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Teen Poetry #9
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Kaleidoscope
| Teen Poetry #9 |
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Kaleidoscope |
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Octave Member
since 2008-07-29
Posts 186Highlands, Scotland. |
Can't decide whether i absolutely deteste this or absolutely love it. I'll leave it up to you guys. Kaleidoscope Standing alone on a mirror painted black Bullet in my hand and gun inside my head Flakes of golden rain are eating at my smile Concrete in my shoes are filled with air instead My arms are twisted up in the best knot I know While the pebbles in my mind rattle off key And drops of beads of microscopic needs Are spilling out my ears in a phobic symphony Draw out hopscotch in the alveoli of my lung So every breath I take is a pattern that I break With spiralling chaos that spins through my nerves In an appetite of colour that I can’t seem to shake My smile glued to cheeks in a plastic coated lie Stretching skin over bones that beg to laugh along And every part of every cell of every single voice Creeping through my veins in an attempt to belong Sparks are snapping in my mind, also in my dreams And it’s raining on my fingers as I touch my face My skin is melting and my neurons ran away as Emotion passes glory and laughter eats disgrace Standing alone on a mirror painted black Bullet in my hand and gun inside my head Balanced on a pinhead of my lonely ecstasy Laughing at a game I know I’d rather live instead. |
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| © Copyright 2009 Octave - All Rights Reserved | |||
moonbeam
since 2005-12-24
Posts 2356 |
Octave This has an awful lot to like (I prefer it to Senselessly Numb). You sure have a talent for pulling out wonderful images and wonderful titles - and this is indeed a kaleidoscope of pictures. There's hardly a line here that doesn't contain an idea that would make a whole poem in itself, in fact to be honest I've rarely seen a poem with so much wonderful raw material in it. I've spent a good deal of the afternoon trying to figure out what weakens this poem and I'm still not entirely sure. Don't get me wrong, this is a very interesting piece of writing indeed, but in the world of contemporary poetry it might not find a very appreciative audience. Perhaps the meter is a bit too lumpy in places, but that's a minor issue. I think the main difficulty is the relentless focus on the self of the speaker. You have 24 lines of poetry here and in 18 of them you use either the word "I" or "my". The effect is to induce in your reader a kind of ego centred monotony. A string of great images is a weakened by the fact that they are all focussed on one subject: "I". Now I've looked back at your poetry and as most young writers do you use a large proportion of your time writing in the first person. Let me make it quite clear immediately that there is nothing wrong with that at all - quite the reverse in fact because when you begin writing it is often easier to write powerfully about things you know about intimately. Most of us start out though by writing what I might call "cliche filled diary entries", such as: I suffer from a broken heart and my soul is in torment I gaze out at the stars my tears falling onto my burning cheeks as the moon rises over my beach an angel appears to me. You. Awful eh? Your writing has progressed way beyond that stage and is filled with wonderful originality. Yet while the content of your poems is mostly wonderful you still retain vestiges of the form and rhythms of those diary entry days: I did this I did that She saw me I saw her Her and me etc etc By all means write about you and your experiences, but let's try to get specific now. Try to break away from a repetition of line after line of experiences enjoyed by, and actions performed by "I". Break up the experience with description or a storyline - make something up, lie! to tell the truth. Let the images do the talking. This poem which you may know by Elizabeth Bishop: http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/fish_elements.html is an "I" poem. She describes what "I" did. But look how the focus is also on the fish. You feel the poet's emotion and feelings through the descriptions of the fish. This is a good trick. Take the focus directly off the "I" to show a story or picture of another object or animal or scene, and in the telling let your readers see indirectly what you the poet or your speaker is feeling. Here again is Mary Oliver, telling about the "I" but focussing on the rich images of the woods and blackberries to do so: http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Mary_Oliver/3091 See how the "I" retreats in the words to make way for the tastes and scents and feel of the woods and blackberries, yet nevertheless this is definitely a poem about the poet. Hope this helps. |
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Octave Member
since 2008-07-29
Posts 186Highlands, Scotland. |
Thank you very much for taking the time to read and crit. I can completely see where you are coming from now. I never relised how i much i have been basing poems around...well, myself i suppose. I read both those poems and i have to say, i completely agree with you. I look forward to trying to cut the habit of writing from "I" all the time. Hopefully this may make me poetry and little more mature? Thanks again. (: |
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