My poem: Poor Andre

[Todd]

Hi Jaylyn, I can appreciate where you are coming from. Let's deal with a few basics. Most people who write poetry start by rhyming. It's what they've seen done in school. Without rhyme it doesn't feel like a poem to them. I'm not going to discourage you from rhyming (even though poetry doesn't need to rhyme to be a poem). What I will say though is that rhyme carries a few traps when you're just starting out with it. One of those traps is that you sacrifice content for the sake of making the end words rhyme. The other one is you focus so much on the rhyme that you forget to add imagery and that makes your words come across like your telling people things rather than helping them to experience them through a picture. Finally, without understanding how meter works (and that just takes practice) the poem doesn't flow well.

For rhyme, I would direct you to the poetry practice forum. There are some good exercises to try that will start grounding you in meter.

Okay, now lets go into the main issue I want you to think about (I don't want to hit you with too much at once). What you've posted could be the basis for a narrative poem. What it needs is imagery. If you're just making statements it could be a short story. Go through the poem and ask yourself how can I say this with images. Let me give you a quick example off of the top of my head.

From your poem:

Bye mama, I'm sorry you loved the needle in your arm more than you loved me. If I went to school, you'd be more pleased
Like the killer who ended my sister after a strip tease
With bruises to the face, and scraped up, bloody knees!

So before the imagery example, we have a mother who is a heroin addict. The speaker of the poem is saying the mother would be happy if she went to school and she compares her mothers happiness to the happiness of her sister's killer. That's interesting definitely. But again its focused on just telling the reader things. It has concrete detail but it still comes across as flat despite the subject matter.

Marge Piercy has a poem that talks about the girls she grew up with. Each part is about a different friend and how they turned out. When she concludes she has a line in it with this phrase: girls used like urinals. Its been a couple years since I read it, but the image stays with me. The thing to remember with narrative weather its fiction or poetry is you are going for emotional power not every little detail.

So in the lines I pulled from your poem, the sister may not have been a stripper. This could have been an act she did for a boyfriend, or a husband, or a john...its up to the writer. The issue is how do you make it interesting. How can you say it with an image?

You could for instance do a sequence where you focus on her on a strippers pole and think about what other things might share that look. First thing, I thought of was a child's carousel maybe you could blend those comparisons together to show the innocence than has been burned out of her. What has been lost. We have to love them before their death matters. I hope that makes sense.

Here's a simple example from one of mine (not because its great, but because its on the top of my head )

I needed a woman to be dressed in a burka, I could have said she was dressed in black with only her eyes showing. That's a flat boring statement. Here's the same idea with imagery:

Must she peel back the starless night
and wrap herself within its emptiness
with no pinprick of light allowed entrance.

Make sense? It can take awhile but it is definitely worth it. I would suggest going through your poem and pull out sections and work on saying them more with pictures.

I hope some of that is helpful.

Best,

Todd