Dear drumrgirl30, Taking into account the previous comments about your poem, I suggest you rewrite the first two lines as follows: Except insofar as I post poems about my feelings on a poetry website called poemranker.com, I keep my feelings to myself. Except insofar as I splatter my emotions around the Internet willy-nilly like some sort of deranged Harris, I keep my emotions boxed up on a metaphorical internal shelf. This rewrite will no doubt improve your credibility and your reputation for accuracy. It will, however, render the rest of the poem redundant. Accordingly, I suggest that lines 3 to 13 inclusive are scrapped altogether. Yours &c. Enderby Throbbington-Smythe Esq.

You say that, but if you actually read the conversation you will see that where zodiac says "It is better" he is in fact, possibly accidentally, referring to Lenore's statement: "However, it’s not all that important for me to convey a particular meaning. Rather I think it better to have the reader find his or her own meaning." By 'convey' here, Lenore doesn't mean 'convey to the reader after they have read the poeme', it means 'convey to the reader in the poeme itself'.

Thank you - glad for that!

You're all wrong, and you're all grotesquely ugly freaks. None of my poemes are open to interpretation, or any sort of guff like that; they merely relate factual events and experiences that befell my childhood years. Granted, I do have three poemes on the Worst list, and said poemes have been there for almost two years now, but that doesn't mean my opinions aren't valid! All opinions are valid, even the invalid ones! Sure some poemes are open to interpretation, and they might even be good poemes, but why can't a poeme just be a description of something? What's wrong with communicating something specific in a poetic way? The idea that a poeme is necessarily better because it is open to interpretation is buncombe. People just say that because they listen to art critics and nod knowingly, and then prance around the place saying things like "Huxley's 'nappy' is a bold encapsulation of the cultural effluence stagnating a leaking society". Pish! Fipsy! Buncombe! Huxley's 'nappy' may well be all those things, and more, but there is one thing Huxley's 'nappy' is not: It is not a proof that vagueness is a necessary characteristic for good art. Husks are.

this pome was really intended as a joke, it's all clichés. I put a little effort into the anapestic trimeter, but no effort into the content or imagery. Isn't that what a lyric is, lol?

LOLTTM

i decided you were right about the stanza break.

ooh, can I fix war and make it clear it's one person with one simple edit?? ...I have left over/from our last great struggle... or ...I have left over/from the last time we had this war and then, I might as well use we'll.

re. dream: you might be right. In my original conception, it isn't really about a dream, but referring to an experience of lucidity when your past life seems like a dream that you're waking up from, but I realize I didn't actually develop this idea in text so it's just in my head. I must decide either to ditch that idea or figure out how to bring it out in the pome. similarly, the you/I mismatch was because it's all one person. But I realize I don't make that clear either. Damn.

I don't know where people get the idea that the definition of poetry is writing about your thoughts, feelings and emotions. In fact I do know where they get it - they get it from being stupid and believing the first thing they hear that sounds 'deep'. Look it up in a dictionary. It's besides the point anyway, since what I was trying to convey is that your perception of yourself - as the sort who struggles through life without complaining - is utterly wrong, since you're actually the sort of person who is completely incapable of writing poetry that isn't about how terrible their suffering is.

zodiac was talking to god'swife. I daresay he isn't pleased to see you back, otherwise he surely would have addressed his comment to you. I'm so sorry.

yes

you are correct, small d and &'s serve no purpose, and are just laziness. The pouch and daddy belong together, part of the idea is that daddy did come up with a diamond ring at one point, but it is long gone, lost or sold or gambled away. hmmm, my repetitions were definitely deliberate, but perhaps they don't do what I want them to.

Yeah, I'm going to work on the war thing. As ajt discerned, it refers to an internal war, but I want that to remain an incidental detail, not a feature of the pome. It's character background. how does "...from the last great struggle" sound? nah, silly. I mean last as in previous. "...from my private wars" "...from the last time I fought this"

sorry, but jackson pollock went to art school. He knew the rules before he broke them. there has never been an iconoclastic artist who didn't first go through an intense period of learning and absorption, whether in school or self-imposed. van gogh, for example, spent thousands of hours studying paintings, sitting in galleries sometimes looking at one painting for an entire day. You can't break rules you don't thoroughly know. You can't defy tradtions with which you are not intimately familiar. That doesn't mean you are required to devote yourself to studying poetry to play around with writing, or that you shouldn't play with breaking "the rules." By all means, go for it! But it does mean that name dropping famous iconoclasts to excuse the inaccessibility of your efforts, as though you were somehow their peer, when you quite obviously haven't gone through the rigorous and intensive learning and training they typically do is inexcusable and will simply result in people dismissing you out of hand. You see, when you don't actually KNOW the rules, you inevitably break them accidentally, and this shows plain as day, as opposed to when you break the rules for some intent or effect. At least read and absorb Strunk, it's like 30 pages long. Christ.

stalk v. tr. 1. To pursue by tracking stealthily. 2. To follow or observe (a person) persistently, especially out of obsession or derangement.