09-17-2026, 11:47 AM
I agree with wasella, this poem is still making me work too hard for bare comprehension. A lot of infolding/extension/complication before the context has been fully established.
Still think you should ditch the rhyme, still find all the rhymes to be holding the verse back.
More to the point, the first stanza is still full of poetic no-no's:
-mostly direct editorial
-rhyme feels forced into place
-relies on lots of abstract nouns to tell us what it's all about (wit, adoration, trepidation, fear, hate, lust, misplaced, undesired, so damn tired).
"I think I know some of your pain,
Some of your truth and the disdain" -- this is unambiguously very bad, you want to really reject the impulse that produces this kind of language
I think the last 3 lines of your new draft are worth building on, and the rest can comfortably go straight in the bin. Okay "let us taste, let us touch" was a cool intrusion. The coffee bean stuff I found just kind of annoyingly arbitrary but maybe it has a place in a different form of the poem.
All the rhyming lines are pretty ineffective, as they just say what they mean, but with some awkward masculine rhyme thrown in.
It occurs to me that the poem operates almost entirely in generalizations, which is probably its biggest flaw. I think the last few lines feel comparatively so much more satisfying/like a relief when we reach them at last, because the speaker is FINALLY being particular.
Last, some good advice that I forget who I am stealing it from: the 2nd person works best when you write it as if it were the 1st person. Maybe another significant contributor to the kind of "uhhh no thanks" feeling I'm getting from this draft has to do with the pervasive sense of artifice in the poem's structural conceit. Like, I'm implicitly asked to imagine the speaker saying these things to "you," but "the glimmer in your eye's detested in their awful trepidation" is a pretty tiresome thing to imagine sitting through listening to.
Still think you should ditch the rhyme, still find all the rhymes to be holding the verse back.
More to the point, the first stanza is still full of poetic no-no's:
-mostly direct editorial
-rhyme feels forced into place
-relies on lots of abstract nouns to tell us what it's all about (wit, adoration, trepidation, fear, hate, lust, misplaced, undesired, so damn tired).
"I think I know some of your pain,
Some of your truth and the disdain" -- this is unambiguously very bad, you want to really reject the impulse that produces this kind of language
I think the last 3 lines of your new draft are worth building on, and the rest can comfortably go straight in the bin. Okay "let us taste, let us touch" was a cool intrusion. The coffee bean stuff I found just kind of annoyingly arbitrary but maybe it has a place in a different form of the poem.
All the rhyming lines are pretty ineffective, as they just say what they mean, but with some awkward masculine rhyme thrown in.
It occurs to me that the poem operates almost entirely in generalizations, which is probably its biggest flaw. I think the last few lines feel comparatively so much more satisfying/like a relief when we reach them at last, because the speaker is FINALLY being particular.
Last, some good advice that I forget who I am stealing it from: the 2nd person works best when you write it as if it were the 1st person. Maybe another significant contributor to the kind of "uhhh no thanks" feeling I'm getting from this draft has to do with the pervasive sense of artifice in the poem's structural conceit. Like, I'm implicitly asked to imagine the speaker saying these things to "you," but "the glimmer in your eye's detested in their awful trepidation" is a pretty tiresome thing to imagine sitting through listening to.