Category: Poetry

The biggest change I made was in the second to last stanza where I added lines that connected to the first few stanzas. I brought back the voices and quarrels from the start, making it clear that they represent humans. I also tweaked the “And I watch,” stanza to make it flow better, changing envisionments to just visions, changing “radiating” to glimmering for an alliteration effect, and shortening the last line to keep it succinct. Lastly, I steered away from cliche at the end of the “Cut from the same cloth” line by changing what I originally had to a pause and then bringing in “But I’m afraid, you were too late” to bring back the pace of the poem.

I received a lot of feedback on the clarity and comprehension of my piece. The feedback mostly revolved around long sentences that could be confusing or murky in meaning. Bringing this piece in, I was very insecure that it was contrived and was also concerned because it is a style of poetry I am unfamiliar with. I got a lot of great feedback on the effectiveness of the piece, the ambiguity of the central meaning, and how its themes could be brought to the surface more.

People pointed out patterns and made connections around the idea of 2’s that I had not even considered, so getting outsiders’ perspectives like that was very valuable to my own understanding of the piece.

This was a self-assigned prompt, and since I had no idea of how it was/wasn’t working, getting a sense of that from the lovely folks at WG gave me helpful feedback on how to tweak my punctuation, wording, and get a sense of what flowed and what I could make more clear.

Since surrealism is a style I don’t dabble in too often, getting a read on what parts were confusing in the right ways, vs. confusing in the wrong ways, was very beneficial.

I received a lot of helpful feedback on the images that were working and felt vividly described. Readers also told me what they felt the central theme to the poem was, and which sections were confusing or could be written clearer.

I received feedback on the title, which I changed from Ode to Ohio to Ode to Cleveland. I also received feedback on certain lines and their wording. Additionally, I was encouraged to play around with stanza breaks, which I tried but didn’t like.

When I brought this piece to Writers Guild, people encouraged me to experiment with the formatting, which I tried to lean into, since I’m not always the most experimental when it comes to layout and visual appearance.

This is one of the older pieces in my collection-in-progress (the date I probably started receiving feedback was in November of 2019!), but I’ve had additional feedback on the poem since then, and I know that Writers Guild will always be there to look at subsequent drafts. The writing process is always a joy when there’s a community to share it with!

Everyone at Writers Guild was so receptive of my work and took their feedback seriously. I received really helpful and varied feedback that made my revision process a lot easier. I love that I have a community of writers at the Guild who I know have my back!