Ruth's comments (member since Sep 30, 2007)

Ruth's comments from the ¡ POETRY ! group.

Thanks, Bill. Found your poem, Nina. It's a good one. No wonder they chose it.

Congratulations, Nina. Do they have an online presence yet?

Nice discussion of the problems on both sides of the fence, Ray.

Ruth B.

Congratulations, Daniel, you're cooking on all burners.
I especially like the musings of Cleave One Flesh.

Congratulations! I can't wait to get my contributors' copy.

(For others here, I was lucky enough that three of my poems were accepted for this first issue. Fire, Fire, The Season of Dogs and How to Create an Exquisite Corpse)

Congrats, Harley. Must be nice to see so much of your work all together. Artists is a good one.

Fun, Britty. I agree with Meg. It'd be a great kids' book.

I kind of like slopipng. Feeding pigs on a hill?

I think I get what you're talking about. Good poets, whether they write in form or in free verse always consider the pauses implied by line breaks and stanza breaks.

Notice how different your two examples are because of the simple change you made. (I'm not considering the poem itself, merely its arrangement on the page.)

Focused
Forceful
Panic stricken

Needing
Wanting
Slopping
Down

In the first stanza "focused" and "forceful" are given great weight because they each appear on their own line. The there's a speedup as we get to "Panic stricken," that's appropriate to the meaning of the word.

Then we return to "needing, wanting" slowing down again to give each word emphasis. "Slopping" (are you sure it isn't "sloping?") and then "down" on the next line not only slow things further, but give an extra push to the meaning of the word "down." It's really down. Right down there on the bottom.

Your version:
Focused
Forceful
Panic Stricken

Needing
Wanting
Slopping Down

This has the advantage of symmetry. It looks nice on the page. I admit to paying a lot of attention to how my poems look on the page. What you get, though, with this more tidy approach is that now "slopping down" is almost like one word. It speeds up like "panic stricken" does.

What I'm saying is that I agree with you on the importance of the way the poem is spaced on the page. But I'm adding the idea that it all depends what the poet wants the poem to do.

In this case, what's the poet's intent? Speeding up at the end or slowing down. If it were my poem, I'd go for the slowing down at the end, and use the four lines in the second stanza.

Clear as mud?

Look at the poem Jim posted here, Britty. http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2391...

This one sucks us in so that by the time we reach the last lines we are moved and saddened. And it's all done by using concrete images. Our senses are involved. We are involved. We're not being told how anybody feels. We see it. We feel it.

That's what I mean when I talk about the power of showing, rather than telling. That's the kind of thing you need in this poem.

Beautiful.

And a perfect example of the effectiveness of a concrete image.

Congratulations. You're on a roll.

You're welcome, Annette.

For the type of poem that makes a person ponder and make new connections--that works best if you can find a central image that works a metaphor. IOW, you may be describing an automobile accident, but when you get towards the end you throw in just a word or two to make the reader realize that the poem is about more than an auto accident, it's about the failed relationships we have.

If you want us to relate to the poem and feel the emotions instead of being told about them, then you have to show us the circumstances. Paint us a picture with words. Write about one individual, even if you have to make it up. What does she look like? What did she do on a specific occasion? What do the drugs look like? Where was she? Did she smell anything? Who was with her? What was she wearing? What did the sky look like? Describe the room, the other people, the automobile, etc. All kinds of stuff like that is what your poem is missing.

Getting better, Britty. But we still have no idea what's happened or why the persona of the poem is so upset. You need to anchor all of this hyperbolic language to something concrete, something real. How about trying to weave the actual story into the poem, telling us what actually happened? You could trybalternating stanzas of concrete images (who, what, why, where, smell, taste, sight, touch..) with the abstract language you have here.

BTW, pus is pus. Puss is a cat.

All I have to do to perfect my approach, Andrew, is to remember every time I want to print out my poem, to do Print Selection. Otherwise I turn around, and the printer is churning out 14 pages of variations on a theme.

On the computer every time I want to do more than just flick around a comma or two, I copy the latest version of the poem and paste it at the top of the file. So at any time, if I want to see what I've done previously, all I have to do is scroll down through the file to travel back in time.

Barry, what's an "earth typewriter?" Do you mean just a regular typewriter?

Once in a while I have a poem that drops in my lap full blown from the head of Zeus. Mostly I revise and revise. True, occasionally I realize I've revised the life out of a poem and revert back to one of my early versions. That's another reason I love the computer. All my previous versions of a poem are kept right there in the file. No scrabbling through last week's wastebaskets.

Your comment reminds me of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. It's said that he never cropped a photo for better composition, instead composing everything through the lens.

Ah well, some of us are mortal.

Meg is right. Despite the over-the-top language and emotional approach this poem leaves us unmoved because we have no idea what's going on. All we know is what the persona of the poem tells us of her reaction. We need to be let in on the secret. Paint us a picture with concrete images.