Gothic BC

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SwoopGuy

Hmm...  was that "thanks" sincere or sarcastic?  I is confuzzled!  (Take that, proper grammar!)

Darlin', once this pounding headache decides it's had enough of me and leaves, I will take a close look at your writings and be as nit-picky as you'd like.  For now, however, I am going to go back upstairs, pop a couple extra strength painkillers, and try and sleep with a three year old constantly begging for my attention.  Sounds like fun, don't it?

In my defence, I mentioned at the outset that I can be a harsh critic.  That being said, I still welcome anyone to rip through any of the pieces I’ve thrown up here.  I mean, if I was cruel enough to have y’all read them, I can’t see any reason why I’d object to folks throwin’ in their two cents on how I might have improved them.  I was actually surprised when no one had anything to say about “Holy man.”  And it’s not as if I didn’t give people ammunition when I butchered Lord Byron’s “She Walks In Beauty.”   

On the plus side, it's good to see so much traffic in the Lit forum.  :)

Poor kid...  here we are, telling her to practically re-write her entire poem, and not only that, but telling her how she should have written it to begin with...  but I agree with you, "loathed and alone" is a lot less cliched, which is a large part of the problem with this poem.  It's predictable and over-done.

On another note, I am currently speaking with my Grade 12 English and Lit teacher...  I miss being a student, too!

I believe the word they were looking for was not "loathed" but "lost".

Oh yah!  I can totally see that.  Especially since the "a" and the "s" are right beside each other on the keyboard.  But I suppose you can see my point about making the wrong guess, thus impossing a different meaning on the poem. 

Now that I think of it, I almost wish it was supposed to be "Loathed and alone."  The coupled long "O" sound is a complimentary pairing with the alliteration presented in all the "a" words.  I think it contributes a sort of howling sound (as in "Oh! woe is me," but less trite), and howling noises tend to conjure up images of lone wolves on craggy mountain ledges, crying up at an unresponsive moon.  It would also be less cliche than "lost and alone," while still making reference to the commonly used phrase.

Good God! I miss being a student.

What I meant, and I know that you know this already, is that the poem, when ready aloud, is choppy, inconsistant, not easy to read.  I read it a couple times, and parts of it made me stumble, parts of it were just not pleasing to the ear.  It's difficult to enjoy a poem when those things are in the way.

PS: Yes, I can tell...  I miss highschool, too.  I loved it.  Not for the students, but the teachers and the material we studied.  I was, am, such a geek.  Go me!

Guilty as charged.  I went over that poem about three years back with my grade 10s.  It has since become my favourite example of establishing voice.

On another note...

"There is very little flow to the poem, some lines are quite long while others are very short."

When I saw this, I was instantly reminded of one of my poetry profs.

He insisted that "flowing was for liquids."  And further, "poems would be  better described in terms of their rhythm and meter." 

Just picking at nits, as usual.

Swoop

PS Can you tell I miss my job?

Swoop,

You can tell you are a highschool teacher...  I remember studying that Langston Hughes poem in Grade 11.

Trixy

I believe the word they were looking for was not "loathed" but "lost".

Anyhow, that aside, I have to agree with Swoop that while your poem conveys a very strong message, it was lost in all the typing errors and grammatical mistakes.  If you are going to post something that means so much to you and weighs so heavily on your heart, and if you want the people reading it to give proper criticism, then proofread your work before putting it up, or much of the feedback might end up being about your poor grasp on the English language.

That out of the way, I would like to look at the poem itself and give my input.  You start off trying to have a pattern, a stanza of two lines and then a stanza of four.  The only problem with this is that your structure ends there.  There is very little flow to the poem, some lines are quite long while others are very short. 

The fourth stanza has very vivid imagery and a feeling of despair and lonliness, and then all of a sudden you turn around saying "I knew there was a reason for me being alone", and then leave that thought, a very important one to the poem.  You don't expand upon that idea, you instead jump into trite sentimentality and "don't kill yourself, there's always something better at the end of the tunnel, people will be sad if you do".  Being someone who has gone through that kind of loss, you should, perhaps, try and avoid the cliches about suicide.  I am sure that you have more insight than that.

I also had a great deal of trouble understanding this stanza:

even though life is hard

and trouble an inevitable part of it

if you decide to leave it all behind

maybe you will

but i can guarantee that others

......you mistake wiil haunt

The first two lines are clear, if not a little shallow, but the rest of the stanza is lost in the midst of poor grammar and sentence structure.

This poem is a good start, and I think that you have a lot of potential, but this work needs a lot of fine-tuning.  The problem with poems written out of extreme emotion, be it sorrow, joy, anger, etc. is that the person is so intent on getting everything they feel out onto paper that the thoughts are disjointed, the structure is chaotic without intention, and the end result is more theraputic than a literary work of art.  Keep working at it, and keep us posted!

(PS: Please don't think I am a bitch...  I am just trying to be helpful.  ^___^)

For me, the most interesting thing here is the third line.  It’s loaded with alliteration and assonance. Sounds good when read aloud.  Unfortunately, the word “loat” isn’t in my dictionary, so it’s hard to know what you meant by it.  For the meantime I’ll guess you meant “loathed,” as it best fits the context. 

Trixy made a valid point the other day when addressing your language skills.  The primary reason for using good grammar is to communicate effectively.  You don’t want people to guess at your meaning, for it is quite possible that they will guess wrongly, and your message will be lost.  I acknowledge that using proper grammar can be difficult (because English is difficult), but one should at least try to type out the words they know correctly.  Two examples from this piece include a missing letter in front of “ould,” and “wiil” instead of “will.”  Errors like these only serve to further distract the reader from the core of your work. 

That’s not to say that good poems require perfect grammar.  Sometimes the use of poor language skills contributes to the voice of a piece of writing.  The Langston Hughes poem, “Mother to Son” is a good example.  Lines like:

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

Where there ain't been no light.

For I'se still goin', honey,

I'se still climbin',

The use of double negatives, and a very unique contraction of an improperly conjugated verb are characteristic of the vernacular of early African Americans in the southern US.  Hughes uses these “errors” very effectively to establish the identity of the poem’s speaker.

I don’t think this is quite what you were looking for, but I hope it was helpful nonetheless.

SwoopGuy