Hi Hera ,



Title:

The title of any item is what draws people. It's like the magic word to open Ali Baba's cave or a locked door that will start you off on an adventure.

Sometimes a title is a direct reference to the content, and other times it has a more tangential connection.

But, whatever you choose as your title, it must grab people's attention. Your title is intriguing, and that is what drew me in.

Poetic techniques:

Any poem requires the poet to dig into a big ole bag of magic tricks to make it work. A poem is after all far more than just a few lines and perhaps a couple of rhymes thrown together.

A poet relies on assonance, consonance, and word choice to help build up a smooth cadence. You make good use of assonance and hard consonant sounds to produce a slow reading speed, which nicely mirrors your narrator's sense of ennui.

Imagery is quintessential to poetry. Unlike in a novel where the writer can spend pages setting a scene (like Stephen King frequently does, or when J K Rowling first described the Great Hall of Hogwarts), a poet has only a few lines.

You set the scene really well. It is easy to visualise the room your narrator is in. We can see the clock with the hands moving, and we can hear the 80s laugh track (and can even visualise our favourite show from back then on the TV). However, you then include "emotions" and "thoughts have been repetitive", but you talk about them in a vague way, lacking the visual punch given to the earlier lines.

You make great use of repetition in your poem. Repetition is used for a multitude of reasons. It provides the individual lines of the poem with a cohesiveness, it keeps the theme or the crux of the poem constantly in the readers mind, and also serves as an echo to help emphasise previous lines.

Your seventh and eighth lines, which are a near repetition of earlier lines, serve to not only reinforce the emptiness of the house, but they literally act as an echo of that emptiness.

I also like the last line being a repeat of the opening line as it creates an envelope effect. This does a great job of bringing the reader back to the start of your poem, and it is also a great way to symbolise the repetitive thoughts of your narrator.

However, I think that you have overused the pronoun "I" in your poem, and it is distracting. In prose, the word "said" is used so often that it is often overlooked by readers as though it is there one minute and then lost within the the text the next minute. This is why authors are advised to always use the word "said" in prose. However, in poetry, we see every single word that is written.

I don't like giving suggestions to authors or poets about changing words or changing half a sentence, as I believe the work belongs to the writer. But just to give you an example of how you could eliminate one of the "I"s: instead of "I watch the clock" you could try "Watching the clock". It would leave the syllable count unaltered, and I don't think it would impact any on the reading cadence of the poem.

Favourite quote:



Although I can relate to your entire poem, this line exemplifies the past year or so for me. I know what it's like only ever getting those deeper downs and staring at the laundry basket.


Thank you for sharing this item! Please keep on writing!

Andy~hating university


My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .