If there is they have to be warmer than the ones in this. To answer your question - yes i do.

I do. Just type "vagina" into the search-o-mat. You'll get gems like this one: http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=68450

Now that you are actually talking about voices/whatever, here goes: In the poems of yours I've read recently, I don't get the impression you're creating some narrating character. Call me blind, but I HAVE spent the last seven years (ie, longer than you've been out of middle school) talking about narrating voices, so I guess I ought to know as well as anyone. Regardless, a neat trick to say something which could be read as self-righteousness is to obviously place a character in the poem to say it. That's all. This doesn't have anything to do with "any views that I do not personally hold", or whatever. Actually, it's better for views you DO personally hold, but are for some reason or another unsupportable, self-righteous, or open to attack. With views you don't personally hold it's safer, since people will be inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt and recognise crazy or ill-informed views as crazy and ill-informed. If you wrote a poem that went, for example, Walking through Colour Town, Down streets smelling of Chinamen, Down streets smelling of Mexicans, Down streets smelling of Blacks, Down streets smelling of Jews, I feel an unbearable ache And wonder Which street is yours? - people will probably not really think you're a racist, but rather that you're making fun of racists. Am I wrong? Sure you can put whatever the hell kind of view you want in the first person and make it a character narrating - or claim it is later - but it's a lot harder, and you don't need harder now. If that WERE the tack you wanted to take, I'd say you'd need to work to distance your persona - Dovina's - from the narrator's. An easy way to do that is to insert some doubt or flaw in the narrator's persona that the reader is unlikely to attribute to you, Dovina - because they'll think it's too honest even for Confessional Poetry (or whatever) or because it actually casts some doubt on your - Dovina's - real assertions. I mean like here: http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=85208 or here http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=83918 Anyway, it's just a suggestion. Considering that the moral certainty/whatever I've seen or imagined seeing in your poems recently is a terribly unhealthy thing for a real young lady to have, I hope you'll at least try it. Here are some decent examples: http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=98137 http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=85647 http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=113633

How do you know the "you" in my comments was really you - Dovina - and not a purely rhetorical "you", maybe even a character I've created named "you", to whom, in the interest of indirectness and otherwise poetickal abstractness I direct all my comments? That aside (and probably utterly untrue and irrelevant - who knows?) the points of my earlier comment were that: 1) you answered richa's comment that your poems tend to make unsupportable assertions by making a bunch of unsupportable assertions and saying "so there"; 2) a useful trick for making unsupportable assertions in a poem is to place a character in the poem who makes the assertions; 3) your poems are self-righteous and doubt-free. The last bit, I'll admit now, was a little over the top. I'm sorry. But, seriously, I was thinking about the last poem of yours I'd read, "A Better God", and just kind of connecting it with a vague idea I've gotten about you from earlier poems. I might have better said, "You might consider being careful to make sure your poems don't sound self-righteous. The feeling I get from your poems of a rather childish and naive certainty, for me inseparable from the sense I get of you, Dovina, whether or not it's some elaborately constructed narrative voice, is actually painful to me." Better? Anyways, your response was a general, unsupportable and laughably wrong attack on my person, having practically nothing to do with my comment. After reading it, I checked the last half-dozen times I'd made useful and practical suggestions on your poems, and saw you'd regularly ignored the point of my comments and just said something irrelevant or insulting. So I guess my saying, "As usual, you're not answering the fucking point of my fucking comment" isn't so far off the mark. PS-You just think it's "childishly thought out" because I said "fucking" - twice. Anyhoo my characterization of you didn't have anything to do with your narratorial voice or whatever the rest of your comment's on about. Good catch!!!

I don't know really. For some reason I just felt that it sounded better this way.

That is because most people don't get any better. They just keep churning out the same crappy poems forever. And yes, you should take it as a compliment.

I guess I should take that as a compliment...lol. You seem shocked that I've actually "gotten better." haha.

hehe thank you. :)

You'll never be a professional poete if you refuse to accept that some people are better writers than you. There's a lot you could learn from Brittanyy, but you won't learn a thing if you continue to berate her. I'm sure you have a lot of feelings and emotions bursting to come out - don't let your ego spoil it. Good luck!

I totally agree. You have only to look at the number of 10s you get compared to Fear of Garbage to prove that. As for poetry not being about skill, but being about the skill of expressing yourself in a creative way, I think you're right. That's definitely, definitely true.