Re: a comment on Relief (Ventilation Shaft rewrite) by cyan9	9-Dec-05/7:16 AM
1. Well, it's good that you're writing sentences. Where it falls apart is that it's essentially "Glaring at drops of steel. Striking out. Whipping up. Venting to peace" instead of "He glared at drops of steel. He struck out. He whipped up, venting to peace" and so on. Some good poetry pulls off all -ing nonsentences, but not a lot. And a whole lot of bad poetry tries it and doesn't pull it off. Anyway, it's become a pet peeve of mine lately. Practically speaking, I would try to make sure each sentence in those first two stanzas has an explicit subject, something like: He glared at the glowing drops of steel As they dripped from the scarred anvil Like beads of tempered rain running Into crevice and crack like red lightning. Forks streaked cross charcoal sky From whence rain came as cool ash Damping breathing, calming the very soul. 2. You've edited this? Or I've slept some finally? Anyway, now it's obvious the rain is like cool ash. 3. Yes, I understand that. But it's (unfortunately) as much the non-downtrodden's responsibility to solve the problems as it is the downtrodden's. The downtrodden can't by themselves. That's why we call them downtrodden, because someone is (we are) crushing them down. At any rate, you can't hold them to our more-priveleged standard. That's what being priveleged means, by the way: that we have the privelege to control and change our lives. And how many priveleged people do you know that have managed to improve THEIR situations?
Re: a comment on Relief (Ventilation Shaft rewrite) by cyan9	9-Dec-05/4:04 AM
I meant "I can tell you NOW", not "know".
Re: a comment on Better Off Dead by wilco	9-Dec-05/3:59 AM
First off, don't be insulted. If I'm coming off harsh, I claim not having slept for 6 days now and having been on 3 totally separate drunks during that time. I like you and I don't mean to be all in-your-facey. Regarding "general impression": I think a general impression is as useful as 99% of the other things you could post. Besides, most poemranker posts are so broken they honestly don't deserve the hours you could spend fixing them. Personally, one thing I find useful about poemranker is people's general (even unspoken) impressions. Minutes after finishing a poem, I'm no judge of its worth. But (with a few exceptions) I figure if the poemranker opinion is tepid, everyone's is going to be, educated or not, and I probably need to start from the drawing board. If opinion's really positive, I might keep the poem around awhile. At least, I'll take what I can get here and be happy with it. Of course, I'm not the norm here. What most people want is gushing mush; those people are going to hate everything else anyway. I stick to commenting on grammar on a lot of poems because (1) I think a poem cannot be successful with crap grammar, (2) it's an easier way to tell someone his or her poem sucks than trying to critique the poem's ideas, and (3) a lot of people seem to need it - whether or not they like it. Regarding "serious poetry": There's all kinds. Writing is my profession. With everybody else here, it probably ranges from hobby, like whittling or blogging, to something they did once while bored in study hall and immediately went online to see where they could show it off. I'm not the one to judge who's serious and looking for advice. Probably everybody deserves advice, but after two years of getting trashed by a lot of users for anything other than guffs of praise, I do tend to rush to judgment and trash a lot more than I should. I'm working on that. Regarding "put up": I meant, offer the kind of criticism you'd like to see on your poems - ie, "step up". I'm not sure if that's what the phrase actually means. I don't need anything put up at present, though I'd be flattered if you took a look at my posts - not for serious critiquing or judgment, mind; I'd just like to know you'd seen them. Regarding deleting: I understand that, but a lot of what seems irrelevant here is the best part of poemranker. I cringe just imagining someone deleting the race of liars, Bayes' theorem, Dovina's and my many wandering "arguements", or the short life of the hobo-sheathed insult generator. And even critiques pertaining only to your poem might be useful to some other user in a similar situation. If you've posted a totally different poem and the comments aren't going to make sense (this has happened before), fine, maybe. But I'd leave comments whenever possible.
Re: Relief (Ventilation Shaft rewrite) by cyan9	9-Dec-05/3:32 AM
Here's my critique: 1. The first two stanzas aren't real sentences. Don't overuse present participle (ie, "-ing") phrases. It weakens your verbs. Not to mention, you'll forget to make it a sentence. 2. You don't actually have something coming from the charcoal sky, only something that's LIKE cool ash. You need to at least drop "as" and have cool ash coming, or say what it is you're comparing to ash. On a similar note, it takes more than half the poem to get that it's the strangler "glaring" at the drops of steel, or almost half a poem too long. 3. The ending may be true enough, but I can tell you know it's going to get you in trouble with almost everybody. Basically you've placed the entire responsibility for "remedying" the situation on your strangler, who should (it's implied) just be able to decide to change and do it. By extension, that diminishes or frivolizes his complaints and disdain when they don't need to be. Whatever Bush and his smug aristocrat cronies prattle on about it, the reality of the situation is not that all these whining disdainful downtrodden should just one day up and decide to fix themselves and stop whining so much. At least, that may be the reality of the situation, but I'm not going to say it even as a joke. Otherwise, it's good writing. Keep on the ball about your grammar, sentence structure, your message, holding your images together (I just noticed, "calming the very soul" is a very weak and off-message thing to say at that point.) I think you can take my word that I got all your subtle metaphors and such. Yet, I'm going to go with wilco. -8-
Re: a comment on Relief (Ventilation Shaft rewrite) by cyan9	9-Dec-05/3:16 AM
He should. The fact of the matter is that a good deep-hidden-meaning poem (like, say, an Eliot) is going to be impressive on a superficial level to start with. I appreciate trying to write a poem that's simple-sounding on a quick read but has great stuff hidden. That's what Shakespeare, for one, is so good at. But if wilco's unimpressed on a superficial read, I don't think it matters what deeper subtext you've got. And in short: as a general rule, don't assume people aren't getting your subtle meanings just because they don't like your poem. I hate when people do that.
Re: a comment on The Third Fall Of Jesus by amanda_dcosta	9-Dec-05/1:51 AM
It's 4am and I just got to America after 24 hours of flying. My brain's fried. Sorry for all the grammar mistakes in these comments.
Re: The Third Fall Of Jesus by amanda_dcosta	9-Dec-05/1:47 AM
Okay, here's the score: I've been trying for ages now to write you some good advice for your poem and I'm tired now and it's driving me crazy. The short of it is, I think you're good and I'm so glad to have you on the site. But I think you need to work a lot harder on the technical side of this poem. Don't misunderstand me, I have no problem with your message or plot. I like it. The telling needs fixing, though. Here are some basic rules that can help guide your rewriting and future writing: 1. Do not use "doth". Especially don't use it just for rhythm, which is what you're using it for. 2. Do not do what we call "inversion"; that is, writing a sentence backwards so you get the rhyming word, usually the verb, last. Some examples of this from your poem are "While this earth with love You save", "The Lord indeed doth promise keep", "Next morning, I, the road did cross", and so on. Obviously, you'd normally say "While you save this earth with love", "The Lord doth keep his promises", and "Next morning, I crossed the road". Yes, it's harder to get the rhyme that way. Poetry writing is hard. Rather than trying to rhyme "love", "promises" and "road" instead, I'd suggest using a technique we call "enjambment" - running the phrase through the end of the line. This way, lines like Next morning, I, the road did cross Surprisingly I had a toss become Next morning, early, while I crossed the road I had a frightful toss. - Or something such. See what I mean? If not, let me know and I'll try again. 3. Pay attention to the grammar and punctuation connecting lines or thoughts. What I'm thinking of is lines like While this earth with love You save On us who doth with anger rave If you write it out as a paragraph you get "While this earth with love you save on us who doth with anger rave." Or, the Lord saves *ON* us. That's not real grammar. It's easy enough to fix, just do like I suggested and write everything out as a paragraph to check. You see pretty quickly that you'd have done better to "for" or "and" instead of "on". 4. What's really going on is that many of your phrases aren't 100% relevant or connected to what you're saying at the time - or rather, you end up fitting them in in a way that's distracting or confusing because you need the rhyme. Sure, they're all connected in that they're about God's love and God really does save all the people who rave and so on, but that make a really untight and confusing poem. Um, I'll say it this way: A lot of your rhymes are too often used to make this a compelling or very precise poem, so there's no reason to fight to keep them. I would start working (and I mean really WORKING) to find new rhymes that don't require distracting or unnecessary ideas, phrases, or grammar inversion. I'm sorry to tell you it's going to be hard, that it'll take a lot of frustration to do well, but I can tell you've got the smarts to pull it off. Don't give up. And don't ignore my advice, please. People are going to tell you this is a great poem. It's a good story and a good Christian message coming from a good heart - I agree. But just like there are people who are only going to look at the story and faith side of this, there need to be people who only look at the grammar and structure side. If you listen to BOTH of us, you're going to come off better. Good luck. If you have any questions, just ask. zodiac
Re: a comment on Better Off Dead by wilco	9-Dec-05/12:57 AM
Boys, boys. There's an easy way to solve this whole problem. cyan9 - your average original poem comment is no more helpful or interesting than wilco's. Usually it's just a general (mostly negative) impression with some positive comment on a detail you liked. That is, nothing any serious poet can take to the bank. You probably comment like this because you realize poemranker isn't serious poetry and besides you have better things to do. Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely happy to have you here, but if you're going to hold other users to a high standard, I'd say put up or shut up. Both you & wilco - it's hard enough to get someone on poemranker to read your poems, much less to offer any comment at all, useful or not. I'm glad enough both of you actually do this, and in truth you're two of the current best things about the site. I'm not saying we couldn't all use improvement, but let's be happy about what we got, right? I mean it's Christmas, right? Oh, PS - let's all agree not to delete anybody's comments from our own poems. What, are you afraid someone's going to think your poem's good until they read some other user trashing it? That's just silly.
Re: a comment on Count All the Stars by TLRufener	9-Dec-05/12:40 AM
ie, Note the timestamps on the two CLICHE COUNTS above. I did them one-after-the-other. If you're speaking generally - it's surprisingly hard to make people believe they're cliche. Usually you tell them and they're just like "I've got to live my own life" or "I am alone amidst a crowd" or "FREEEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM!"
Re: a comment on Count All the Stars by TLRufener	9-Dec-05/12:36 AM
Boredom. And it's faster than you think.
Re: a comment on Count All the Stars by TLRufener	9-Dec-05/12:35 AM
You misused credit, display, documentation, extemporaneous, and arguments. What's your deal lately? Are you becoming Irrish?
Re: a comment on Count All the Stars by TLRufener	9-Dec-05/12:33 AM
Dovina and AlChemy are correct, except that I also googled phrases which were close or got to the gist of the image/connection/whatever - ie, "You left me here, alone and sad" => "You left me alone" + "You left me sad" + "you left me sad and alone" + "You left me alone and sad". I imagine the problem with making an automatic cliche counter would be getting it to do that, to search "Went to a better place" or "Went on to a better place" instead of "And went on to a better place", for example. That's easier for us, we already know what the cliches are. Ideally, an automatic cliche counter would also have to correct bad grammar, since that seems to go hand-in-hand with cliche on this site. The numbers, as you've guessed, are the number of google hits, roughly. I can only find one other GOOGLE CLICHE COUNT on poemranker's Search-o-Mat, but I'm sure there have been more, probably with more user-friendly formats. Naturally, GOOGLE CLICHE COUNT is only a very rough indicator of clicheness and, Dovina's snarky assessment notwithstanding, not meant by me as any real measure. (Though in its defense, notice that it managed to pick out Caducus's biggest cliches, "Promises were made" and "Waiting for a train". Incidentally, this doesn't mean that Caducus's poems are great, only that they're comparatively less cliche.) In deference to Dovina's sensibilities, I've at least decided that posting a TOTAL CLICHE COUNT at the end is unfair and unnecessary. So bite it, Dovina.
Re: Count All the Stars by TLRufener	7-Dec-05/6:19 AM
In the interest of fairness, here's Caducus' most recent post: "I was your Abilene dream" = 0 + "I was your dream" = 357 "Your rainy Chelsea thoughts" = 0 + "Your rainy thoughts" = 1 "The moisture on your fingers" = 49 "midnight moon Prince" = 53 "I was your IPOD lyrics" = 0 + "I was your lyrics" = 29 "You cantered through suits" = 0 "Breathless even then" = 21 "Before we ever touched" = 390 "You were my serpent" = 1 "My scent of apples" = 0 "Eve slept against my rib cage" = 0 "Knowing the end was near" = 492 "We met in Coventry" = 7 "Both becoming flesh" = 1 "Trains spat diesel" = 0 "Was it a ghost" = 1,160 "Taxi to a Hotel bar" = 4 "Lips betrayed minds" = 0 "Nerves brined my palms" = 0 "Whenever you breathed" = 39 "We left for Texas engaged" = 0 + "We left for Texas" = 195 "Broth of your mothers mouth" = 0 "Stirred the cauldron of my tongue" = 0 "Promises were made" = 107,000 "Ring became a rock" = 0 "Rock became sand" = 10 "Sand became time" = 0 "Time impaled her heart" = 0 "Left me deaf and blind" = 68 "Waiting for a train" = 167,000 "That brings new lovers" = 1 + "Brings new lovers" = 2 "Her wailing ghost" = 3
Re: Count All the Stars by TLRufener	7-Dec-05/6:05 AM
Let's try another approach. GOOGLE CLICHE COUNT "I sit quietly" = 20,700 "Sit in the dark" = 123,000 "Peering out the window" = 19,300 "Count all the stars" = 623 "Wish on every one" = 190 + "Wish on every star" = 769 "Until you come back" = 126,000 "You left me here" = 33,400 + "You left me alone" = 27,700 + "You left me sad" = 1,830 "You left the world behind" = 249 "Went on to a better place" = 786 "Sit here and wait" = 47,400 "For your return" = 566,000 + "Sit and wait for your return" = 125 "You said you'd come back" = 590 "Take me in your arms" = 120,000 "I sit in/on the windowsill" = 119 "Count all the stars" = 623 "I'm no longer lonely" = 580 "You hold me in your arms" = 20,100
Re: a comment on YOUR OWN PLEASURE by Zoe	7-Dec-05/3:51 AM
In that sense, anybody who takes something seriously is actually parodying the parodist who makes fun of his seriousness. Yes, I see now...
Re: laugh again by skaskowski	7-Dec-05/1:27 AM
A mobius strip is a metaphor. For the rim of a coin, among other things.
Re: almost missed work by calliope	7-Dec-05/1:26 AM
Yeah. Sweet, no lingering impression.
Re: a comment on YOUR OWN PLEASURE by Zoe	7-Dec-05/1:10 AM
PS-The breadth of your reading is amazing. What fiction are you reading now?
Re: a comment on YOUR OWN PLEASURE by Zoe	7-Dec-05/1:08 AM
Yeah, I was looking at your pictures. Living in the Middle East (a ghostly sort of Latino beauty, if any,) always makes me want to move back to Mexico and do obvious things, like getting a flat in Coyoacan and eating tacos al pastor with a Bohemia.
Re: a comment on Snake in the Grass by thepinkbunnyofdoom	7-Dec-05/12:50 AM
Ooh, righteous indignation! Why are you ripping off 80s lyrics then? Go fuck yourself. Everything you write is awful because where anybody else would have taken some of his readers' advice and stopped writing the same crap with the same mistakes all the fucking time, you seem to have preferred sticking your head in a clothes dryer and hitting 'Go'.