The Paliform Precipice Part I

[Blake]

Hi, Blake, welcome. Thanks for starting with jumping in with feedback on other people's poems.

Even though I love a good story, I keep getting only half through here. The two issues I have off the bat are:

You've got a lot of yoda speak going on, I know, I've done it. You can read here for some examples:
Yoda Speak

The other problem is I think the 9 syllable count is tying your hands. I am a counter myself and love to hang a poem on the skeleton that it can provide, but I think you are sticking to it at the expense of meter. In what I think of as a saga poem, the meter can pull me through it, and yours is not working in many spots.

You can make something of this, but I think you need to work on those aspects first.

I'm going to keep working at getting through it, just wanted to let you know the problems I'm having as a reader.

Again, Welcome.

Thanks, I've always used inversion (yoda speak) pretty heavily, as I enjoy the challenge that strictly adhering to a rhyme/rhythm brings.
I can agree that as a result some of the lines are a bit dodgy and ill-flowing. I've always been quite fascinated with word inversion and how a sentence can at first glance look totally wacky, but then when reading it, sense is made of it.

hehe you should have seen one of my earlier renditions

I originally wrote it with no syllable constraint and rewrote it to fit 9. So another rewrite could be in order

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Yoda Speak

Hmm, seems I dont yet have access to read that post. Maybe later on I can read it.

Joethryn proposes freeing the slaves.
A plan between the two starts to brew
To save injured slaves from early graves.

That sounds like something from a trailer for a tv show.

Next week on an all new episode of The Paliform Precipice:
Joethryn proposes freeing the slaves.
A plan between the two starts to brew


doer of things wrong
Hide he cannot from deeds most awful

Sorg seeks to deliver death’s cold sting
Swiftly executed by his hands.

While leaving them may seem nightmarish
The prisoners largely were inert.

Into a vestibule, wise to the risk;
The room is empty, he does notice.


Figure out how to say things more naturally. Not adding details to fill the lines and rhymes, because when you do you have lots of filler and awkward sounding things that distract from the story and make the poem unreadable. You have to flesh out the story without filler.

Simply counting syllables leaves the lines feeling stiff and mechanical.

Thats true about the TV show thing, the detail part is something I will have to work on as I myself love reading juicy and vivid imagery (probably inspired from the REH works I have read). Now the first poem in this saga I wrote was written in a similar style but without as strict syllable counting.

Instead each stanza had its own metre. Still not sure which I like best. I would like to keep some form of metric, as rhythm is important to me, but I have to figure out what works best. I'll have to work on this a bit and see how I can make it more fluid.

And most of my poems are about this length