Poetry Forum

This comes back to definitions of poetry. Do line breaks define a poem? I don't think they do. Many people would say that a poem makes use of language in some interesting way that is both surprising and illuminative. If you were to get rid of the line breaks, this is just prose. Unimaginative prose....

I really dislike this kind of quasi-scientific stuff in poetry; it just screams pompous wordiness. I do believe in simplicity, accessibility and purpose. I'm not sure this displays any of those three things. There's no art in it! I've read some decent stuff you've written, what's the point of this? ...

In the first strophe you are apparantly talking about the table; the finished article, yet you say "left you standing tall". Surely the opposite is true, no? What's this blind cupidity stuff? Brought you to your knees and left you standing tall? Tall as a tree, on its knees as a table. I'm...

No, I wouldn't want to know why. I'd just say the song was crap and decide not to listen to it. You can argue forever but art has a job to do; it succeeds or it fails. I can't see what makes this a success for the reader or the writer. I read a lot of poems. The great poems from every century. I tra...

Yeah, it's nice to be nice but that doesn't mean you should gloss over the shortcomings of a poem for the sake of etiquette. Has anyone heard of Arthur Rimbaud? I'd stake my life he never minced his words where crap poetry was concerned, and his work has survived a century and counting. You can writ...

I don't want to get into the debate about what constitutes poetry, it's a waste of time to argue about these kind of things. Poems stand or fall on their own. What I will say is that never implies never! Not recently or for some time. Never felt like this in my life or before are basically the same ...

I'm not sure about the meter in this, is it meant to be iambic? The rhymes or half-rhymes, I should say, work well aside from 'area' and 'pressure' which isn't really a big deal. There's a problem with tense in line six, but it's easily fixed. Why does the inspector lose his 'urbanity'? You would th...

gg

I'm not sure what's on the shell that can't be rubbed away, what is this mysterious 'it'!? I think pen might work better than crayon rhythmically, just the "-on on" I'm not too sure about. In line four, starting the sentence with "it" doesn't work very well, you could either cont...

Hii guys, thanks for the comments, thoughtful critique og, much appreciated. The original idea was that the lamps could be thought of literally or taken to represent the faces of people on the streets; wrapped in black coats and seeming pale against the sky. It doesn't seem to have worked, though. H...

Thanks guys for all the comments. You can talk about capitalisation in poetry, it's really a matter for taste. Some argue that each line should begin with a capital. I am familiar with the rules of english but they do not always apply in poetry, there's something called 'artistic license' which can ...

see ya

I do quite like this, but it confuses me a bit. I think it's because it starts so definitely that it fools me into expecting concrete at the end. The first verse gathers a kind of momentum that seems to disperse throughout the second, the former states some intention the latter can't deliver. I'm no...

It's the rhythm and the form of this that reminds me of Heaney. The clarity of the voice just seems to stop things for a minute, it's nice. A had a look at your site, good to see you posting some stuff on here for us mere mortals! But to the matter in hand, I'm one that's always sceptical when I see...

Something in the style and tone of this reminds me of Allen Ginsberg, which is no bad thing! To me, you get your point across entirely without wasting words. So job done! One thing I did want to say, by way of a criticism, involves line 7; I'm not sure if you need the phrase "Everything goes to...

Thanks for the comments, a bit too clever for its own good was near the mark I'll try and explain the title: We in Luv,mum(bled) was supposed to be read in a few ways. We in love mumbled, and we are in love, mum bled. The childishness of the grammer and the mis-spelling of love intend a few things; ...

If you're aiming for stale language, I'm not sure if words like 'thrillingly' and 'glittering' fit the bill.

cheerio

I like this one but I just think it could be livened up a bit. Some of the words, though not out of place, aren't very challenging, so aren't very rewarding. There's a bit of a deadness to the first stanza. In the second verse, words like 'goggled', the line; He ate a pizza: they just don't offer th...

I like the idea of this. I just thought, like Nigel, that it was a bit too heavy on the end of each stanza. Maybe if you used the phrase sparingly it would have more impact. For some reason, I think it might work better in verses of four lines; the first three with similar rhymes and the fourth The ...

Thanks for your input everyone, I've posted a rewrite that hopefully takes into consideration your comments.

I enjoyed this, the general mood of the piece. I think you've basically got away without using punctuation, though there were a couple of things that stood out in the rhythm; "her window she opens a little crack" O.k, not rhythm here but syntax. Just didn't sound right. What's wrong with &...

It's supposed to be an account of a day spent, or wasted! It isn't actually midnight, but midnight is waiting in the wings.

Hi Ben,

Thanks for that compliment, it nice to get some encouragement.

You're right: femello is just an invention. As far as I know, anyway.

sayonara