I am, oddly enough, in.

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

I am in.

I'm not sure I've done a poetry writeoff here before, but I'm in.

Me, too!

It's a veritable plethora!

Mike

“Eight.” —The Stanley Parable Demonstration

Am not going to be able to guess who is who. Nice

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hm. Nice imagery, but I'm not sure what it's imagery of. Someone feels boxed in, but there's nothing specific for a reader to latch into and identify with. The strong point here is word choice.

Bit of visual flair. I'm not sure if the shape of the poem, aside from the long indentation, is meant to evoke anything. Given the title, I'm trying to think through playing cards or Alice in Wonderland, but I'm not coming up with anything. A generalized thing without a concrete set of circumstances, but it still feels pretty relatable.

Quite good. An odd cadence to it. The first two lines of each large stanza have an extra unstressed syllable on the end, but it keeps that pattern up, so good enough. At least until the final one, and I don't know whether the break is deliberate or meaningful. Rhyme scheme is flawless. The message here is good, too, and it even seems to me there are multiple messages: one about overcoming writer's block, and one about realizing more and more that life is passing you by, where there's always a new crowd of younger, more skilled people waiting to take your place.

This reminds me a lot of a poem we studied in high school. I think it was by Wordsworth, but I don't remember the title. It used a similar image of a mountain that features prominently, as an obstacle that the narrator fails to overcome, and it redefines all his past, more minor successes as unsatisfactory to him. Maybe I'm reading more into this than was intended, but I think it's pretty effective.

A little vague, maybe? The narrator seems to be upset that there's no permanence to anything he does, and I like the theme of relating that to a garden (I assume that's not meant to be taken literally?). I haven't necessarily found a very relevant meaning for the Babel reference, but it being reduced to a plane along with the garden theme, has me in mind of Babylon, which... if that was intentional, it's clever. Mechanically, I like the way there's an extra unstressed syllable on one line pair per stanza, and that it switches which pair it is, plus it carries the rhyme across stanzas with it. But then the meter breaks in the last stanza.

I like this a lot.

This comes across as authentic. I just wish it were a little more dynamic. By the end of the first few lines, I know what the speaker feels, and that doesn't change through the rest. Structurally, all the lines have 10 syllables (well, I didn't check the whole thing, but when it proved out through the first 4 lines, I assumed he rest was fine), but there's no set rhythm.

Wow, I love the work that went into getting this form. Is it a pre-defined one or something you invented? The rhythm scheme is fairly complex, but the meter and rhymes are all flawless. By the end of the first stanza, it's set up the situation well enough, just with the quote, that the reader knows what he's talking about. It's a familiar enough situation. But I still like the exploration given to it, and the juxtaposition of how it's a meek resolution instead of a lot of bluster.

Kind of vague, but a philosophical look at what makes people always strive for more. The syllable count starts out consistent, but it doesn't stay that way, and there's no set rhythm. Reminiscent of the "I'm Stunned to See" entry.

The peak of the ages that rises clear
Is the goal of those seeking to strive

We're descended from those who worked past fear
By the fervor of being alive

Can't set down the word
The one to start all right
I hold myself back

Until the pen moves
Covering the paper
Black strokes of meaning

Rejected now, I am forlorn
And bitter grief assuage.
I do not turn to useless scorn
Or seek to stifle hope unborn
Or fly to useless rage...
I sigh, and turn the page.

Verse takes us
World...........................Wide
As we sit
At home.

At length, I climbed,
No end in mind,
And now I'm over,
And all is in clover.

The bright blank whiteness spurns my roving eye,
It's hard to see an ode, and make it so,
At first my sultry thoughts just flitter by,
But then the lightning strikes, and words do flow!

The pile just mocks me, receding
In tall pillars into the sky,
Despite all my pruning and weeding,
It visibly grows 'fore my eye.

My vigor is leaving me dry
For it seems that the items are breeding
And my epitaph shall be writ high
In a cluttery pile's proceeding.

You're going to fail once or twice, or three hundred,
And feel all your feelings are broken or plundered;
Let go of the struggle and focus on you,
Forget all the crowd, you've your own work to do.

No need to cut against the grain,
Take on, take off, and try again!

>>Pascoite

Life's Work Undone

Thanks for the bronze, 'grats to Baal Bunny and Light Striker! A laurel, and hearty handshake, to all who participated.

I am in the process of decluttering and reducing the stuff I have accumulated before moving. My partner and I are both keepers and we have a prodigious amount of boxes to weed through. This poem reflects my frustration at this effort, the unfairness of discarding things that are still useful, and other whining attendant on transferring ourselves a thousand miles away.

The Babel reference was meant to suggest a pile forming a tower ascending to the heavens, and the accompanying hubris in thinking that you can own an appreciable part of the world and that such ownership can bring you contentment.

Thanks to Pascoite for the lovely review; I always look forward to your critiques! I'm glad you liked it.

>>Light_Striker, >>Pascoite

I Compound the Red Queen

I had some time left after editing Life's Work Undone so I threw a few more into the ring. This is just a riff on the Red Queen's remark in Through the Looking Glass, again echoing the frustration of managing a move. Thanks for the reviews!

>>Pascoite

I'm Stunned to See

This one was sort of a mini-Feghoot; the inspiration was the double meaning of the final line. The speaker can't get over [being in awe of] the mountain. Nothing deeper was consciously intended.

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!

>>Light_Striker
The problem with poetry is that it relies a lot on subtlety, and outright saying something can screw up the aesthetic in a way it doesn't with prose. So all I can think of are inelegant solutions where you explicitly mention academic topics, or you get a little meta and have the poem comment on its own rhythmic choices, or at least make pretty obvious references or parallels to them. That's almost certainly not the best answer, though. It may also be a case of author credibility. If I'm reading someone I've never encountered before, I'm more likely to assume a mistake is a mistake. If I'm reading someone who has a long-standing good reputation, I'm more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt, assume mistakes are deliberate, and actively look for effects they might have been trying to accomplish. Given the general quality of the poem, I probably should have been doing the latter but got lazy.

>>Light_Striker
>>Pascoite
>>GroaningGreyAgony

Thanks, folks:

And congrats to the other medalists. This is a form I might've made up, or maybe Kipling does something like it--I don't recall. It's a variation on what's called either "common meter" or "fourteeners" with a couple extra lines stuck in to make those couplets in the middle.and at the end. I was going to call this "No Means No" originally, but all the bloody imagery made me change the title. :)

Mike

>>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!