Re: a comment on Fastso by Dovina	7-Mar-05/8:27 AM
Fastso if nothing else deserves an award for the most ironic mispelling ever.
Re: a comment on a note to the politically inactive fundamentalist christians by i_am_the_popsicle	5-Mar-05/3:56 PM
That giving birth may seriously harm the mother may well give rise to a mind-parp. However is this mind-parp so cosmically profound that the foetus that is killed is not the same foetus that would have been killed had the labour not been so harmful. I can only hope so.
Re: Advertising says: by Dovina	2-Mar-05/11:39 AM
Eat healthfully? If you really believe advertising is some great contradiction because some people want you to spent your money on their tat and not someone else's but that someone else wants the opposite then I would at least suggest portraying these people asking you to be fat or to 'eat healthfully'. And what is the spacing all about, 44 words on 31 lines!
Re: Help me find a poet (This is an actual question, not a poem) by Plaidypus	21-Feb-05/11:48 AM
That description is not much use. But if you are serious about them having more poems than you have ever seen, go to the users page click on poems at the top to sort users by number of poems and check through see if you recognize any names. It may have been Christof or poetandknowit or edpeterson I guess.
Re: a comment on Hunger by Dovina	21-Feb-05/9:03 AM
:(
Re: a comment on Hunger by Dovina	21-Feb-05/8:35 AM
and stop bitching all the time about critics. It takes a lot more effort to try and communicate to you what is wrong with your poems and why such a thing is wrong (as you will not accept even the most central of poetetic tenets) than it does to simply say: Ace Dovina, and everyone's opinion is equally valid so if you think 'show don't tell' is wrong you don't even have to make a cogent argument why.
Re: a comment on Hunger by Dovina	21-Feb-05/8:29 AM
That is to say there is no debate over whether to show or whether to tell. The poet is supposed to communicate something. How can she communicate what she means when she forsakes the precision of image for the vagueness of abstract terms.
Re: a comment on Hunger by Dovina	21-Feb-05/8:20 AM
If a dunce bangs her head against stone because she believes its properties are not stoney, does that make her at war with the stone? The line break thing is correct by the way. It may happen with metrical forms that lines break for syllable count's sake etc (although they really should not), free verse on the other hand attempts to mimic the musical patterns of speech.
Re: Hunger by Dovina	21-Feb-05/6:25 AM
In free verse each line should always be semi-independent from the preceeding text i.e. it should stand on its own, therefore the instructions should be to you not the reader. Other than that be wary of using labels for abstractions 'mental formulations' 'volition'. It is always better to show than tell.
Re: a comment on The Man I Love by Dovina	18-Feb-05/9:59 AM
Of course you are an ageist. Minging, fat and messy is what being an old boot is all about. That you are ageist for your own good is neither here nor there.
Re: a comment on The Man I Love by Dovina	18-Feb-05/9:53 AM
What exactly have you been hearing for 50 years. That the individual black person is more diverse than the individual white person. Well of course that is true, black people for instance have dark skin. Do any white people have dark skin? No. I don't need to read the bible to know that. Jesus christ, no wonder your brain went wonky.
Re: a comment on The Man I Love by Dovina	16-Feb-05/1:35 AM
Of course not. There are lots of girls who do not discriminate.
Re: a comment on Plastic Explosive Iraqi-Man by Enkidu	15-Feb-05/3:37 PM
Perhaps it was because you had some wonderful insight about the middle east and people dying or whatever and then you proceeded to write as vaguely as possible.
Re: a comment on Love Poem in HTML by Plaidypus	15-Feb-05/3:15 PM
A transcript from Africa: "If I were a negro perhaps I would be able to tell the difference between different negroes. However I am not a negro and to me all negroes look the same." Can the word negro be replaced by the word poet in the above passage and mutatis mutandis mean the same thing? [10]
Re: a comment on Separation by Dovina	9-Feb-05/9:44 AM
For there to be a richa the lesser there must be a richa the greater and there is only one. I was only referring to D_A the lesser (the less educated one who chased off hypatia) so as not to offend you :( but as this has not worked; your face.
Re: a comment on Separation by Dovina	9-Feb-05/9:43 AM
The reason you need quotes is because the 'allusions' are to a voice that is not that of the narrator. The same person that is saying 'Look at the Lutherans/ liberal Methodists/ tolerating beer/smoking, dancing' which I guess is your voice appears to be the person talking about ready to be spewed/ from the mouth of God.'. Another good reason for making clear your allusions is that half of them are copied word for word from the bible which is plagiarism.
Re: a comment on Separation by Dovina	9-Feb-05/2:38 AM
I understand that you have become somewhat hypersensitive during your time spent on poemranker. I know you had a previous alias and am glad you came back after facing a lot of Dark_Angel the lesser's twatishness. However I think you have become too defensive to accept criticism. The bible quotes I did not pick up on, but I think that they should really have been in quotes. The criticism I make is one of didacticism, to make grand statements in poetry is not done. The poet must at least first build up her argument so that the conclusion follows on logically. Otherwise it just looks like you are hiding behind a poem to make unsubstantiated claims. If the narrator is the one making the claims such as 'watered down make believers' and 'sin makes a sham of our faith' then it is up to the narrator to elucidate. Otherwise make the narrator the one responding to them. I get no sense of the poet in this poem, the sardonic voice, to seperate her from the fundamentalism she is trying to rail against. The other criticism which is part of the first one is your lack of discipline. That you have these feelings is not enough, you must craft them, deconstruct, show. For instance that bad things happen is a decent reason for not believing in an interventionalist God, don't tell me that, I have heard it all before. Tell me something interesting, something that as a piece of intellectual enquiry is yours.
Re: a comment on Separation by Dovina	8-Feb-05/4:20 PM
OK then. I read your poem, under what conditions should I accept it to be valid?
Re: Separation by Dovina	8-Feb-05/3:02 PM
I very much doubt you are an authoritative source on theology, so anything you write about religion per se is going to be misinformed and consequently valueless. The bit where you bring together the Lutherans and methodists and catholics and represent them as a kind of hierarchy is I guess interesting, but you go too far in your conclusions later on, and what the hell is all this about spewed from the mouth of god. The metaphor is utterly random and unrelated to the rest of the poem. I thought metaphors had to be built up.
Re: a comment on A Thing I Must Do by Dovina	4-Feb-05/10:23 AM
The 'show don't tell dictum' means that the poet must find images, or surface if you will, to convey what may be quite abstract. Now you can say 'you know that thing called hate they talk about, I feel that about trolls'. From this we know you hate trolls. Unfortunately we don't care because no one wants to know what a poet thinks about trolls. If you do not use the tools of the poet you are just talking arse and expecting us to care.