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Inhaler: I don't doubt the sincerity of your sentiment. But the question must be asked: in what way is this a poem, rather than, say, a journal entry or a postcard with line breaks inserted more or less at random?
With the exception of the single arresting image that Jade mentions, you don't seem to be paying any particular attention to your choice of words—their allusive qualities, their sound-values, their rhythms.
A poem, says, is a small or large machine built of words. A machine that's supposed to do something.
Think about what you want your machine to do, and choose the words of which you will build it accordingly. Eliminate, inasmuch as possible, any word that does not contribute to that effect.
Do you want your poem to convey the humdrum endlessness of the workday? Okay, then: you might want to consider a regular rhythmic scheme, with each line having the same syllabic pattern—mechanical, singsong, like the tick-tock of a clock that never seems to chime.
Watch out for clichés—"tar and feathers," for instance—which jolt the reader out of the mood you're trying to create before you'even had a chance to establish it.
Beware abstracts—"cancels out all of my positivity," for instance: it may seem paradoxical, but concrete sensory imagery is much more effective at conveying emotional states. The reason for this is that abstracts are subjective—positivity may mean something different to me than to you—while specific sense-impressions tend to be universal. When I say that the day sucks the iron out of my spine, you know what I mean in a way that doesn't come across when I baldly state that it "neutralizes my ambition."
(This is what we mean by "Show, don't tell," by the way—a phrase uttered by every writing teacher, but rarely explained properly.)
Lastly, and most importantly—I honestly cannot stress this enough—think about what you want to communicate, or if you want to communicate all. If you want to vent and blow off steam, that's fine: we all do it. But that sort of unformed raw spillage of emotion and sensation is strictly writing for the drawer: if you want to engage a reader, you've got to give hir something s/he's never seen before, make hir feel a way s/he's never felt before—otherwise you're wasting your time (whichg is forgivable) and also the reader's (which is not). |
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