Aww, I was hoping to make this one but I was asleep pretty much the whole time. Oh well.

>>Pascoite A perfectly cromulent answer. And yeah, it's definitely a tricky space—I'm trying to get better at judging the author/audience gap there, since that seems to be a place I'm weak, and this helps. Thanks!

Interminable, some kind of retrospective:

Thank you for the silver, voters. As with most of my poetry entries (well, and most of my writing in general), this was composed rather impulsively.

For what it's worth, the metrical shifts, including the loss of the last syllable in the second couplets of the major stanzas, are meant to reflect the jerky start-stop pattern of trying to proceed with unsteady energy to advance while underlying issues claw back at you, and repeatedly missing the target and falling back. The last group starts out in the “weakness” state after the demoralizing sequence of failures, tries to reassure itself into the “moving” one, then gets dragged back down even harder and faster than before.

The first group can certainly be interpreted as writer's block but can also be applied to a lot of other kinds of intellectual work; those with experience in academia may recognize the dynamic at play.

Thanks to >>Pascoite and >>GroaningGreyAgony for the commentary and feedback. I remain curious whether any specific changes come to mind that would have made some of the above come through more clearly.

See y'all around!

No luck from me this time—mind's flitting about elsewhere. Sometimes my wingèd—ooh, shiny!

Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Some things are insurmountable because they don't present a face to surmount to begin with—just a sharp, ringing dissonance and the weight of responsibility of negotiating it alone. This digs deep, and the form flows with the meaning, especially the couplets at the end of each stanza and the way many of them have ending stops on both lines.

When I scrutinize this, there's areas that feel weak to me by comparison to the surrounding text: “drips” feels out of place when contrasting to gore, “whisper”/“wisp” clangs some, “overcome the ill” feels a bit underjustified, and the ending feels subtly off in a way I can't quite place. But when I'm not specifically picking it apart, those all seem much less important. Definitely in the upper tier of the crop.

Tastes like: overripe kimchi, eaten straight from the jar while standing over the sink. In this case, that's not a bad thing.

Thank you for writing, author.

Now this I like. Simple but starkly effective. It's distinctly visual rather than auditory in presentation, the “one place” being the heavy weight of the anchor to the left margin that you can feel tugging on each. Distinct. Word. One. Per. Line. Always. Held. Back. Until the engine revs up. And the whitespace appears.

Tastes like: a tiny-skewer-based hors d'oeuvre, from which one eats a prim black olive followed by a spicy, zesty pickle.

Thanks for writing, author.

A slice of life about an obtuse and presumably unnecessary snarl whose specific nature is left undescribed. The mental state being described hums along like a rattling refrigerator, or like a cat making a grumpy face and batting at an intruder, and the meter and rhyme hum along with it. A bit on the bland side overall, but well conveyed for what it is. Some bonus points for the mouthfeel of “troglodyte”.

Tastes like: a Ritz cracker sandwich with American cheese.

Thanks for writing, author.

But to stand upon it's peak is sublime,
No matter how often you failed

… roll to disbelieve?

More seriously: I like the choice of topic, but a lot about this isn't landing for me. For instance, what is “be reborn” doing on the low side of what seems like a challenge/ease or active/passive duality? My best guess would be that that represents passive reincarnation, but it doesn't feel like the context is established, especially when it's paired with “breathe” and when the rest of the poem is comparing different individual lives lived.

Meaning aside, I think the crumbly-feeling scansion is the main thing that puts me off. The fifth stanza sounds like it's in an amphibrachic meter, and the line preceding that has anapestic symmetry, so it doesn't present clearly as blank verse to me, but I can't get the syllable-feel to cohere overall either. Maybe I'm missing something.

Tastes like: undercooked rice?

Nonetheless, thanks for writing, author.

“Eight.” —The Stanley Parable Demonstration

Note that if no one else is in, I will become mildly annoyed. Fear my wingèd wrath!

I am, oddly enough, in.

Ah… I was thinking of doing a pic, but I'm exhausted and wouldn't get it in in time… hmf.

… interesting collection…

Wait, these are three days long? Oops. I misremembered. I should've tried for it! Sigh.

Well, I had a thought, until I realized too late that the lower word limit was 100 and it really wouldn't expand well (or at least I have too many other things to do tonight to push it up into triptych range or whatever). Whoops.

So you'll just get my current draft of it in the thread as a lagniappe. :-)

Desertion and Ranging

Power surges; I wake to screech
Radiation, sine waves with reach
Over spectrum, sharp beacon tone
Singing signal; who hears? Unknown.
Intermission, pause long and still
Glowing timer ticks down to nil
Nothing's inbound; I sleep alone.

>>Crafty
I tend to: (1) set my first vote card before reading anyone else's comments, to avoid anchoring, though this isn't strict and I sometimes change them later if I see good points that I didn't consider; (b) if there are enough entries and I feel inclined to do bulk reviewing, split them in half at random and review the half that didn't contain mine; (iii) if there weren't many entries, review them all, including mine to avoid the obvious omission; (四) apparently, use inconsistent list numbering when I feel silly.

Activity has definitely declined a lot over the later seasons of FiM and the time after that, but some people are still around. :-) I've always been sporadic, myself.

>>CoffeeMinion
Whew. I think I finally, tentatively have enough w—

*deadline*

Well.

(Actually a well would be pretty nice. Maybe one day I'll move out to the countryside. Or maybe that's just my Applejack desktop background influencing me…)

I was very tempted when the notification landed in my inbox just now, but I may also have to spend most of the weekend making sure I can get access to enough water and such. Hooray!

>>Baal Bunny
I think that's the usual nowadays for short story rounds?

(Though still not enough for my depressed self to get anything in.)

When I get older (plug-in the mic)
i'm gonna be WILDER
and write poetry in my spare time
and I'll use some very interesting metaphors! (drum is shoe)
and then post my poems online.

cue rain and groovy triangle

So depression
Much lie in bed
Wow

>>Bachiavellian
I think that thinking I'm probably getting this sort of thing through when I'm not, in poems, is a weak spot of mine, so it's good feedback when people are unclear on it.

Here's a description of the intended micro-plot with the details as I imagined them. Not all of the details were actually represented in the text at all, in the end, but a lot of them were meant to be at least partially exposed:

* First stanza: Our viewpoint character, a seer/witch-type lady (at least, that's how I imagine her, though she's not explicitly gendered in the text), is finishing a day of duties, proud of what she's accomplished as she looks over having put a lot of text into the “correct” forms.
* Second stanza: The VC's suitor comes to her, to try to reconcile and perhaps win her affection this time after having displeased her before. He's brought a love poem as part of this, but he's not really a sophisticated writer.
* Third stanza: In fact, as it turns out, he's written a poem that rhymes—which she considers to be in very poor taste. In the first stanza, our seer was setting up more individual-phoneme pairs (mirroring the phonetically alliterative form of this poem), and the implied cultural belief and/or actual world behavior is that this is a good form to use for written prophecy or magical text, whereas rhyming lines tend to cause… problems. Those operating within magical tradition are supposed to avoid rhymes completely in their work, which spills over into lay life as a social taboo—it's like farting in church, especially if you're trying to make a personal connection with someone who's much more closely bound to it. Oops.
* Fourth half-stanza and title: So she chews him out for it, throws his poem away, and sends him packing. But she still wants a boyfriend eventually! Just not this loser.

One of the big confusing parts, I think, might've been that I mixed up oracular and spellcasting sorts of tropes without providing enough backup for them being in the same domain…

If and when I enter more poems with little narratives in them, I'm going to have to pay more attention to this and see if there's something about the arrangement of words that's… well, as you saw in my self-review, I think it got murky and obtuse.

Thanks for the feedback!

I continue to be positively dismal at guessing poets, evidently!

Actual short retrospective coming later if I have time. In the meantime, to answer >>Pascoite first, yes, it's “repeating the initial sound of the first two syllables of each foot”, with some leeway for vowel matching but other than that with the written letters of the sounds being of only secondary concern. Also I'm curious what >>Bachiavellian thinks/thought the narrative was about, since some of it seems to be getting lost in transmission…

Sadly I think I'll have to throw in the towel on writing anything useful about “Plagued Poem” and “Lose Win Now”. My main issue with both is that I can't seem to interpret them properly, and I'm not sure where to cut the author/reader responsibility cake in either case. And now I'm being pulled by other things and won't have time to get at them again before the finals close.

Sorry! Good luck to both, though, and I'll be interested if there are retrospectives…