I thought I would take a look at some of the stuff on here, and there's some pretty good poetry around. Of course I then thought I should give it a shot, so this is what I randomly came up with in the last 5 minutes. If it turns out to be any good, maybe I'll try something else sometime.


The Forgotten

There’s a shadow
At the edge of my mind
Of something coming my way
With a pulsing severity
That will not be subdued.

I can feel it approaching,
Derisive and black,
Ruthless and toxic.

My will can sustain it
For now,
Giving in to the odd embrace
Of faithlessness.

But eventually
An impulsive flinch will let it in.
And it will envelop me,
Consume me,
Conceal me.

There will come a time
When it will be inevitable
And I’ll accept it
And move on
And forget the past with a dignified patience
That will leave me in peace.

It’s too late to ask for more.

Too late to regret.

So are all the poetry people just not around, or is it just that bad?

I'm here. But I have a workshop application due in a week and a conference with my professor/mentor tomorrow so I've been all poetry-ied out on my own time. I will get to it though. Perhaps tomorrow after the conference.

I'm working on a 2000 word essay comparing William Carlos Williams's "To Elsie" to to Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". I'm tired of analyzing .

Anyway, you don't really need to look into it too much... like I said, I wrote it really quickly to see what I could come up with if I wrote something.

Ok, now that I've basically finished my application and written 1200 words sobre un cuento de García Márquez and everything else I had to do this week, lemme take a look.

I like the subject matter. It's delicate, it has this weird sense of death. It's haunting. I think you can expound on it.

However, my first impression is that it has to be way more specific: the lack of specific images is the biggest hindrance to your poem here. The reader wants to feel that it is a specific experience; you can't give them that if you don't name this fear or this looming, or at least, if it's a nameless fear, show it--metaphor, whatever, but you need to add specific images. The image is hands down the most important part of the poem; collected specific images are what make great poems. Get specific here. Don't tell me black and toxic, show me the dark sludge pouring from barrels into once pristine mountain lakes.

You might also want to experiment with uniform stanzas. You've already broken it up, but maybe quatrains would help the flow of the poem.

Just some things to think about. Hope this helps!

It does. If I had a course on poetry or something, I would probably spend the time to do that kind of thing. As it is now, I can't really be bothered. What I do write (when I'm not bogged down with essays and exams) is generally prose, and I'm much more comfortable with that.

The only thing I do tend to disagree with is the uniform stanzas... not that I've done it well or anything, but I would rather be able divide my ideas up the way I choose rather than conform to a predetermined layout, you know?