Could You Critique This Poem

Can you critique my poem?

———————Arguing TonightCommunication broke down tonight, we had a fight with our words.I enter into the nightthrough the cold air that bites. When will I return? I amunsure.I walk away from the house,regretting my angry cry,already wanting to apologize,waiting around for dawn’s light.———————Hi, William, thank you for asking!What we want from poetry is DEMONSTRATION, NOT EXPOSITION. Exposition - as the spelling indicates - explains something. Demonstration, by contrast, shows us something without explaining it.Your first task as you move forward in poetry will be to know and act upon the difference between these two types of writing. Does this line *demonstrate* something meaningful about my scene? Or does it try to explain something? The procedure is as follows: keep what demonstrates, remove what explains.(Show, don't tell.)You can see that S1 demonstrates nothing, but explains instead. “We had a fight with words” tells us about an event, but does not show it happening.What do I mean by “showing” the fight? This:DONT TOUCH ME!!!But honey, I…GET OUT OF MY ROOM!!! NOW!!!Sweetheart…I'M CALLING THE POLICE!!!~~~So, this is what must be done moving forward.Where you find vivid or accurate description in your writing, keep those lines.But where you find something explained, take those lines out. Allow the story to reveal itself with no explanation at all.

Will you critique my poem?

This is good. If you want to stop reading there you can! Really, what I have are not recommendations exactly but just some opinions.OK, so, imho, the imagery is strong but not particularly coherent especially at the beginning -- if it's a "bandage" then what do you do with bandages - you put them over wounds, you peel them off when they get wet, etc.  You don't put them into anyone's jaws, much less a washing machine, and if you do you would need to explain why. Once you introduce the symbol you kind of have to own it, see it through. Why is it "fluffy," which recalls a bunny or something else not serious. Why is it "corrupted" by chlorine? What are you saying about pool water, or about disinfecting, or what? Why is the sweat "unnecessary"? Can bandages be "corrupted" at all, or doesn't something else happen to them when they're used up? Much stronger are the lines that start "Summer left..."  and I might even start the poem there, where the imagery pulls together with the residue of summer (postcards, after-love). Even there -- "whatever door"? Why not a specific door in a specific place, a pool cabana, a screen door leaking a/c into the summer night. And "hard as nails" should probably go -- it's a cliche so if you use it you want to play off of it somehow (hard as nails but a screw loose, or something, I dunno). And why introduce a doctor now? Aren't I still in front of the washing machine with you? But this is where you stick the landing and make this a winner:"..,after-loveslowly peelinglike a gloveeach time I shedmy clothes"So, I guess I want to feel the exactness of place more. I want to smell the towel funk and know exactly what happened to make it smell that way, and what that has to do with the end of summer and casual love. I want to know what make and color the carpet is, when you put it in, if it's in a cabin, if the walls are wood, if the cracks are straight or crooked. But I don't necessarily want you to put any of that directly into the poem -- think of Hemingway's "writing as iceberg" (what you leave in implies the 90% you edited out). Anyway. I normally don't comment when people ask me for thoughts on poems, because, well, free criticism of a free poem is rarely valuable. But this has a style and flow that I really enjoyed. Thanks!

Who can critique my poetry?

If you would like me to read your work, I would be willing. I think over history a lot of writers work in a depressed, intoxicated stupor--it seems to go with the trade if you think of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (who had to be poured out of a bathtub filled with ice-cubes to deliver his Nobel speech), Lowell and Berryman, etc. My guess is they all revised sober.You can post poems here or send them by message. I can't promise that I will praise them, but if they are praiseworthy, I would.

How do you analyze/critique a poem?

To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem's perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter.If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness.A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the poem to be truly great. As you proceed through the poetry in this book, practice this rating method. As your ability to evaluate poems in this matter grows, so will, so will your enjoyment and understanding of poetry.The above is something any fan of the film The Dead Poets Society will recognize. It���s pretty awful stuff, as it degrades “appreciating” poetry into embalming it. Nevertheless, some familiarity with the techniques a poet uses is helpful in analyzing and critiquing poetry.It’s similar to the way one experiences music. It’s possible to appreciate music for the emotional response it evokes. One needn’t know how to read music, let alone have an in depth understanding of things like key signature or time signature. Understanding more allows for an analytical appreciation, as well as an emotional response.

Will you critique my poem (revised)?

Thanks for the A2A.  Here are my thoughts:You have some nice lines and images here.  I particularily like "Living in the lightening of those storms."  That's quite good.  I also like, "Contingencies for the clouds" and that idea pairs well with the engineers who designed the tree, so good use of evokative words and images.   I'm not sure what "fending off the rays that led leaves astray."  - do you just mean that sunlight encouraged the plant to grow in a different direction than the engineers wanted?  That idea kind of works for a vine type plant, but a tree?  Who is this "our" in stanza three?  Are you comparing this tree's growth to a couples'?   That idea is not expressed clearly enough.  And it's also problematic b/c this "our" doesn't appear again in the poem.  It's not the engineers, who are the "they," from stanza two, right?  By then of stanza three and four, you seen to be mixing your metaphors and I honestly don't know what you're talking about.  You seem to be comparing the sparks to pirates, but then you lose the spark metaphor and seem to be talking about real pirates "sailing on rumbling seas," and looking for treasure.  But the "and bark" takes me back to the tree, so are we back to talking about a spark?  So is this spark thirsting and searching for something to burn the way a pirate searches for treasure?  I also like the sound and image of the line "goose-winged guided by wet fingers."  But I have no idea what it means.  I don't know who the "they" in stanza four is.  The engineers?  The pirates?  The sparks?   Clearly, there's some theme here of a rogue force that over takes nature (since the committee planned the tree, and this rogue struck down the committee and burned the tree said committee made), but I'm not sure what the point of all that is.