10-11-2023, 12:58 AM
So...
You said you had just started writing and Basic critique is where you should have placed
this poem. But that's okay, you don't know what goes where yet you're just starting and
that's not a big deal. Just a note for the future.
Okay here's a little secret: I am reasonably experienced with poetry, but I really don't do
critique that often. So here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to give you some critique on
how I would do things. This is NOT how I think you should do it, I'm just giving you an
example of how someone else might do it and I'm going to leave it up to you to learn
something from this but to figure out how you would do it your way.
That said:
First off you're doing iambic 4/3 and rhyming the second and fourth line like a lot of folk songs.
In spoken poetry you can get away with a lot more variation in the rhythm because you can
squish some syllables together and pull some apart as you are speaking, just like you can when
you're singing. But if you're doing the poem for the written page you have to be a little more strict
with the rhythm because the reader doesn't have you to prompt them with your voice. Not that
I'm saying you have to follow the iambic religiously, if you do that it will sound contrived. You
should make a mistake or two every stanza or so that's a little out of rhythm. And in similar
fashion your rhymes shouldn't always be perfect ones, you should include near but not perfect
rhymes every once in a while. That helps to make it less mechanical and more natural as well.
Now here's some personal preferences that you should take is an example, but not as an
instruction that you should actually follow them. It's my personal taste and not yours but I
just wanted to provide an example.
I really don't like poems that have a standardized rhyme scheme. I don't mind having words
that rhyme and especially ones that alliterate, but I don't like them always in the same place
or that often. i.e. Sometimes in the middle or at the first. And personally I love iambic feet
and religiously use them in all my poems, but the number of feet I put in each line varies
quite a lot.
All that above is probably something you want to ignore but I put it in here just so you can
think about it.
Now getting on to the thematic and narrative content of your poem which is something
you should really think about:
Your poem is in nice little blocks of 4/3/4/3 that rhyme, so it has the appearance, rhythm, and
rhyme of a poem; but it reads like an article from Wikipedia. What I see on the page is a list of
facts which any number of Dylan books repeat in the same chronological order that you have
written them down in.
No matter how your writing is structured, if you don't have something different from the
encyclopedia, it doesn't make for a good poem.
Now they're all sorts of ways to go from here, but let me tell you one specific example that
would work.
You said you were old enough to be alive in that time, when Dylan was writing the songs or
at least a few years after that when some of the albums were coming out. So that means
when an album came out or when you heard a specific song for the first time, something
was happening in your life, maybe it had to do with the events that inspired his songs, or
maybe the song reminded you of something that happened in your life, or some emotion
that you strongly felt when you heard his song for the first time.
Here's a writing exercise you can do that I think would help you quite a lot (but you'll need
to be the judge of that): Read over your poem and identify the stanzas which have the
strongest memories and emotional feelings for you. Pick 4 to 8 of them, but no more. Copy
only those to a fresh page of your computer or whatever you use, and leave plenty of space
in between them. Now fill each space with notes about what the stanza above reminded
you of (they should not be metered lines, just rough notes). With what the stanza above
reminded you of, how you felt, your physical condition at the time, what person you were seeing,
what you read, saw on TV, etc.
Now go back and mix those notes in with the stanza above. Make a new stanza or stanzas
out of that mix. ---- A poem is about feeling and emotional connection and real people and
you're the poet and the thing you know the best is what you see around you and you yourself.
So try that out, see how that works, and bring it back here.
"May the bears be off gathering flowers." - (old Romanian saying)
ray
You said you had just started writing and Basic critique is where you should have placed
this poem. But that's okay, you don't know what goes where yet you're just starting and
that's not a big deal. Just a note for the future.
Okay here's a little secret: I am reasonably experienced with poetry, but I really don't do
critique that often. So here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to give you some critique on
how I would do things. This is NOT how I think you should do it, I'm just giving you an
example of how someone else might do it and I'm going to leave it up to you to learn
something from this but to figure out how you would do it your way.
That said:
First off you're doing iambic 4/3 and rhyming the second and fourth line like a lot of folk songs.
In spoken poetry you can get away with a lot more variation in the rhythm because you can
squish some syllables together and pull some apart as you are speaking, just like you can when
you're singing. But if you're doing the poem for the written page you have to be a little more strict
with the rhythm because the reader doesn't have you to prompt them with your voice. Not that
I'm saying you have to follow the iambic religiously, if you do that it will sound contrived. You
should make a mistake or two every stanza or so that's a little out of rhythm. And in similar
fashion your rhymes shouldn't always be perfect ones, you should include near but not perfect
rhymes every once in a while. That helps to make it less mechanical and more natural as well.
Now here's some personal preferences that you should take is an example, but not as an
instruction that you should actually follow them. It's my personal taste and not yours but I
just wanted to provide an example.
I really don't like poems that have a standardized rhyme scheme. I don't mind having words
that rhyme and especially ones that alliterate, but I don't like them always in the same place
or that often. i.e. Sometimes in the middle or at the first. And personally I love iambic feet
and religiously use them in all my poems, but the number of feet I put in each line varies
quite a lot.
All that above is probably something you want to ignore but I put it in here just so you can
think about it.
Now getting on to the thematic and narrative content of your poem which is something
you should really think about:
Your poem is in nice little blocks of 4/3/4/3 that rhyme, so it has the appearance, rhythm, and
rhyme of a poem; but it reads like an article from Wikipedia. What I see on the page is a list of
facts which any number of Dylan books repeat in the same chronological order that you have
written them down in.
No matter how your writing is structured, if you don't have something different from the
encyclopedia, it doesn't make for a good poem.
Now they're all sorts of ways to go from here, but let me tell you one specific example that
would work.
You said you were old enough to be alive in that time, when Dylan was writing the songs or
at least a few years after that when some of the albums were coming out. So that means
when an album came out or when you heard a specific song for the first time, something
was happening in your life, maybe it had to do with the events that inspired his songs, or
maybe the song reminded you of something that happened in your life, or some emotion
that you strongly felt when you heard his song for the first time.
Here's a writing exercise you can do that I think would help you quite a lot (but you'll need
to be the judge of that): Read over your poem and identify the stanzas which have the
strongest memories and emotional feelings for you. Pick 4 to 8 of them, but no more. Copy
only those to a fresh page of your computer or whatever you use, and leave plenty of space
in between them. Now fill each space with notes about what the stanza above reminded
you of (they should not be metered lines, just rough notes). With what the stanza above
reminded you of, how you felt, your physical condition at the time, what person you were seeing,
what you read, saw on TV, etc.
Now go back and mix those notes in with the stanza above. Make a new stanza or stanzas
out of that mix. ---- A poem is about feeling and emotional connection and real people and
you're the poet and the thing you know the best is what you see around you and you yourself.
So try that out, see how that works, and bring it back here.
"May the bears be off gathering flowers." - (old Romanian saying)
ray
a brightly colored fungus that grows in bark inclusions