Each line is layered, inscribed with hidden meaning. Vibrant imagery details the divide between humans and nature.
Category: Poetry
Adding personal, vivid details deepened my story, helping me show emotion while staying mindful of the reader’s comfort.
Writers Guild allows me to get so many diverse perspectives, and even sometimes my own feedback thrown back at me.
I left space in the story for readers to step in; wove in hope, rhythm, and quiet constancy to guide the emotional arc.
Cailey advised me to try the “sandwich” effect of the first stanza in the second one; it helped balance the poem out!
The workshop helped me put the finishing touches on my piece by removing bits that messed with the perspective and the intentions of the speaker.
Took a knife to it and it seems clearer now.
Readers of the poem found the climax intriguing, but felt it lacked the right amount of imagery to convey the shock and intensity of the moment fully. Hence, I used visual notes and emotional traits to evoke more of an embodied experience. The distinction between lust and love was depicted as the contrast between the colors black and red. The protagonist starts to realize that they are clouded by the antagonist’s strong desires.
My feedback included a lot of great suggestions for line edits. While I’m used to receiving thematic feedback in this genre, sentence-level suggestions can really change the entire essence of a poem. The macro and the micro often become one in the same when it comes to poetry. As a poet, it’s really helpful when others give their insight on even the “smallest” of decisions—like verb tense, word choice, the decision to include or omit punctuation, etc.
Most of the feedback I received was aimed toward greater specificity, in wording and vocabulary. Lines like “we desire your love” turning instead into “we covet your conditional love”—covet having more biblical connotations, and the conditional aspect being important to the current situation of the narrator. Some of the feedback I received but did not agree with, was about the formatting and expanding the poem into more of a story. I thought separating the confessional text from the lines of the poem would create too much of a divide between the words I am trying to weave into conversation with each other. As for expanding the poem into more of a story, that felt too much like straying into prose.