Good morning everyone!

This week’s poetry contest is going to scare the socks off of you. It is original fiction with a dash of spicy spooks. 👻

It is not required for you to write about Halloween, but it is highly encouraged.

Good luck!

Boo!

>>Anon Y Mous

So, the ideal poem:

Would somehow incorporate both "prompt" and "theme"? Or if we're not feeling particularly Halloweeny, we just stick with whatever the prompt is, and it'll be okay?

Mike

>>Baal Bunny
Yup!

Boo!

Ahh!

Anon Y Mous #19918 · 5 · 11 months and 30 days ago
Happy Halloween!! >:)

💀 Happy Halloween!! 👻

Good alibi.

This is a poem(s) I want to take a while to analyze. I will be back with this one in a bit, bringing copious amounts of words with me.

Why did I just get the email saying that prompt selection for this writeoff was starting? How am I supposed to redeem myself after last time now?

Needs a bit more work on meter and it'd be great.

I smell ponies. Yum.

There's a couple spots where I'm still not sure yet if I'm missing the meaning or it's just nonsense.

Not that I have anything against nonsense, mind you. One of my favorite compilations is Sense and Nonsense—the Complete Works of Edward Lear.

Nice:

We used to have some next-door neighbors who went all out for Halloween--cobwebs everywhere, scary lights, music and sound effects, the woman, who was six feet tall, in full Morticia Addams garb, and her husband, who was six foot six, wearing a big black cowl and robe with a horse skull mask. One group of pre-teens, after leaving our house, stopped on the sidewalk in front of the house next door and stared for a full minute. Then one of them said, "Well, it's not like they can really kill us." And in they went.

As for the poem, I can only suggest more sensory details. The smell that always gets me, for instance, when I'm sitting out on the porch waiting between groups of kids, is the slowly growing aroma of baking squash as the candle inside the pumpkin starts cooking it. Give me some sounds, too: the "trick or treat"s of the other kids seeming to go silent as the little girl approaches. Maybe make everything at the beginning and the end very mundane--the parents remind the little girl to say "Thank you" before they leave and we get the last line--and heighten the language in the middle during the actual encounter--I mean, you're using ancient Greek for the title; that give you leeway to get all fancy diction-wise, don't it? :)

But it's good stuff.

Mike

>>The_Letter_J
You don't need redeeming when you're already a hero

Genre: Sweet, Sweet Prose

The Shakespearen sonnet is a beautiful thing, which I was actually going to enter originally. It is characterized by its theme of love, whether eternal or tragic, and the shift in the couplet called a volta.

I can see the theme of love throughout, for the woman is lamenting her lost love, and I can see the volta, or reveal of who the woman is in the couplets and the melancholy departure of her. You’ve done the sonnet a great service. Beautifully put together.

I, however, had a problem with some of the words in the last quatrain. They began to blend together and I couldn’t quite grasp what was going on. I think that might be a me problem, though.

Best line: “the voice a sob of silk and sand”

Genre: Thank you Kanye, very cool!

I really enjoyed the first stanza, although I’m pretty sure ‘wordses’ is supposed to be ‘wordless’.

I’ll let it slide this once. 👀

I am very sorry, author, but after a couple of readings, I still cannot see the connection between epitome and home like you want us to. All in all this is a cute poem, but I don’t know where to place it on my slate. I’d love to know what the whole poem means afterwards.

Best line(s): “languid motion’s exhibition. Perfect but not Perfunctory.”

—

EDIT: I THINK I GET IT? Epitome is not supposed to rhyme with home, home is supposed to rhyme with epitome. To make ‘homey’.

If so, that’s clever, I’ll tell you that.

I enjoyed reading this. Thank you, author

I like:

The concept here, author--I made a similar point in one of my webcomics just a couple weeks ago, actually. I'd like them better if they kept the anapests going more strictly, but then I'm the sort of person who thinks a limerick's even funnier when it's in perfect meter. But these address the prompt so well, it almost balances out...

Mike

Genre: Wall Street

I’m sorry author, but this rubbed me the wrong way. Taking the last word to the next line doesn’t make it more of a challenge for the author in most of the lines and, in fact, makes it more of a hassle for us to read. You could omit the double word and still have a perfectly comprehensive poem.

I like the imagery in this poem, especially the last couple of lines. It’s filled with that exciting feel of sexuality and lust. 10/10.

Best Line(s): “being the only language we know/know that words no longer have a meaning/meaning that words die since they lack/motion”

^ that is good shit, author.

Prompt mashups!!!

Murder Ballad

Why Doesn’t it Rhyme?
Confess, Sinner!
“We Were Born Sick”

Strange Eons
It Stirs the Forest Darkness
It’s Coming, It’s Real...

...Spooky Pumpkins!

>>Anon Y Mous
We had word magnets when I was a teenager. Some words up would go up on the fridge. They'd get rearranged. Eventually, we'd mine all the good combinations and swap in new words. They usually ended up lewd.

Rhyme Sinner Ballad

Why doesn’t it confess murder?
Strange pumpkins were born!
It's... it's coming, spooky real!
Sick darkness, it stirs the eons.
We... forest?


Real Pumpkins Confess

It stirs the coming forest rhyme.
Strange ballad, it's darkness eons born.
It's sick, why?
Doesn't it murder?
Were we spooky?
Sinner!

I liked this more the second and third readings
I actually kind of like this
It's cute

Light futurist reading. I especially like the format. Sign me down as a fan.

Especially if there are ponies. There are ponies.

Considered one by one I found the haiku to be hit or miss; yet it didn't bother me much.

Pfft. This one rolls off the tongue nicely.

But I agree with >>Anon Y Mous that the last stanza feels a bit weird.

https://ponyphonic.bandcamp.com/track/idioglossary ("wordses" pet theory: it's siblinguistic all the way down)

Genre: Pompeii

This poem is very straightforward with little prose porn. That can elevate a poem, but could also bring it down. In this case I feel it brings it down but just a teeny tiny smidgeon. This poem doesn’t rhyme, and people usually make up for it with fragments and more poeticness. When it doesn’t have either of those, it sometimes feels like you’re just breaking up sentences.

Overall this is a very solid entry. I personally loved the angle it took on the world dying and the way this man reacts to it. It’s kind of funny/intriguing of how calm he is towards his own demise. And very poetic on how he thinks of what people in the future would want to know about, what encapsulated the entire human race.

Best line(s): “Back at home I print/The things I'd wish to learn of”

>>Nemesis
You linking that song threw me back to 2015 when all I would listen to was that song. Don’t mind me as I listen to that and The Moon Rises on repeat for the next twenty hours.

That is a great theory you have and it would link back to all of the kid imagery mentioned. And if the author really did intend for that to be it, it would be great for them to hint at it and utilize that more often.

>>Anon Y Mous
Fuck, the moon rises gives so many /feels/
Chills especially. We should talk pony music on Discord sometime!

>>LoftyWithers yup, defo smells of ponies.
Maybe a frustrated and grieving Celestia immediately after the banishment?
I wonder why the fourth last line is not capitalised.

Not quite sure how the archer imagery fits into this narrative, though.

Song: Sun (duh).

If each entry was a gf, this would definitely be clingy goth gf.

I'm curious as to the rationale behind this entry's composition, because some of it honestly reads like nonsense, but at the same time I feel like there's something deeper going on here.

Time to get conspiratorial up in this bih.

Sort of like I Am Legend if the protagonist wrote poetry, which is cool. At the same time I feel like the author is taking the piss with a couple of these haiku.

HAIKU.

Reading this poem is like watching a gifted guitarist purposely play out of tune, but just competently enough that it really annoys other musicians.

I like it.

Nice and upfront in its theme, but maybe too much so. I can easily re-imagine this as a minific, Take that with a grain of salt, though, as I am barely literate myself.

The number of sexy poems involving wolves in this round is slightly concerning. I'll take one more, though.

The flow of this thing is fucking weird. Not sure if I dig the repetitions.

Very melodramatic and yet mundane, as befits the spirit of the holiday. It's the time where we get to be spooped out over nonsense, and the younger folks get to not be themselves for a moment.

For example, on Halloween I get to be someone who goes outside.

"The sun burns muh skin," quoth Celestia the sun butt.

No it doesn't, you fucking goober.

Feels like an odd place to insert a line break.

Soul free from body, I watched

Punctuation varies between good, bad, and missing. That it's not consistently one of those things bugs me.

The focus of the piece feels like a broken place between specific and abstract. It doesn't quite work for me.

This was near the top for me on first read because I enjoyed the mood. After a more-critical read, I'm not sure anymore.

Exsanguinated moonlight

This poem is best-read when listening to Bauhaus. Specifically, Who Killed Mr. Moonlight.

Fantastic story. Not sure about the poem yet, but I'm leaning towards good. Good sensory words. Nicely evocative. The structure feels a bit iffy on first read, so possibly some points to lose on that account when I re-read.

I counted three of the poems that had a line with wrong syllable count.

I like the individual poems, but I wish there was a more uniting factor here than just all of them being thematic. There's not a continuous narrative. It's more like reading an anthology than a coherent piece. I can get that you didn't want to tell an overarching tale and the minimum word count doesn't allow for entering single haiku, but that only ends up hurting this, because there's not as much unifying sense to make a single entry out of it and have an overall impression. We've seen haiku collections entered before, but they have been the type that were organized into a narrative. With this many, it's inevitable that some will be hits or misses, but when they go in support of an overall story, then you still have that total effect to judge, and the weaker stanzas don't detract as much from it. I think this kind of thing has the opposite effect, where I'm more looking at a bunch of individual ones, and the whole survives by its weakest part.

I don't really have any suggestions for improving it as it is, since personal taste will drive what verses people like or don't, and I don't have criticisms of the content of any individual ones.

You've turned some very nice phrases, and if I interpret the meaning correctly (which I probably didn't), you're talking about how the prompt is making people abandon rhymed verse.

I like this and will rank it highly, but I'm a stickler for form, when one is chosen, and I have some of the same complaints I did about iambic pentameter in the last poetry round. Again, I'm going to use bold caps as hard stress, regular caps as light stress, and lower-case as unstressed.

diaphanous: normally pronounced di-APH-AN-ous, but has to be di-APH-an-OUS to fit the meter here.
Exsanguinated: ex-SAN-GUIN-A-ted versus ex-SAN-guin-A-ted
shadow drenched: SHA-DOW drenched versus SHA-dow DRENCHED
wonderland: WON-DER-land versus WON-der-LAND
undersized: UN-DER-sized versus UN-der-SIZED

Lastly, it would require "child's" to be read as two syllables.

Agreed with >>Anon Y Mous in that toward the end, it gets abstract enough that it's harder to follow what it means.

It's harder to swallow more egregious places where, for example, the meter requires an unstressed syllable where a normal pronunciation uses stressed, so you're on the more forgivable side, but it's still a question of whether you want something that just meets the threshold of working or whether you want something flawless.

On the whole, though, nice sonnet form, great diction, and I like the message.

I'm out of my element on this one, because I'm not as good at digging into deeper meanings, and there's not a form you're following, so I can't look at how well you do. All I can say is what impression I got from it. I'm someone who likes atmospheric pieces and will be more forgiving about other issues it might have if it gets that right. This one had a very nice atmosphere, but I wasn't clear on the message. There's not a big epiphany about this narrator's attitude toward death, even though one had pretty much been promised: "that I’d see why." So when the reveal of that isn't much more than an "oh, okay" moment for him, it's not going to have any more of an effect on me. I also can't figure out what I'm supposed to get from the specific people mentioned: Stalin, a Ukrainian Jew, and King Hamlet (though since he's a fictional character, I don't know whether to take this whole thing as a "real" account, one that's even fictional to the narrator, something he realizes is only his imagination, etc., which is a whole other issue). Or what I should get from the specific mention of Thailand, for that matter.

From what little form free verse has, I will say that the individual lines and stanzas seemed to be organized well, in my opinion. So a nice mood piece, but I feel like I'm missing something, and I feel like the narrator being underwhelmed by things was anticlimactic. Though I don't quite understand the ending.

Structure-wise, I don't have a lot to say. Haiku with 14-syllable couplets in between, and the final stanza ends on a 7-syllable line instead of 5. The last one in particular I don't understand. It's not going to detract from the whole for me, but it doesn't add anything either, since I don't think there's a message hidden in that decision. I'd guess it's different just to be different? Given the theme, I think it'll just confuse the people he hopes find his printouts...

And to that theme: I like this idea that he's trying to preserve things he thinks are important when faced with a doomsday scenario, but my problem with it is the disconnect that he obviously treats it as important, but he doesn't sound passionate about it. He feels something needs to survive, but why he picked literature in particular doesn't get more than a superficial justification. Something like science or medicine might be more useful to a future person finding it. Not that he necessarily has a lot of that on hand, but he attaches a lot of value to literature, yet I never get his mindset of why it's the one thing he's chosen to save. If you want the reader to care about it, get the character to care about it, and give me a thorough discussion of why.

From language use alone, this will rank pretty well on my ballot.

This one almost feels like a feghoot to me. Not that it ends on a pun, but that it was all leading to a line that didn't crystallize the story or make a point, but just end on something silly. If I try to come up with a meaning for it, I'd guess it's the speaker making fun of his brother.

The structure was pretty clever, but it's a little misleading. The first line of the quotation has such perfect meter that it set up my expectations, only for that to be by chance. It might be a good idea to break up the rhythm of that line just so it doesn't imply the rest will do so, since it was a little disappointing.

The rhyme scheme was nice, though. Even with the weak "perfunctory/story" rhyme, I liked what it was doing. If only the "but don't you know" line had followed the pattern as well.

Some of the meaning is lost on me, especially in the long stanza, which by design is the most poetic. I'm kind of with the brother, not really knowing what to make of it. It sounds great. It's just above my head, so I don't know what it means, but there's still value in that. It's like listening to a song in a foreign language, where you like the music even if you don't know what the words say.

This was really cute. I love the portrait of a little girl trick-or-treating and trying to overcome her fear of the creepy people and things on the porch. That her parents just stand back and watch only adds to it and keeps it within the realm of the cute, as without that touch, I think this would take on too much of a "stranger danger" air.

The repeated use of "dart" near the end is unintentional, I think, so that could use some variety. And like I said on a previous entry, you have to be careful with what expectations your opening stanza creates. The rhyming pair of lines makes it look like you're going to have a rhyme scheme overall, but then you don't, so beware setting up people to look forward to structural cleverness that you don't actually have.

Other than that, I don't have any improvements to suggest. This was fun to read.

Genre: Raining Bats and Dogs

This is cute and simple enough. Although, since you had a sing-songy scheme, I would have liked for you to keep the meter better kept together. Also, the iambic nature of the piece is ruined sometimes by words that could be omitted or switched around.

Example:

“Til grabbed by a hand below.”
Better as:
“Til grabbed by hand(s) below.”

The stresses are much better in the second one, which I’m sure Pascoite will be pointing out.

Best line(s): “ Gravity then/Plucked at them”

I guess this is about Nightmare Moon?

I like the way the title becomes part of the poem, and it's something I'm surprised more people don't try in minific rounds, since that can save you a little word count. It's kind of an old trick, but one that doesn't get used much.

There's a pretty good amount of narrative in here for the word count, but the precise numbers of "sun"s in there was pretty obviously governed by the need to hit the 50-word minimum, so it's a bit padded.

The jokes here are funny, but I'd guess most people would find them to be lame dad jokes?

On the whole, I liked it, but there are a few things that bugged me. I didn't understand the first one. I'm not sure what "fail" connotes here, so it just left me scratching my head. Limericks are definitely one of the forms that endure the most abuse in stretching it out of its intended meter, and the rhythm is off for most of it. For the kinds of jokes you're making, I can see you not wanting to spend the amount of time it'd take to perfect that, so YMMV.

Sometimes when there's a series of replaced words like this, there's a significance in the new or old words. I've been conditioned to look for this, because it's common to see it in certain thematic crossword puzzles. So if I look at the words that don't belong, I get "seances talk wrestling orders."

And in the spirit of Halloween, that's actually a pretty appropriate message. Funny, too.

The trick of repeating words is one that's occasionally used as a prompt for prose minifics, so it didn't bother me. I do think you could have been a little more judicious how you used them, though, since it feels like at times the direction of the story is being dictated by what word you happened to think of ending the previous line on, rather than having a set outline for how the story would go and picking repeated words that fit it well.

This was a rather sensual poem, and I don't know whether I'm to take this guy as a literal werewolf, which isn't a bad thing.

It got better as it went on, but particularly the early expository stuff felt more driven by the word gimmick than the story. You tried an experiment, though, and I'd say it worked.

Genre: Here We Go

”Often focusing on images from nature, haiku emphasizes simplicity, intensity, and directness of expression... The last line is usually used to make an observation about your subject.”

Most of these haikus are amazing, author. The last lines typically reflect or give a huge insight into the tiny moment or world you’ve given us and yes, while some of them are obviously take the piss, the rest are solid and tell a story as a whole and as individuals.

-I’m going to review them with short lines. Some I may have just no comment for.

Not my favorite to start out with, but makes sense to start with it.
.
Had to look up what panopticon meant. Great haiku.
Oh god not Alexa she’s coming for-
This one’s hilarious.
Good.
Favorite
.
Love the social commentary
.
.
Perfect
Favorite
Claustrophobic
Favorite
Favorite
I accept him as our lord and savior
At least I get my werewolf boyfriend 😎

All in all these were either hit or miss and you hit most of them.

Best line: “Still have prejudice”

Not a bad little switcheroo, making a fight morph into possibly innuendo, then have it turn out to be a carnival ride.

Structurally, there's nothing regular, but I don't know if there was supposed to be. You don't have consistent stress patterns or syllable counts, but the stanzas do have fairly consistent patterns of how long it takes to read lines, and with the irregular stresses added (as the rule, not the exception) this does end up feeling more like natural speech than verse to me, and that's fine. Verse would have been harder to do, and so would increase your difficulty score, but what's here isn't bad.

It is just another "oh, that's what they were doing" story, but it is a cute one.

Despite myself, I really like this. It's not filk, as it rewrites what the story's about, while it still follows what's going on in the original pretty faithfully. Many of the rhymes are lazy, and the meter is conceptually something you once thought about including, but to do a perfect job of recreating the original's structure in one day of writing is probably too much to ask. Hell, you didn't even fill out the same number of stanzas, so the storytelling isn't perfectly parallel.

Incidentally, the raven's refrain made me think of the "I like corm" meme.

Even with all that, there's a lot of work that went into coming up with the narrative and beating it into the shape of this poem, with the same stanza arrangement and rhyme scheme, the same gimmick, a similar plot... I'm pretty impressed with what you were able to do. Now if you could whip this into the same length, meter and plot milestones as the original, plus revamp the weaker rhymes, that'd really be impressive.

Up the ballot you go. This was really funny.

This one definitely changes gears a few times, and while I think I enjoyed it when I could get into the swing of it, some of the transitions are a little rough to me.

In particular, I was never really sure if there was a rhythm that I should have been following. Some lines have a very clear beat, while others don't really have any kind of meter at all, and it appears that this was deliberate. IMO, poems are things of structure and expectations. It's a little hard to get into a flow when you change up the format so often. And while I'm pretty sure that this kind of transition work can be done effectively, I'm not familiar enough with writing poetry to really put my finger on why this case feels so disjointed.

I'm also having a hard time parsing out the meaning of this one, TBH, even with >>Anon Y Mous's explanation. From my understanding, we get our narrator reading a poem, and then his brother dismissing it. But that's really all I could figure out, and I'm sure there's another layer or meaning that's going over my head right now.

So overall, while there are definitely some lines and some rhymes that I like, I'm having a little trouble coming together and enjoying this as a whole.

This kind of sits at that triple-point between being blank/verse, traditional poetry, and prose for me. Some rhymes, some meter, and some parallelism, but not really committing either way. It's definitely something unique, for sure. I also really like your imagery here, and the whole subject matter is conveyed in a rewarding way.

I am, however, running into the issue that I had with some of our other entries this round, which is that it's kind of hard to get into the flow of this one since it's swapping out its primary structure so many times. Occasionally between a stanza or two, there'll be a repeated sentence structure or a consistent meter, and then we'd never see that particular element again. My personal philosophy regarding poetry is that poetry is heavily dependent upon setting readers' expectations through structure and repetition, so for this one I did feel like I'm not quite getting enough cues to feel my way through the piece.

So overall, while I do enjoy where this piece goes, I have to admit that I'm not quite as enamored by the feel of the piece as a whole.

This one has a great mood. It's really cool how you treat the subject matter of death in a way that's really peaceful, to the point of almost being playful/casual. I'm definitely leaving this one in a good mood.

Now, I always feel a little unqualified to talk about blank/free verse, since it's so subjective. So I'm just going to give you what's purely my own opinion on what makes blank verse work.

I'm of the opinion that pretty much any kind of poetry needs structure and organization to become distinct from pretty-sounding prose. In the case of blank verse, while you certainly have the freedom to not follow rhyme scheme or rhythm, I still think it's really important to have some structural scaffolding in place. For me, the blank verse poems that I enjoy most will often (heavily) use repetitions, paralleled sentence structures, and juxtaposition to establish and pay off on the reader's expectations.

In this case here, I'm having trouble feeling like I get very much guidance on how I should be moving from one line to the next and from one stanza to the next. The overall effect is that to me, this piece comes across a bit like a really pretty piece of prose that's got odd line breaks.

So while there's definitely some well thought-out mood-crafting at work here, I think you can really make this piece shine if you leaned a little bit more on some of the strengths of blank verse.

I think too many lines were devoted to the mechanics of printing. I like Pascoite's suggestion of exploring the why.

The 5-7-5 7-7 form is apparently a tanka. It seems to be related to several other Japanese poetry conventions, but there's too much there for me to take in right now.

Content-wise, I enjoyed the start. The middle could use work as noted. For the end... is this supposed to be an unfinished poem by the character? If so, I point you to Monty Python.

"The Castle of Aaargh."

What is that?

He must have died while carving it.

-Come on!
-That's what it says.

Look, if he was dying,
he wouldn't bother to carve "Aaargh."

-He'd just say it.
-That's what's carved in the rock.

-Perhaps he was dictating it.
-Shut up!

I think the ”seance” line meter is off slightly. Should be ”she'd” instead of ”she would”?
I think ”age” line is off.
Stress on Werewolf seems reversed. Half points.
Wrestling is right off on the meter.
The Doral Limerick seems to have a disjoint message. What lesson is she trying to teach with orders? Why is the axe murdering mentioned if unused? The RP-fiction seems unnecessary and out-of-place.

I could get behind the first three with small changes. Less sure about the last.

I think I forgot to hit submit on my comments for this one earlier. I'll try reconstructing them.

The word repetition had potential but I don't see it as used well here. The line repetition in the previous contest worked better. This one needs something else to make it work.

My general thoughts on content are

You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals
So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel

”Words die since they lack motion” is a good line that I think deserves a better introduction.

Like a couple of our reviewers already mentioned, this anthology has some hits and has some misses. Rather than try to talk about them generally, I thought I ought to actually give a couple of thoughts on each piece. One thing that I will have to note about the whole, though is that I found it very tiring to keep up the mental/emotional energy to properly read almost 20 individual entries. They all do start to blur together, especially since many of them have largely similar subject matters.

Even Ours: I like how the last line calls back to the initially confusing title. It's a nice little mini-reveal, which is a cool take on the haiku format that usually makes a revelation without actual surprise. I liked it overall.

It Was Us: That second line looks to have 8 syllables to me. Not sure if this is a localized pronunciation, but I've always said "ruin" with two syllables. This one overall has less of a reveal or the "cutting" quality that one often looks for in a haiku. While the last line gives context, it doesn't really alter the mood.

Choosing Slavery: I'm not 100% sure what this is supposed to mean. My best guess is that its trying to draw a comparison between one's home and a prison, but the last line (where we'd normally find this kind of connection in a haiku) seems only tangentally related to this interpretation. So I guess something is going over my head.

Searching for Intelligent Life: I'm having trouble figuring out how the last line relates to the first two. Since I'm sure my comprehension is affecting my reading, I'm having trouble making out the juxtaposition of meanings that makes up the core of a haiku. So I'm afraid this one's not striking home for me right now.

But They’re Still Immobile: I read "murderous" with three syllables, so the last line comes across as having six to me. But other than that, I like this one. It has both a clear break/cut, and it calls back to its title nicely.

Planet Earth: Another one that I like. It's a little on-the-nose with the last line, but in a way that I think works overall.

Cockroaches: I like this one too. Less on-the-nose than the previous one, but it still has a great moment of understanding and a good mood.

Nano: Like it as well. Saw this one coming from the name and the early use of the word "gray", but it's still nice.

Own Worst Enemy: This one has less mood than my favorites of the bunch, but it does still execute on its juxtaposition, so it's a plus in my book.

Contamination Breach: This one feels a little, um, generic I guess? Describing a pretty typical zombie apocalypse situation without really getting a mood.

Bigger Than the K–T Asteroid: I read the second line with six syllables. I might be feeling some fatigue from reading so many of these already, but this one feels kind of straightforward with how it presents the mood. There's not really any elements of juxtaposition, contrast, or imagery here, which is what I think the haiku format is most suited for.

SimHuman:Small nitpick, but I kinda want "some day" to be one word here. This one doesn't quite strike a mood other than being silly, and I think its "twist" feels more random than it feels revelational. In other words, it doesn't seem to put very much into context, outside of being a little surprising in and of itself.

Hubris: I think this one kind of suffers from the repetition of the word "power". It comes across a bit like an "of course" situation, since if power gave you the towers, then the loss of power would surely remove the towers. I personally think that finding a way to replace the first use of "power" with a synonym like "energy" would help create a stronger gap of meaning between the second and third lines.

Close, but Further: I like this one a lot; it's probably my favorite of the bunch. The last line has just enough distance from the first two to set up the "cutting" contrast, and then it does a great job of recontextualizing the mood of the previous lines. My only quibble is that the first line definitely feels awkward to me. Maybe consider putting a comma after "Beds", if the intention of the line is that the beds fill the space from floor to ceiling.

Played God: This one's another nice one. The whole feeling of sardonic absurdity that the last line creates is really nice. It's a little bland in terms of imagery, but I think it still gets the job done.

Human Studies: Unfortunately, I'm not 100% on board with this one. There's no easily discernible point of division or cleavage that a haiku would typically try to establish, so I don't feel like I'm gaining any sort of recontextualization or clarity. There's also not really any imagery, so overall it's hard to feel out this one's mood, other than the vague intellectual curiosity that I'm sure these aliens must be feeling.

Roboticist: Okay, so this one made me laugh. It's really different in tone from the other ones, and the last line throws it straight
into silliness territory. Honestly, I think I would have liked this to be placed somewhere in the middle of the bunch since it breaks up my reading experience so nicely.

Genes Gone Wild: I'm not sure how I feel about dialogue in a haiku. To me, it kind of goes against the principle mood of solitude that is prevalent in the format. As with some of the others, this one struggles, I feel, with building a good mood or creating one through insight from the second part. Overall, this one's not for me I think.

Genre: Mood™

The biggest detriment to this piece is that no one can understand it. Being able to understand a piece on your own is one of the biggest things an author needs to do and this fell short of it. It’s all a bit too vague and we’d like a bit more hints to piece the poem together.

Having said this, I really enjoyed the world building and the voice of the narrator. It’s a moody piece which made me feel like I was there with him, especially the part where he’s at church and is phasing through the windows. It’s my favorite part.

Lastly, I noticed that you didn’t put a period at the end of ‘free’. Great choice and beautiful detail.

Best line(s): “ I stopped in a window/Overlapping the glass kaleidoscope”

Genre: The old gods (brought candy!)

This one is one of my favorites this round. The whole time I imagined a king of the hill-esque scene where they tower over these poor four year olds who have to bow before their graciousness. Loved the imagery. Spot on.

The only thing I think people would have a problem with is the actual free verse. It reads more like purple prose. I still think this is an excellent poem.

Best line: “without entreaty or trickery.”

This one has a really clear and strong message, which is always nice. I'm also intrigued by the format, so props to >>LoftyWithers for identifying it.

Now, I will have to say that I thought that the idea of keeping records for a natural disaster did come across as a little simple/straightforward to me. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since it frees up the reader's attention to take in the other details. However, this kinda leads me to my next point, which is that to me, there doesn't seem to be much going on other than the conveyance of the themes and ideas.

Personally, I don't get a lot of satisfaction from seeing a lot of lines following the 5-7-5-7-7 syllable count, in the same way as I'd receive satisfaction from well-crafted iambic pentameter or a clever rhyme scheme. So I'm not getting a lot of mileage out of the format of the story. As for the mood, it's kind of unemotional to me, with the narrator clearly laying out his talking points and descriptions. There's also not much imagery or a haiku's "cutting" insight.

So in the end, although the message comes across cleanly, I can't help but feel that the text of the story feels a little sterile. I personally think this piece struggles to lean on the strengths that poetry has over prose, and in the end it kinds of feels like a oddly-formatted thought experiment to me.

This is really cute, and I absolutely love the somber-but-actually-funny tone of the whole piece, especially the last line. Overall the piece strikes a great mood and runs with it.

Now, I'm going to have to level this with the same criticism that I gave our other free verse entries so far, which is that I think that this piece is kind of hurt by the lack of structure. There are things in a poet's toolbox other than rhyme and meter, and the free verse format lends the chance for these other tools to take the spotlight. So I'm a little disappointed that the only use of structuring that we see are the line breaks. There are a couple of great uses of this (the "remote mountains" and the "to us!" line being isolated are great examples), but I really think you could have done a bit more to meaningfully order the text here.

IMO, the difference between prose and poetry is that poetry sets up the reader's expectations on how to read the piece. It gives the reader a set of instructions on when to expect things like rhymes, similes, stresses, so it lends the reader a unique intimacy with the reading experience itself.

Now while this piece certainly does a great job feeling poetic in that it crafts a tangible and interesting mood, it still kind of comes across to me as very pretty prose with odd line breaks. In other words, it doesn't really take advantage of the fact that it is poetry, IMO.

As I said with our other blank verse entries, this has a lot to do with my own personal philosophy regarding poetry, so you should definitely feel free to take this with a grain of salt.

I'm honestly having trouble reading this with any interpretation other than one that involves ponies, so I think I'm just gonna have to go with that.

There's a lot of very evocative word choice here, which really gives the piece a sense of character. For me, I get tones of archaism, and myth from images and words like "Zenith", "nadir", and "archer". You do a great job of very compactly getting these ideas across. And I actually do like the desperate, almost crazed mood that the repetition of the word "sun" brings about.

Unfortunately, I do have trouble following with what's going on in a lot of the second half of the poem. I get the feeling that these aren't supposed to just be random words thrown together, but I'm a dumb-dumb and I can't really put combine them coherently. It's definitely very poignant in its mood, but the overarching meaning is lost to me, other than some imagery about the sun's motion int he sky, I think.

Overall, I do really like how emotional this piece felt to me, though I do wish it was a degree or two clearer in its content.

I really like this one. As soon as you figure out the trick, reading the lines becomes easy and rewarding. I think it's a great mechanic to feed stream-of-consciousness style to the reader without feeling overbearing. The progression and links between each individual thought and the ones around it feels intuitive to me, so overall this one did its job for me.

Now, I'll have to point out that this poem doesn't really come alive until the second half. I'm not sure how much of this is my own reading experience (as I got more into the flow of reading) or how much of it comes from the writing itself. What I can note is that even on re-reads, I'm often a little bored by a lot of the lines in the first half. I get the feeling that I'm often waiting for something to happen, as opposed to how in the second half I felt that I was moving from idea to idea and from action to action pretty smoothly.

So while the poem does feel a little lopsided to me in terms of pacing, I think that as a whole it still worked well for me.

All four of these limericks are basically the same joke, so it's a good thing that it's an amusing one. :P

Unfortunately, I am running into some meter issues with a lot of these lines, which made my first reading take a bit more effort than it should have. The point of a limerick, after all, is to easily build the reader towards a punchline by following a familiar pattern. When that pattern gets stretched and broken, it does hurt the overall experience of the joke (or in this case, anti-joke).

Other than that, I don't think I've got much to note. The idea here is a bit of a simple one, but it's certainly effective for what it does.

It took me an embarrassing amount of time before I realized this was a sonnet, but as soon as I figured it out, you won a helluva lota brownie points from me. I really like the mood of this one, especially the way the last couplet ties the abstract together with the concrete imagery that the rest of the piece showcases.

I will have to note, though, that I agree with >>Pascoite's thoughts regarding the meter and stresses. Once I knew I was reading iambic pentameter, it was easier to "force" the sounds to work. But I have to admit that before I realized this was a sonnet, I was pretty lost in trying to tease out the meter.

Other than that, though, I think I like pretty much everything else. Your word choice is moody and evocative, and the "story" of the piece is a good, cozy fit for a sonnet's format.

Okay, this was just dumb. And I'm sure that's exactly what you were going for.

Overall, I thought the jokes came at a good pace, but I'll have to admit that I didn't really find many of them to be outright laugh-out-loud funny. After all, many of them do end up being variations of the same theme, once the crow comes into play. But like I always say, my taste in humor is entirely my own, so take my thoughts just as a data point.

It's cool that you chose to ape the general format of The Raven, and I think that it does a good job setting the reader's expectations of the piece as a whole. But I will have to mention that the title is, well, strikes me as a kind of weak way to link it back to the prompt. I'd almost rather that you ignore the prompt completely at this point.

In the end, this made me roll my eyes, which I think was exactly what you wanted it to do.

I largely agree:

With >>Bachiavellian here. This is all about the surface details with nothing coming to me of what's happening inside the narrator. I need more scope, I guess, both larger and smaller--what this super volcano's eruption means to the rest of the world and what it means to our narrator. Don't just tell me about printing stuff out: show me what stuff's getting printed and what stuff isn't. Seeing those choices will tell me a lot about who the narrator is, but I'm getting none of that right now...

Mike

I'm getting nothing here:

I mean, if it's about Nightmare Moon, would she refer to "my abdication"? She was trying to force Celestia to abdicate, after all. I'd suggest making this about 120% crazier, to paraphrase the meme. Fill it with raving imagery of blood boiling across the sky and dark shards piercing swollen milky flesh. I mean, take this Nightmare Moon's level of madness and let it explode.

Mike

Genre: Jack(daw)ing it.

When I read this it tickled some funny bone of mine (no not that one) and it had me laughing the whole way through. This is stupid as fuck but I’ll be damned if I didn’t love it. It’s honestly at the very top of my slate, but don’t tell anyone else I said that.

Best line of the competition: “A dank meme, and nothing more.”

It might be fun:

To experiment with the herky-jerky, "sometimes meter, sometimes not" in the middle of the poem when they're actually on the ride, but to make that work, author, you'd have to establish the rhythm strongly at the beginning so that you can break it up and then return to it at the end. As it is, though, the staggering of it bothered me almost as much as the backward quotation marks at the beginning of each line of dialogue--how does that even happen?

Mike

Genre: Daybreaker

I love the frantic nature of this poem. The tone is great and I love the descriptive words you have in there. Incorporating the title into the poem is cute, too. The words are nice and sharp. I feel like I might get stung when I look at them, yknow? I don’t really have anything else to add and agree with what all of the rest say. Overall a pretty good poem. It’ll go in my middle slate.

Best line: “Sun sun sun sun sun“

Unironic best line: “ Zenith nadir arc arrow bow”

The opening line reminded me of Crescent on the Water from the last poetry round. I don't know why, but I read the first stanza as a rap more than a poem haha.

Middle part is a little jarring. "Cool story," "cringe," "binge," etc. Very different tone from the beginning and the end of the poem.

Would like some explanation for the final stanza :)

Would be interested to know if there was any intended rhythmic structure for this poem. For example, why vampire/werewolf are used in some parts and vamp/wolf in others.

Also interested in what an elephant ear is :P Took me a while to get the message but it's a nice one in the end!

Big mood.

This one hovers between vagues and specifics, and I'm debating between picking one or the other. There's a clear message to be had, but it needs to be communicated a bit better, I think.

Hmm, some of these I like, and some a little less. A mixed bag, but that's what happens with a lot of haiku, I think :P

I think everyone else has said mostly everything, so just a couple additional thoughts. With a haiku, less is more, so there needs to be more meaning packed in each syllable. Some of these I feel should be expanded to different forms of poetry, because with the haiku sometimes it feels like saying it just for the sake of saying it.

This one is creative, but a little too specific, I think. Said this with the other haiku, but I think there could be more meaning packed into each word. More mood to create, more thoughts to think.

This one was a nice read. Even though I'm not much of a Halloween person it was easy for me to follow along with the built excitement. Cute and very befitting of the holiday.

What was especially good about this one was that it seemed right as a poem, rather than prose. There's just a wonderful mix of imagery and description. Not a thing is left unclear, which worked really well for the theme. Good job!

This poem flows very well, and it's probably one of the most emotionally raw ones. I'd probably need the repetition explained to me though. Kind of sounds like someone going crazy, in which case, up the ante and really invest in that, but also make it clear what's going on.

I think this is the kind of poem that if I read out loud, I could probably interpret it a million ways, but maybe not as the author intended. There's some hidden cleverness, I think, which I'd be interested to find out about.

The repetition of the last word and first word really tripped me up. I ended up just blotting those from my vision and reading the whole thing as one big sentence, which worked at some parts, and not so much at other parts, where the structure is a little different.

Prose choice is nice though. Excluding above, it flows very quickly and simply, so definitely fits the atmosphere of the piece.

Hmm, not sure about these. Meter is a little odd, and I feel like these were supposed to be funny, but I kind of missed the point on a few.

Seconding everyone else's thoughts on the meter. This was a nice sonnet that I enjoyed.

I'm gonna give a horrible guess that this is a meta entry. Am I correct? xP

Pretty good overall. Definitely near the top of my slate.

>>Anon Y Mous
>>No_Raisin
>>LoftyWithers
>>Pascoite
>>Bachiavellian
>>_Moonshot

Thanks, folks, and congrats to our other medalists!

But yeah, this was me trying to answer the question of the prompt--"Why doesn't poetry rhyme anymore"--without actually having an answer. Most rhyming for the past century or so has been in children's books or popular songs, so maybe poets see it as essentially unsuited for anything serious nowadays? I don't know.

Part of the rhythm problems came from me trying to use as few words as possible. The maximum number of words a sonnet can have, after all, is 140: 14 lines at 10 syllables each means, if you used only one-syllable words... In my own mind, I've set 70 as the minimum--a sonnet made of all two-syllable words--but I've never come close to reaching that goal. So I force words like "diaphanous" into iambic pentameter when they really have no business being there... :)

As for some of the other words, well, my Random House College Dictionary puts the hard accent for "wonderland" and "undersized" on the first syllable, shows the middle syllable as unstressed, and puts the soft accent on the last syllable. So once again--as with "realized" in the last contest--I'll go with the reference material I've got on hand and stick with what I wrote. "Child," though, yeah, that's one syllable and definitely needs a rewrite... :)

Thanks again!
Mike

I'm not surprised this happened in a poetry round, since that will especially be affected by personal taste, but the voting is skewed every which way.

There were 7 ballots submitted, and 5 different poems got 1st place votes. The only 2 that got multiple 1st place votes finished 4th and 5th overall. The 3rd place winner didn't get any 1st place votes. It's just a weird distribution that results in all that.

>>Nemesis
>>No_Raisin
>>LoftyWithers
>>Pascoite
>>Bachiavellian
>>Anon Y Mous

Thanks for the reviews, all. Grats to the medalists.

Just gonna explain this real quick. I guess you could've called this an exercise in perspective--it was written how I thought a friend of mine would've written it. Premise was fairly simple: when people die, they become ghosts forever. Then they have forever to do mostly nothing, since they're unable to interact with the real world in any way. So things that mattered in life don't matter so much anymore as a ghost--family becomes significantly less important, not much to work towards, not much point in religion, etc. Stalin and the Ukranian Jew should be mostly self-explanatory: it refers to antisemitism within the USSR and the Holodomor, a massive famine in Ukraine under Stalin's rule that's arguably classifiable as genocide. Under the premise of the poem, Hamlet would've never happened, so instead of the father-son mess that we got, nothing happened, nor would it have mattered in the end anyways. So overall, this poem is about a dude who slowly comes to realize that even though he's chained to the earth forever, he's been unchained from everything else that might matter in life, and that gives him an odd sense of peace in the end. Meeting his parents in a way became the final point of acceptance, and a final farewell to his past life.

Super fucking belated retro time. Oh yeah.

Retro: The pervert bird one

Yeah, so I don't have much of an explanation for this one other than what's probably already very obvious. I got a very dumb idea when I saw the "Halloween Theme" description for this round, and I just had to do it, despite the prompt being literally the opposite of it.

I went and read Poe's The Raven a maybe four or five times aloud before I started writing, and I kept one of the stanzas I thought was most representative of the structure pasted on the same gdoc as reference. Honestly though, I gave up trying to follow most of the beat by the time I got to the third stanza, and I think I finished the rest in about the same amount of time it took for me to write those first three. Poem-ing is hard, ya'll.

>>Pascoite
Yeah, I vaguely entertained a notion in the beginning of making it parallel the original stanza-by-stanza, but that went straight out of the window as soon as actually started working on the first stanza. I'm not cut out for this meticulous beat and repeating rhyming scheme thing, clearly. :P

Glad you still liked the idea of it, though! Thanks for leaving your thoughts!

>>Anon Y Mous
Happy you liked it! I have to admit I was kind of kind of chuckling to myself like an idiot at some of the lines that came to be out of moments of stupid-as-fuck inspiration. So I'm glad that they seemed to have worked for you as well!

>>_Moonshot
>>Nemesis
>>No_Raisin
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