importantly EVOKE something. it should TRIGGER something. EXPLAINING something in a poem almost robs the effect you're trying to produce.
painting a picture of something happening is one thing. explaining the painting process WHILE painting distracts the audience from the intention of the painting. you need to make a choice. one or the other.
and you need to learn how to break up terms into their original parts and then reconstruct them based upon this initial and necessary investigation..
WHAT is the 'canvas'? WHY a canvas and not a banana? What is so significant about this term. break it down into it's barest parts. and then see if it's still necessary to use the whole term, or if you can use other terms to convey the same purpose behind your word choice.
You're using "canvas" from a context understood by painters which is fine, but you're trying to convey something of your own experience. focus on conveying the experience and let the words fit around your experience and not your experience around the words.
