Angeline
Poet Chick
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2002
- Posts
- 27,156
Hi again Z!
You must be good, my friend--you are getting the full treatment here on the poetry board from some terrific writers, like Judo, Homer, Star, Suzie, FairyTat! I looked at all your poems on this thread. My guess is that Vibes and Quickie are your most recent pieces (although I'm often notoriously wrong). Those two poems seem more "evolved" to me than the others.
I agree with Judo and Homer about Dream Flight--it looks like it needs some editing down, some paring back. When I first started posting poems at Literotica some seven or eight months ago, my poems were inadvertantly "prosey." Not in a good way either--just too much verbage. One of the best things I've learned here is how to edit my work. Still learning actually.
Another poet here, Senna Jawa, recently commented to me that imagery is everything in poetry (or something like that--Senna, if I got it wrong, get in this thread and correct me
). I really see that now--that extra words weaken the images that convey the poem to the reader. Those conjunctions and articles that seem so tiny and innocent accrue and dilute the poem.
Another thing I saw in this poem that I would change is the punctuation. I have ambivalence about punctuation in poetry. Sometimes it is really necessary, I think, and adds to the poem, other times it restricts when it might be better to let meaning be ambiguous.
I liked Homer's advice about reading the poem aloud to get a sense for whether and where to puntuate. Part of my evolution as a poet has been--more and more--to see poetry as performance art. By that I mean I see poems, like plays, as things that are meant to be heard--yes read--but foremost heard. So I read my poems aloud over and over. Then I record them and listen. That helps me know whether or not I need punctuation and where.
There is another, often better, way to deal with pauses in poems though and that is spacing. Obviously, if you are working with a traditional form this is not an option (right Judo and Homer, 'O beautiful progenitors of trad form?). One poet here, Smithpeter, is IMHO a master of that. I have been learning from reading his poems and those of a few others how to work that. Here is a poem I wrote:
leaning quiet
i can mark my
sway
and hush
match breath to
heartbeat
arching
slow
deliberate
falling back
which is it?
hearing silence
or the wind
or the sigh
of giving in?
I could have used punctuation to tell the reader where to stop, but I think the spacing works better.
My last point has to do with repetition and redundancy. I am fond--some might say overly fond sometimes--about repeating words or phrases. Sometimes the chanting quality works well. However that is different from redundancy where a word or idea is restated by mistake. That weakens the poem. I do that alot in my first drafts and I am forever cutting out redundencies. Here for example, if the woman is "sitting close," then she is, by definition, "nearby." I took them both out in my suggested revision because I think, in this poem, less is more.
Dream Flight
Passenger plane
flying high
pretty woman
tasty pie
Racing heart
throat dry
elbows touch
sparks fly
flowing heat
full supply
wandering hands
settle ply
something soft
sigh
thigh
Silent glance
pleading try
consent please?
may I?
impish eyes,
smile shy
she nods
lets them lie
Note that I took off the last stanza. This way the poem ends, thematically at least, with a beginning!
I hope you don't mind all the pontificating and the liberties I took! Just trying to suggest some other ways to think about it!
I really like your work!
You must be good, my friend--you are getting the full treatment here on the poetry board from some terrific writers, like Judo, Homer, Star, Suzie, FairyTat! I looked at all your poems on this thread. My guess is that Vibes and Quickie are your most recent pieces (although I'm often notoriously wrong). Those two poems seem more "evolved" to me than the others.
I agree with Judo and Homer about Dream Flight--it looks like it needs some editing down, some paring back. When I first started posting poems at Literotica some seven or eight months ago, my poems were inadvertantly "prosey." Not in a good way either--just too much verbage. One of the best things I've learned here is how to edit my work. Still learning actually.
Another poet here, Senna Jawa, recently commented to me that imagery is everything in poetry (or something like that--Senna, if I got it wrong, get in this thread and correct me
). I really see that now--that extra words weaken the images that convey the poem to the reader. Those conjunctions and articles that seem so tiny and innocent accrue and dilute the poem.Another thing I saw in this poem that I would change is the punctuation. I have ambivalence about punctuation in poetry. Sometimes it is really necessary, I think, and adds to the poem, other times it restricts when it might be better to let meaning be ambiguous.
I liked Homer's advice about reading the poem aloud to get a sense for whether and where to puntuate. Part of my evolution as a poet has been--more and more--to see poetry as performance art. By that I mean I see poems, like plays, as things that are meant to be heard--yes read--but foremost heard. So I read my poems aloud over and over. Then I record them and listen. That helps me know whether or not I need punctuation and where.
There is another, often better, way to deal with pauses in poems though and that is spacing. Obviously, if you are working with a traditional form this is not an option (right Judo and Homer, 'O beautiful progenitors of trad form?). One poet here, Smithpeter, is IMHO a master of that. I have been learning from reading his poems and those of a few others how to work that. Here is a poem I wrote:
leaning quiet
i can mark my
sway
and hush
match breath to
heartbeat
arching
slow
deliberate
falling back
which is it?
hearing silence
or the wind
or the sigh
of giving in?
I could have used punctuation to tell the reader where to stop, but I think the spacing works better.
My last point has to do with repetition and redundancy. I am fond--some might say overly fond sometimes--about repeating words or phrases. Sometimes the chanting quality works well. However that is different from redundancy where a word or idea is restated by mistake. That weakens the poem. I do that alot in my first drafts and I am forever cutting out redundencies. Here for example, if the woman is "sitting close," then she is, by definition, "nearby." I took them both out in my suggested revision because I think, in this poem, less is more.
Dream Flight
Passenger plane
flying high
pretty woman
tasty pie
Racing heart
throat dry
elbows touch
sparks fly
flowing heat
full supply
wandering hands
settle ply
something soft
sigh
thigh
Silent glance
pleading try
consent please?
may I?
impish eyes,
smile shy
she nods
lets them lie
Note that I took off the last stanza. This way the poem ends, thematically at least, with a beginning!
I hope you don't mind all the pontificating and the liberties I took! Just trying to suggest some other ways to think about it!
I really like your work!
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