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Friends: I'm not sure if this is the proper format or not. I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm screwing up. For starters, I'll post a short poem...and already I'm aware that it is 14 lines long...but hey...the lines are short and it would lose something if I left the last line off...right? Anyway...her goes...
A Mother's Legacy
Come my Euro-African princess My bronze beauty, queen of curl, woman of color. Burnished gold ksin, hazel eyed, black browed beauty
come sit before me Let us talk while I comb Touch and strengthen our mother-daughter bond Sharing the day, sharing life
I moisturize and comb dreaded-up tresses From your crown to your tightly twisted kitchen Too much sun and pool Brushing, separating, drying tears and consoling Taling of balck and white, marriage and divorce, rich and poor shared time, shared dreams through twisted braids Tipped with golden elastic.
I hope this is the forum for this piece. I wrote it a couple of years ago and haven't done anything with it...just curious about what your reaction might be. Thanks, Ron
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I don't have a problem with this; I suspect you haven't gotten any responses yet because most new members post in the "First, Please Introduce Yourself" thread.
So go do that, and people will know who you are
Anyway, I can't claim to be an expert in poetry (mine usually isn't very good, which is why I leave it notebooks, where I can forget about it; I just find it improves my prose writing), but I thought this was fine. You have a couple of little typos but nothing serious ("ksin" for "skin," "taling" for "talking"--although I liked that one; it sounds evocative, and I'm wondering if you could get away with leaving it in because of "poetic license" [grin]).
I'm also not going to get exercised about it being 14 lines and not 13; it would hardly make sense to cut the last line (like you said).
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Ron, I wanted to respond to this because you're a new memeber and I didn't want you to feel unwelcome or slighted. The truth is, though, that hatrack is not the best place to post poetry. It's not that it's inappropriate and you are quite welcome to try to see if you get a bite, but the truth is that most of us here neither read nor write poetry.
This looks ok to me, but I don't have an eye for poetry.
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Ron, personally, I do not like to critique poetry. Primarily because people often put so much of themselves into these works, and thus when you critisize the piece, there is an aftertaste of critisizing the personal experiences of the author.
Having said that, many authors can separate themselves from their work when reading a critique, but not all, and none completely.
Okay, so, what do I think of the piece you've posted?
I thought the image was cliche. That's the first thing that jumped out at me. Also, the voice didn't really work for me, it was not the soothing voice of a mother that wants to build a relationship with her daughter as the words imply. But rather, it was a distant voice... especially the phrase, "come sit before me".
The words do flow well. To my ear most of them are harsh-sounding words, with the exception of "life." (Not sure if that makes sense to you).
Anyway, welcome to the site, hope to see more of your writing.
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There's also the fact that this forum exists mostly to help people get their work up to the level at which it could be accepted for publication. By posting the entire text of a work here, you've basically published it and ensured that any future publication will be similarly unvetted and unpaid. That substantially reduces the benefit that this piece could derive from a critique.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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I both write and read poetry (my name alone should give an idea of that)... but as everyone else has said, and emphasizing even more on what Shi said, criticizing poetry isn't as easy as criticizing stories... even with the possibility of taking it personally aside ('cause even story writers run that risk)... but there really is no wrong way to write a poem, no more than there is a wrong way to feel (damn, I'm deep)... So... ok... you want to share your work with people and maybe get a couple praises for it, that's cool, I'm all for that... but... if you want to get critiqued for your poems, then um... I don't know if you'll get anything that will be very productive for you...
"By posting the entire text of a work here, you've basically published it and ensured that any future publication will be similarly unvested and unpaid. That substantially reduces the benefit that this piece could derive from a critique."
Not necessarily… I've never heard of a poem being published by itself. So in a way, she's still only posting a fragment of a book…
[This message has been edited by RavenStarr (edited March 08, 2005).]
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