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Still Seeking Prime Partner
Day's drooping! I've ironed out hours of omens
Propitious sung symbols scroll-scribed a wise way
Lines leaping, odes ordered, right rhythms and aspects
Paired palatals, taps, even vowels twined tight.
Limp lover comes calling, rote writing as "artistry"
Trying to tell me "so sorry!" and add
Fraught, feeble conclusion with wishes for friendship
His heartache laid lengthwise, pale parchment for form.
Rereading his heartache, my mouth soon goes gasping:
Ends echo, same-sounding! How horrid! It irks;
Kin codas? Mad magic, chant-charting gone gamy
Deep danger, we warn them, hex-heretic text.
Shocked shouting: keep clear of rogue rhymes to woo witches!
Cad's careless, barbaric love letter's soon spurned.
Propitious sung symbols scroll-scribed a wise way
Lines leaping, odes ordered, right rhythms and aspects
Paired palatals, taps, even vowels twined tight.
Limp lover comes calling, rote writing as "artistry"
Trying to tell me "so sorry!" and add
Fraught, feeble conclusion with wishes for friendship
His heartache laid lengthwise, pale parchment for form.
Rereading his heartache, my mouth soon goes gasping:
Ends echo, same-sounding! How horrid! It irks;
Kin codas? Mad magic, chant-charting gone gamy
Deep danger, we warn them, hex-heretic text.
Shocked shouting: keep clear of rogue rhymes to woo witches!
Cad's careless, barbaric love letter's soon spurned.
I really like the sense of structure and rhythm this has. Even without a rhyme scheme, it reads easily out loud and feels like it calls back to itself with its beat. I'm not 100% sure what's going on in the meaning of the words, but based on mouth-feel alone, I think this is probably one of my favorites from this round.
One itty-bitty nitpick: to my knowledge, you're not supposed to read line breaks without punctuation with full pauses. Since the piece is clearly organized at the line-level, I'd suggest some line-ending commas and periods (at least in the first stanza) to signal how important the rhythm is.
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One itty-bitty nitpick: to my knowledge, you're not supposed to read line breaks without punctuation with full pauses. Since the piece is clearly organized at the line-level, I'd suggest some line-ending commas and periods (at least in the first stanza) to signal how important the rhythm is.
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>>Bachiavellian
Can I just say I love that you talk about mouthfeel at all? Because that's what it's like for me too—in general, not referring to this particular piece. It's probably why I make so many food and taste analogies when describing my reactions, even with prose…
Can I just say I love that you talk about mouthfeel at all? Because that's what it's like for me too—in general, not referring to this particular piece. It's probably why I make so many food and taste analogies when describing my reactions, even with prose…
That said, it does have a good mouthfeel overall. Mm. There's some gristle in it, like the third syllable of “palatals”, or the H's in “hex-heretic” coming in such quick succession. “goes gasping”: weird wording, not sure whether more or less forgivable for the constraint used being so intense. The participles are on the edge of repetitive.
Is this actually primarily in antibacchic tetrameter? I had to look up what that foot was called.
It's dense. I like the little story, but the word choices are hard to chew sometimes. You have to piece together a number of ambiguous meanings to make some lines work, and the hints at background information are murky and come at you fast.
A few extra points for having the title be modeled after the text.
It's pretty good, but might be another “almost too clever by half” like “If Rhythm Be The Food Of Thought”. I'm on the fence about this one.
Is this actually primarily in antibacchic tetrameter? I had to look up what that foot was called.
It's dense. I like the little story, but the word choices are hard to chew sometimes. You have to piece together a number of ambiguous meanings to make some lines work, and the hints at background information are murky and come at you fast.
A few extra points for having the title be modeled after the text.
It's pretty good, but might be another “almost too clever by half” like “If Rhythm Be The Food Of Thought”. I'm on the fence about this one.
Nice sonnet structure without the rhyme, and you've even switched up the meter. It'd be easy to start taking that as female rhyme, but you're not using iambs and it occurs far too frequently. So it took me a minute of awkward fumbling with the rhythm to realize you were using amphibrachs, but with the final syllable trimmed off for the 2nd and 4th lines (or using an iamb for that foot). The wordplay is fun, but I can't quite discern the rules. You repeat opening sounds, but it's not consistent in how. In "I've ironed," you start consecutive words with the same sound, even if one of the words has multiple syllables, but in "barbaric," you're stating consecutive syllables within the same word. I guess it's that you repeat the opening sound for the first two syllables of each foot.
Not only is the form clever, but there's even a narrative behind it, and one that's not too hard to follow. Someone's trying to compose a love letter and getting frustrated with the lack of success.
I think this poem will fall into one of three categories for people. Some won't really care to analyze the structure, so the phrasing will sound odd, but it flows well enough. Some will dislike the amount of work it takes to see what you did. Some will appreciate the amount of work. I fall into that last group. Nicely done. It doesn't feel deep, but it's not really fair to expect poetry always will.
Not only is the form clever, but there's even a narrative behind it, and one that's not too hard to follow. Someone's trying to compose a love letter and getting frustrated with the lack of success.
I think this poem will fall into one of three categories for people. Some won't really care to analyze the structure, so the phrasing will sound odd, but it flows well enough. Some will dislike the amount of work it takes to see what you did. Some will appreciate the amount of work. I fall into that last group. Nicely done. It doesn't feel deep, but it's not really fair to expect poetry always will.
All alloyed, words worming, pro's prose for form,
Like lights strung strangely by branches, way winds.
Like lights strung strangely by branches, way winds.
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…
>>Light_Striker
Well, from the first stanza, I thought that some kind of witchcraft was going on. But I was pretty lost when it came down to the second and third stanzas. In the end, I just vaguely kind of thought that it was about a love spell or something.
... I can be really bad at reading comprehension sometimes.
Well, from the first stanza, I thought that some kind of witchcraft was going on. But I was pretty lost when it came down to the second and third stanzas. In the end, I just vaguely kind of thought that it was about a love spell or something.
... I can be really bad at reading comprehension sometimes.
>>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 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!