Young Writers Society

oh i am so glad to be here to review this for you..
first of all, i think it sounds just fine in English, the title, and it would be a lot more useful to me, as Jack said, in English, so why not give this pretty little poem a nice long, awkward title and give it that character?

now, onto the poem~
oh, oh, now i see. there's more German. but yes, he's right. for many of us, who haven't studied German, we will skip that poem, and we will hear nothing from him, nothing whispered, which makes that entire stanza basically useless.

what i mean to say is the first stanza is pretty good. it has a good concept, a good growing image, and a bit of bathos in the last line that brings us back down to earth and real human relationships. the beginning of the second stanza carries that rebuilding, but then it's lost in the german and it doesn't get it back, my friend! i'm sorry.

while the other two stanzas had fairly logical ways to rebuild, the orange juice made no sense. while it might make for an interesting image, it means nothing and will evoke nothing without an anchor to other things. it, as it stands, seems like you threw it in because it sounded cool, and i don't want that in my poetry. i want thought and power and control.

on top of which, how can fingertips make the burn INSIDE a throat feel better? and then she kisses it better? wat? give me more of this frail, re-birthed being. change "slightly top small" to "still too small", and give me her lips and her chin in stanza three, make her reach up to pull on a lip to connect the two rebuilt portions of the previous two stanzas, or find the next most important and poignant thing to attack and find how you'd rebuild that in someone you loved.

keep writing. keep pushing.
good luck and let me know if you have questions! c:

I found this clunky.

I didn't really like the whole "I did this, but at least this" structure. Bit basic, bit uninventive.

Phrases like "embryonic stem cells" and "the plagiarism was recognisable" and "they were slightly small" are symptomatic of a wider disease of a lack of pushing the boundaries, of trying something different. Your words are just not that interesting right now. Poetry always struck me as an attempt to show the world in an entirely unique light. You've got to get rid of everything that's mediocre, or the norm, or the cliche, by mixing up your words and your meters and your rhythm and your structures to really thrill the reader. You probably know this but maybe you've forgotten, I don't know. I used to write a lot of poems like this. I chucked in a few interesting ideas and hoped it stuck, but really, I didn't have anything that great to say and it shone through. I felt a little bit like that with this.

My personal opinion is having the German in there does nothing good for you. If you have to roughly translate it for me afterwards then there's no point. If I can't, as a reader, gain anything from it, or make connections with it, I essentially just ignored it.

I think there's some ideas in here that are perhaps salvageable but the poem as a whole needs a new start. If you're going for the free structure, I'd like to see more consideration of sounds and line breaks and rhythm, because right now I can't see much of it.

Keep poetrying my dear. And take my criticism with a pinch of salt as I haven't read enough poetry recently