Ranger4 Jul 2006

This is more of a letter (epistle) than a free verse poem, in my opinion - I wonder if nentwined might consider adding that as a category.
If I'm brutally honest, this won't score very highly among many writers here. That's not meant as an insult and I don't want you to be offended by it. It's just that everything contained in here has been written countless times before. Love poetry now has got to the stage where you have to be original - even if it's just one brilliant, inspired line or passage around which the whole poem's built. As it stands this is a collection of cliches. For example, 'bleeding from the wounds in my heart' is just about the ultimate overused phrase in the world of teen poetry. I guess you could argue that it's how you really do feel. But then...don't you think that everyone else feels that way at some stage? And so if everyone wrote a poem describing the same thing, wouldn't love poetry get very boring very quickly? Be inventive. Read lots of poetry on here, note all the recurring images/phrases, and never, ever use them. The dancing in the park passage here is good - write about that. Write about dancing to no music whatsoever. Use 'love' no more than once in the poem though. "Show, don't tell" is very appropriate for that. Just telling us that you love someone makes us as readers feel nothing.
Okay, so I've done a bit of critiquing. What I like about this poem is that the language is kept simple (something with which I struggle in my poetry) and, unlike 99% of poems like this, the grammar is pretty accurate and you've managed to capitalise 'I', which a hell of a lot of people don't do, and it annoys me ;-)
Well, that's it for now. Hope this was of some use.
Peace.