Poetry / Lateral progression (Analysis)

Duality of the human race, even the most reclusive person can relate to this poem.The Nirvana(the it), that we all search  for, is ever changing and unattainable.

Favorite line *The net will catch me before the ground punishes me.

I feel as though you want an answer for your questions, but know that your readers can not give them to you, so you answer your self though not fully -just to the best of your ability.  This is very passionate and real.
-a statement based on one’s own troubling thoughts and what if’s.  Maybe heroic to some and cowardly to others.  I believe we’re somewhere in between – we and our destiny choose eachother!

“our destiny chooses us,” claimed landau.

The title is catchy.  The central dichotomy is less intriguing, however, not being terribly new or dense.  After all, most of readers will be experts on the choices between the heart and the bank account.  To me, the poem’s diction needs to be raised slightly about the employment of the phrase “doesn’t get it,” which is slang twice over, or the notion that “faith in myself allows peace.”  Right now, neither the imagery, word choice, line beats, or line structure help the theme to go beyond the vernacular or common diary entry, even if the subject or theme might be worth the time of the reader to think about.

Very questioning, very thoughtful piece.  I love the lines ‘has a feeling led us down this path, or has a lack of feeling left us here?’

I’d suggest changing the line ‘the fears do exist beneath, light or dark, they exist’ to ‘the fears exist beneath, light or dark, they do exist’.  I think putting the do in the last line of that stanza would carry more ‘oomph’.  

I think this piece also speaks well to aging.  It illustrates confusion and an ultimate (or reluctant) acceptance of where life is going, a desire to no longer fight, but simply find a resting point in peace.

Well done.

i love the view point you give on seeing those around us.
good connection with feeling and very good understanding of what goes through other’s minds.
you have a very good way of taking what others feel and putting it into words.
i love free verse but a lot of times it doesn’t flow.  you’re words flow very nicely and the rhythm is strong.

When you say status I am not certain from the piece what that could be…and that is the beauty of the work.The stanza from your style keeps an open mind guessing though the pace is off, and I appreciate the freedom. Thank you for blessing us.

Because this is a personal piece it’s hard to be a critique. I can easily relate to what you have written and one of the hardest things is to understand yourself and the world you are in. No matter what negative criticism may come from anyone the fact is that it’s a personal piece that has probably served its purpose in allowing you to release the emotions. Keep writing like this. The written word from the soul is the strongest.

interesting, i dont know if i miss read, but isn’t this net that is going to catch you in the end sound like destiny. So i dont understand how faith in yourself results in getting caught.

This is really smart.  I like it, but many people would have issues with the sentence fragments.  Isolating certain statements worked in this piece, too.  What’s up with not capitalizing the first letter in a sentence?  It’s a bit awkward, and I found it to be distracting.  In general, I think this is an interesting contemplative poem.  And I did get the emotional tension, especially as it heightened with the self questioning.  I’m giving you a rating of seven for publishing, especially, because many people would find this poem confusing, unless they were very appreciative of very free verse styles of poetry.  

““this is what i know,” we proclaim with passion,
but is that the truth?
has a feeling led us down this path,
or has a lack of feeling left us here?”

This stanza makes me think of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Less Traveled’. We have a choice to make when we stand at the fork and sometimes we go down the wrong path and need to veer off again.

I would have really liked you to capitalize some of your words so it all didn’t just blend together. When it comes to grammar [even though a lot of poetry isn’t grammatically correct] capitalization is always a must and a plus.

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April 10, 2008

by dms460

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Thanks for the input.. I don’t know if it’s just laziness, or rebelling against the fact that I’ve been a copy editor for the last three years (well, before I quit), but if I’m typing casually, I never use capitals anymore. But I do understand that it makes it less concrete in its format.

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