Re: Brethren by richa	9-Mar-04/1:53 PM
'clock:' - with a colon. I like 'like girls' - without 'the'. I don't get the punctuation in the last line.
Re: a comment on To sow and reap by somemorepoetry	9-Mar-04/1:49 PM
I think it's a great one! Next, you'll want to do the same thing with more original rhyming sounds. Still, good start!
Re: The Cessation of Fidelity by wilco	9-Mar-04/1:47 PM
Do you think _Evanescence_ is the best band ever?
Re: Terrors Children by BrandonW	7-Mar-04/2:57 PM
I'm going to start counting, and if I get to 10 you're out of the pool for the rest of the day: (1) Terror's is possessive, with an apostrophe. (2) You are not a refugee; I don't believe you for an instant. (3) in fact, the so-called 'information' in your so-called poem is either forty years out-of-date or dangerously disgustingly and dangerously wrong. Oh, the poor 'victims' of a terrible 'regime' have been driven to our 'friend' Pakistan! Huzzah for friendly Pakistan! Pigheaded bullshit. What did those poor refugees do? Cart their simple possessions across the highest most desolate part of the planet? Bullshit and bullshit. (4) This poem has no rhyme - yes it does - no, wait, it doesn't again. (5) 'Me' and 'feet' do not rhyme. (6) The end of a line is not the same thing as punctuation. (7) I'm still enraged by the ignorant bullshit propaganda-swallowing of this crap poem. Or maybe you were referring to the Muslim emigration from India in 1947-8. Way to keep up on current events, ace! (8) 'Some nights - I still do face defeat' is just laughable - as is, 'No education, or higher learning.' (9) 'Pray religon [sic]; it finds me' is the second worst use of a semicolon on this site this week. Not to mention that this so-called sentence makes absolutely no sense. And religion is misspelled - which is to be understood, I suppose, since you are a recent immigrant to Pakistan. (10) "A foreign sand... under my feet."
Re: Metametahaiku by -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I.	7-Mar-04/10:16 AM
How on earth did 'Meta-Ku' ever become a category? Nentwined, do you realise what you've done?! Congratulations on programming as a poem-form.
Re: a comment on I could rule myself by fevriere	7-Mar-04/4:10 AM
I'm fine with ouvreture (or whatever.)
Re: The Golden Rule by phbiscuit	6-Mar-04/12:46 PM
The first line makes less than no sense. I don't just mean in its relation to the rest of the poem, although in that department it is sorely lacking. But in a pure semantic sense as well. "I would. Die for you. r Sins I lo. Veyou All." It's like a foreign language. This poem would be a lot better without it. Stick with dirty backcountry semi-primates and their confused bits of wisdom.
Re: a comment on Woman in the purple cotton jacket(repaired) by INTRANSIT	6-Mar-04/12:41 PM
What do you mean? I see you changed the ending already. I'm sure -=Dark_Angel=- will be ecstatic. I, however, am not.
Re: a comment on I could rule myself by fevriere	6-Mar-04/11:12 AM
re: 'why can't those sentences stand alone, grammatically' They can, but you had "My cry is a rose my land floods..." If you're going to punctuate, you can't count on a line-end being read as a stop.
Re: a comment on No Sunday Clothes by wilco	6-Mar-04/11:10 AM
re: "I wasn't planning on an answer...that's the whole point of it..." Of course it is. And the whole point of seatbelt-extenders is to allow hideously fat people to ride safely in cars and planes, but that doesn't mean they're not stupid (the seatbelt-extenders, not the... never mind.) Second, um, like, YEAH whatever God there is must allow terrible things to happen to good people, even on Sundays. There's not going to be a single person reading your poem for whom this isn't a pretty mundane already-thought line-of-thought. You might pride yourself then on the universality of your oh-so-cleverly-expressed sentiments, but you probably shouldn't. Third, do you notice how practically every line in your poem ends with a comma or period (and the one that doesn't, should)? Well, don't do that anymore. In my experience, that comes from not being able to write poetry more than one line at a time (same with the AABB,) which is a complete crock of shit. Amateur hack internet poets write 'Let's go down to the Gentleman's Club.' And that's it. They don't really have a plan to finish out the rhyme, so they start thinking of words: scrub, cub, nub, shrub, stub... Stub works, maybe. They get another line 'You pay and the ticket-man gives you a stub.' This is like pulling teeth to read. Each line is its own clause, which means no clause can be longer than, say, ten syllables unless you're CLS or a fucking idiot. The rhythm's shot, there's practically no connection between lines, couplets, verses or anything. You've got to have a plan, and something that holds it together, like: Let's go down to the Gentleman's Club Where the toiletbowl always flushes, And the girls all smell like a drain and scrub Their cunnies with toilet brushes. See? Unity. Interesting rhymes. A sense of each line building on the previous. Sex. Okay, despite the fact that it's about toilet brushes, can you see how that's a more structurally interesting quatrain than anything in your poem? Yes? No? More?
Re: I could rule myself by fevriere	6-Mar-04/10:23 AM
- no comma is needed after "operastar", which I hope you know isn't a word. - You missed a comma or something after "rose". - "metamorphosising" should be "metamorphosing". - "December doesn't close.)" And what the hell does that mean, anyway? Still it's nice to find one here I like.
Re: a comment on No Sunday Clothes by wilco	6-Mar-04/9:33 AM
Make this poem talk to almost anybody but God. For one thing, do you think God is going to answer you? For another, do you think He's going to answer you when you speak to Him in that tone of voice? You don't even capitalise His Holy Pronouns! If you changed this poem so that the first line was: "I questioned God blah blah blah blah blah," and so on, it would be a 100% improvement. Oh, and make it really rhyme if you're going to use rhyme! Oh, and find some original words to rhyme! That's a difficult thing to ask, because it means reading a bunch of poems and seeing what words they rhyme. You could start by reading all the so-called rhyming poems on this site and avoiding anything they do like the proverbial plague. More?
Re: a comment on No Sunday Clothes by wilco	6-Mar-04/9:27 AM
Yes I do.
Re: a comment on Woman in the purple cotton jacket(repaired) by INTRANSIT	6-Mar-04/9:23 AM
PS- Thin and gaunt are practically the same word here. How about: "She was thin, almost dead," or "She was thin, I was drunk, it was love."
Re: a comment on Woman in the purple cotton jacket(repaired) by INTRANSIT	6-Mar-04/9:21 AM
I think you should have paid the bill, walked out into the street, and been hit by a bus. Waking up in the hospital with two prosthetic legs would have actually been a less heavy-handed and predictable 'ironic' ending than the one you have here. Really, I'd cut everything after beet slice, which is good, and (yes, seriously) add an ending where you walk out of the restaurant, NOT OBVIOUSLY THINKING OF ANYTHING - just description. At the very end the narrator a) passes under trees which reach up into the dark like hands, b) boards a subway/trolley/whatever where bored commuters loop their hands through those hand-loopy-thingies, or c) some less cheesy image of your own. DO NOT MORALIZE!!!1! DO NOT RECEIVE ANY OBVIOUS LIFE-CHANGING EPIPHANY ABOUT ANYTHING!! Just keep up the naturalistic description, and have a hand-image show up somewhere unexpected before the end. That's all and this poem will be great. If you understand, blink twice. Good.
Re: a comment on No Sunday Clothes by wilco	6-Mar-04/9:13 AM
So, yeah, that title is pretty clever, huh? I mean, I'm reading this thinking, like, what does all this have to do with Sunday clothes? and then, bang! right there at the end - there it is again! It's foreshadowing. A circular structure, even. Or like saying, "Have you heard the one about the nun who says 'Well I'm really the bus driver!'" Somehow, despite that the bulk of this poem has almost nothing to do with the punch-line, I still saw it coming like a freight train, which is not good for poetry. Not to mention that ignoring an irrational traditional conception of Jehovah on His holy day is already handled much better in poems like this one here(http://www.bartleby.com/265/355.html) and here (http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem784.html - extra points to Eliot for using 'brown' as a verb!) Do you want more?
Re: Love a Duck by fuzzylogicisagimp	6-Mar-04/8:10 AM
DUCKS WITH AIDS!!!!!!
Re: Woman in the purple cotton jacket(repaired) by INTRANSIT	6-Mar-04/8:01 AM
"As I watched her, I looked down at my right hand holding a forkfull of food. My left hand was circling my cup of tea. I looked back at her and wondered why." These lines are awful. Just awful. The rest isn't half-bad; just change the end to anything - anything at all! - other than looking at your own hands and wondering why. PLEASE!!
Re: a comment on No Sunday Clothes by wilco	5-Mar-04/8:15 PM
Yes, I'm aware that I probably sound like some giant elitist poezi to you, exactly the kind which that famous dream of being the embattled poet-of-the-age validated by time over the elitist poezi censure of his stuffy blind contemporaries would lead one to expect. And this may be true. If you're the next William Blake, all power to you. But I'm not really an elitist, just bitter today. Tomorrow I'm sure I'll be fine. That said, I should point out that don't pretend to be able to write a great poem myself, I do know how to judge them. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I'm one of the very few people on this site who actually does talk and write about poetry for a living - and a pretty decent one - rather than as some kind of hobby, on his/her lunch-break from writing code or sculpting small wooden animals. And I'm heir to a dried-meat fortune which, as I have explained elsewhere (http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=91826), makes me the closest thing America has to an aristocracy. Any questions so far? Good. We'll be in touch.
Re: a comment on No Sunday Clothes by wilco	5-Mar-04/7:54 PM
Please prepare yourself for my criticism by first reading every comment on the last ten posts by Ms. w-crystal lane swift-w and lydia evelyn, especially the ones concerning the use of unmetered AABB rhyme scheme; overused pairings like day/away, night/light, and dead/head; and the complete corruption of rhyme AND meter AND sense for such stupid (and cliche) non-rhymes as time/find, see/need, faith/rape, visage/image. Only when you have completed this task will you be ready for my real criticism. We'll be in touch.