Poetry / Gentrification

This is good.  I love the title.

Other than that – I think you could break your line a lot earlier in a lot of places.  Each line should be like an individual unit of attention, like a station of the cross.  And I feel like sometimes the lines read a little long.  (examples: lines five, fourteen and fifteen)

I also think that you could break this up into more than one stanza.  I would suggest breaking it into five tercets with an ending couplet.

Good Luck on revision  

You have great talent but something needs to fall together into place and i am unable to say exactly what in this poem i think it’s a single focus maybe and a little more clarity as to what exactly it is you are speaking agains
having said that there are lines here i’d give both my hands to write

You emerge from your glass and steel shells, you all look exactly alike.
We, we never worshipped towers, or confused a sofa with art or a restaurant with a song.

you charge us to breathe the air.
Money is a virus, it kills and leaves
zombies, who feed on the flesh of the last living.

i couldn’t but stand and stare – that’s real high class poetry

another piece of poetic writing, i would love to read others like this you have done, and longer ones if possible?  keep them coming

Hm.. The exact topic of this poem eluded me at first, then I had to go look it up. However, you built it up very well, although I think it could use more description of what is going on – I’m not sure how gentrification relates to things like towers, sofas, art and vacuum life.  Perhaps an expansion is necessary?

YOu write very well either way. Keep it up!

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May 19, 2008

by GreenIguana

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thanks. It’s about rich people who value only money and the things it can buy and not art.
The “restaurant with a song” reference actually is a bit obscure but you don’t need to know what I was referencing, I think…

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Excellent topic!

I love your word choice. Descriptive, evocative, and sharp when it needs to be.

That being said, I don’t like the form at all. The super long phrases seem out of sync to me. There’s no rhythm to them. That’s really a personal preference, but to me, even free form poetry has a feel, and yours feels a bit off to me. It’s not the words, but the way it looks, which can be just as important as what you’re saying.

I love the idea, it’s just the form that gives me pause.

I love your sentiment!  Enjoyed this very much.  And totally agree: the Midas touch, love of money, is indeed a virus that’s consuming us all.  All living beings are converted into objects in a narcissitic culture.  A society whose “stars” are in fact, glamorous necrosirens.    

The prose is good; your descriptions are keen, apt.  My only suggestion would be to restructure/format the paragraphs in a way more pleasing to the eye and the ear.  In other words, I think this would roll off the tongue if you made some lines longer, others shorter.  

Good job.  Let me know when you got more.  I’d love to read it.

This is a good example of poetry used for social comment.  I cannot agree or sympathize more with the subject.  Concerning the poetic structure, diction, etc., the phrasing needs to be reworked.  By that I mean that even free verse must follow some pattern and flow in an attempt to show the reader how to read the poem.  If you take the first two lines, stop after tree, then turn the second half of that line into line three, it reads better and also makes that first thought more powerful.  Do you see?

You crept up the floors of our buildings
The strangler vine that kills the tree,
At first you seemed harmless,  
We were happy

Before mass print, poets were the bloggers of their day.  Nice to see it here.

This poem reminds me of my relatives that I used to work for. Just consumed with themselves and nothing else mattered.  

It’s a shame what people ‘will’ do for ‘money’, but I would have used ‘greed’ in that last line – opposed to ‘money’. Because really greed is the root to all evil, not matter what it concerns. Greed could be considered a virus in a wat, but to me money is an object therefore could not be.

I liked what you had to say in this poem. My favorite line is – You emerge from your glass and steel shells, you all look exactly alike. (This describes many people that ‘are’ the greedy ones of the world.)

Take care.

very cool.  i immediately caught on to the interchange of imagery with the jungle and the urban settings, which you did smoothly and without interrupting the flow or general theme of the poem.  this always the poem to consistently engage the reader throughout its entirety.  i like the two long lines, i think they are effective only because they they have a kind of rant feel that would not be as strong if they were broken up (although i’m not sure about “some of us fled”, you might want to play around with the placement of that one).  you also have some really strong lines like ”..or confused a sofa with art..” that really capture the essence of trendy urbanism.  overall this is a very strong poem.  i guess to improve, maybe another subtle hint about the protagonists would help?