Daily Poetry 2013: everything after 1950 is about dicks

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Daily Poetry 2013: everything after 1950 is about dicks

Fanky Malloons: Aug 21, 2010; Is your social worker inside that horse?

areyoucontagious posted:

Mangled in the gears of expectation
ground up despite your protestations

Drowned in ~~the~~a? sea of doubt
faced with naught but inexorable rout

publish or perish, you were in peril
thoughts of yours were lifeless and sterile

you lacked true ethic
your efforts pathetic

your failure a lesson
that stresses won't lessen

so we lash to our oars
amid the master's roars

and while your fate sends shivers down my spine
all I can think is "gently caress you, got mine"

I usually hate rhyming couplets because they tend to sound contrived, but most of these work pretty well because of the way you used assonance and alliteration to make it sonically interesting beyond the mere fact of the rhyme scheme. That said, I'm not really a fan of the tone you have going on here -- based on the last line, I'm assuming you're aiming for a sort of biting, sarcastic feel, but the first two couplets make it sound more pompous and self-congratulatory than it needs to be.

Also, I feel like it's really missing something without a title or some other reference to the subject of the poem. There's no anchor for the sentiment, and so it just kinds of hangs in the ether, which makes it fall flat in the end.

Now, this is a piece that I'm thinking about submitting somewhere (anywhere, I don't actually know yet). As well as general critiques, there are two things really bugging me right now where I'd appreciate help/comments. One is the line "between a rock and the grand canyon", I want to change the grand canyon to something else, but I can't think what. Two, the penultimate line is too banal, but I want to change it rather than removing it, because I don't like the last line without something in between it and "the devil you know."

Edit:
Edited out my poem because I'm submitting it somewhere. Thanks for critting it Muffin!

Fanky Malloons fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Apr 6, 2013

# ¿ Jan 10, 2013 03:37

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 11:17

Fanky Malloons: Aug 21, 2010; Is your social worker inside that horse?

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

OVERALL: it's got a (mostly) great flow and energy to it that work really well and I could never accuse it of being boring. It's a little to, uh ... bad self-aware. I know there's a word for that but I've forgot it. Like it's scared of people reading it so it tries to cover that with big, blustery handwaving. Try to capture that beautifully aggressive flow in a way that's a little less performative.

Thanks! This is awesome, and super helpful. I think a lot of the problems in the poem stem from the fact that it was originally written for an assignment where I was supposed to riff off a poet that I was studying in class at the time (Jeramy Dodds, if you're interested). So probably a lot of the stuff that doesn't work super well is where I was explicitly trying to mirror his style, which (obviously) he is much better at than I am, so it comes off oddly. However, I liked the theme and ideas of/in the piece, which is why I wanted to work with it to make it more my own. I'm assuming it's cool to re-post it when I have a new version, right?

Also, I will take up the challenge that you slipped in there at some point after this week's Thunderdome (if I manage to produce anything for that....)

# ¿ Jan 12, 2013 17:36

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