Conflagration

[Collapsed We Swear]

can you see them 
writhe 
over their kin 
a Rat King's born 
alone in the miry 
dark

Trying something different from my normal stuff, playing around with brevity.

I really like this. My only criticism would be, why not punctuate it? And as you have capitalised "Rat King", why not capitalise the rest?

I would have it like this:

Can you see them 
writhe 
over their kin? 
A Rat King's born 
alone in the miry 
dark.


It seems pretentious not to use punctuation in this particular instance—unless there is a justification for it that I'm missing.

Short poems like this are difficult to critique, because anyone can sound reasonably eloquent in 20 words. And this is like a Banksy: well done, but it's one colour and you see it all at once.

Limiting myself to only a few lines, I thought about punctuation and capitalization as a way to emphasize tone. I intended the lack of punctuation to encourage a certain speed of reading. The lines run into each other a bit only forcing you to slow on the single word lines, writhe and dark. Ending with a period might not kill the effect, but seems unnecessary. The lack of capitalization wasn't arbitrary, but maybe it's personal and doesn't come across. To my eyes, having "Rat King" as the only capitalized phrase adds to the unsettling tone; it looms large in the poem where everything else is almost whispered. Again, maybe that was a failing on my part. Either way, it's a failure of imagination on my part that I can't think of another way to convey that aspect of the tone.

It's at least admirable that you gave it some thought. Unfortunately, I couldn't disagree with your reasoning more. If you expect the reader to slow down on the single word lines, then you are, rightly or wrongly, relying on line breaks as a form of punctuation—at least for these lines. Which means, for the reader, there already is a question mark after "kin" and a full stop after "dark", they are just not there—and conspicuous by their absence. So, call me old fashioned, a traditionalist, a square from the past, but I don't think removing the punctuation—and, by association, the capitalisations—does what you think it does. It just makes you look like you don't know what you're doing. But you already said in your little introduction that you write bad poetry, so maybe you like it that way. You did also say you wanted to improve, though. So, you're in a bit of a catch 22. You want to improve, but you clearly don't like criticism.