hopefully this site is okay with me playing around with historical figures like dolls. it’s sort of a plain piece, due to me wanting to write in first-person for the first time in ages

this is very much historical fiction, but the part about adams’s proposal to hannah quincy being interrupted by sewall and esther quincy is based on an account within David McCullough’s John Adams, at least.

please call me out on any historical inaccuracies!! however, i know that i haven’t done an accurate job at how they spoke in the time period; i find it easier to read, but i’d love to incorporate historical figures of speech into this!

http://wanderers-sandbox-2.wikidot.com/a-heart-formed-for-friendship here it is :D

Piece Link: http://wanderers-sandbox-2.wikidot.com/scrimple-218-s-sandbox

Also, yes, I am aware of the em dashes, yes, I've been called AI before, no, I am not. However, if they are used incorrectly, do feel free to tell me! That is something I fumble often, my love for em dashes occasionally overrides my grammatical sense.

Anyways, here's the thing! :)

"Eren is fresh in politics but already has a history, and it is bad in some places." I think you can get rid of of 'and it has been bad in some paces, since you already about to show how crappy he is.

"You may take it as true or not." After the whistleblow seems kinda redundant and odd for a paper specifically meant to slanderize him to question the validity of statements that support their motive. Although if you do intend to keep this I think you should try using language more typical of a news article instead. such as "we were unable to confirm this" or something like that.

If you're referring to the Chinese philosopher it would be spelt Neo-Confucius.

"but while the latter simply went on world tours and lay down with girls" laid down* with girls is more fitting, if it's meant to be describing the past actions of the same people.

"We will spare you from showing it; it is filled with gore and is still up in Cyber Town Hall despite the app censoring evidence of massacres by the Ten as ‘community guidelines violations’ even when they were blurred." 'it is filled with gore' is a very blunt way to put it, maybe try matching the tone of the typical news article and try to be vague on the contents, as in, 'it contains explicit material possibly disturbing to many readers.' or some version of that.

I really like the Twitter-style boxes containing his statements. I especially like the first one, Perfect amount of megalomaniacal hatred seen through the hearsay and propaganda attempted to spout, major "they're eating the dogs" energy.

"And this guy is now the new regent of New York." I guess this might be alright, although I feel it's kinda redundant to say what the reader is already thinking.

Maybe I just don't know enough about Sub Machina lore but how exactly are they getting kicked out of the ten and what would that exactly entail for Sub Machina? I'm hungry for details, especially in an article going in depth detailed as this.

"In a way, the region is now on a ventilator, and Eren holds the plug, and he is blind." dunno how to feel about this line, it kinda feels article-y for an opinion piece to write this. My only fear is it might be a bit redundant, which it is, but I think it neatly summarizes the previous text in a way that conveys the intention so it's good.

SPAG is always welcome.

http://wanderers-sandbox.wikidot.com/dr-nepalwala

just for a moment.

Shouldn't have a period at the end; none of your other sentences do. You might even consider removing the question mark from the first line.

Other than that, I don't have much useful advice. The imagery works okay, at least to me. Someone who does more poetry can probably give you better critique regarding it than I can.

some of you might recognize me from the SCP wiki! unfortunately they caught me: I'm 15 T_T

so I'll start writing here until the day my adolescence bids farewell…

anyway. here's my funky little poem. I hardly remember writing this, I must've been losing my mind! http://wanderers-sandbox-2.wikidot.com/picklemonstiez

i want to briefly note that what you're writing are not, strictly, haiku. i have a whole dedicated section of my poetry guide that touches on haiku. haiku isn't to do with 5-7-5 syllables at all! what you've got going here is something of a linked verse poem comprised of senryu? so if you want inspiration for how to write in this kind of style, you might seek inspiration reading senryu or the collaborative linked verse of renga written by others!

but, suffice it to say, what you have is a poem with stanzas of 5-7-5 syllables. this has led you to some quite interesting and very lovely constructions:

On his last day, spring
He looked at the trees and was
Before he wasn't, gone

…as well as some constructions that are somewhat awkward:

He lives on a hill, in here.

He was proper, life
Yet surrounded by none

the first example stanza works because the contrast between "was" and "wasn't", and the punctuation of "gone", is a neat way to describe death in terms of being and nonbeing, enfolding the concept in commonplace language. elsewhere you are more tongue-tied; the insertion of "proper" and "yet", and the repetition of "in here", shows me that you're struggling a bit to convey the imagery you want in these syllabic constraints; elsewhere words feel awkwardly short, in straitjackets. i would do another pass, reading these stanzas aloud and seeing which words feel superfluous—try to avoid having any words feel like filler. each word should contribute as much as possible to the poem!

moreover, right now you're really keeping yourself to this halting pattern, in which nearly every line is a full clause with a pause at the end and a capitalized letter at the start. this really emphasizes the independence of each line, and chops up your stanzas quite harshly. this puts a lot of pressure on your lines to each be well-constructed and poetically interesting; which puts lines like "What does he look like?" or "His smiles, empty" (too cliche!) at a disadvantage. other lines fare far better though; "His eyes are a deep" is quite interesting when read alone, for example, so the strong enjambment works to your favor there. "Before he wasn't, gone", again, turns out quite well thanks to the interesting ambiguity and double meaning given by the comma. you might consider whether you want to lean more into the independence of these lines, or allow yourself some more fluidity by placing your line breaks more freely, or carefully considering whether you want to break on the clause or break off the clause; a "strong" or a "weak" break. example:

I would consider this
A strong line break

I would consider
this a weak line break

…as reinforced by capitalization, or not! allowing yourself to choose freely between the two means you can divide your lines with more intention behind it, allowing for the lines you really want to be alone to stick out.

as for the imagery and meaning-making/story-telling of the poem, i think stories of regret and death are interesting! the most interesting narrative seed here is the kind of "in between" place, the bardo, that our old guy is thinking from. this kind of narrative place between is and isn't. i also find it interesting that you introduce him as a person whose life is "full", before seemingly contradicting this later. i enjoy the linguistic ambiguity over whether "being gone is no concern" or him not having much longer to live "as he does" (?) is what he doesn't see. also a bit of an awkward line because of the meter—shouldn't it be "of no concern"?—but that being gone is also literally no concern, a state of being unconcerned, is fun too.

there's a lot of chaff in the way; the first stanza is largely useless, and i don't understand the purpose of the rhetorical question "what does he look like". the image of the hill doesn't recur, so i wonder why you focus on it so heavily in the first stanza and in the title. is it a reference to something? i also think the "His smiles, empty / Never fighting for anything" lines are a bit on the nose, a little telling-not-showing. "He spent years hating, watching"—hating what! watching whom? i worry here that the poem is being oddly moralizing without really telling me the story of who this guy is and what he's actually done right or wrong, instead hitting me with slightly stale imagery of hell and fire. though "stages of hell, envy" is a fun twist on the concept of "stages of grief"!

in general i think this poem could use some more sensory imagery, or something to ground me in who this old guy actually is, what is unique about him, where is he as he dies, what specific thoughts does he have before he goes, what does the experience of death or of hell truly feel like, in specific terms, in unique ways. he passes on but i still don't really know much about him, except that his eyes are a "fascinating" blue. but it isn't enough to be told his eyes are fascinating! you have to fascinate me. what was the last thing he ate for dinner? who made it for him, where did the ingredients come from, under what roof or sky did he eat it? what is reflected in his eyes? what kind of blue are his eyes, blue like what, like delftware, like lightning, like cornflowers, like ice cubes, like the blood of a crab? what does he see, smell, hear, taste, feel, kinesthetically sense on his way to the other side? this way, you can better support the good work you've done to touch on abstract imagery and language in interesting ways, and can touch this specific experience to the universal. i really want to see you flesh out this narrative arc, between the sweet appearance of a man, the bitterness he holds within, and the tastelessness of what comes after.

best of luck! thank you for sharing, and i hope to see a second draft soon!

i really love poetic works that respond to atrocity by deconstructing some kind of clichéd language. there's a few examples i can think of… the first that came to mind was Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, a book which responds to the 1781 mass murder of enslaved Africans aboard the slave ship Zong by tearing into the legal documents, the constructions and clichés of legalese, from the insurance case that follows. here are a couple links to some excerpts. and this is the legal document that Philip is deconstructing

another example that came to mind was Disaster Suite, a poetry collection by Rob Halpern responding in large part to the wreckage of hurricane Katrina and the atrocities of the Bush administration in the United States, borrowing and plucking from government reports, radio and tv broadcasts and the clichéd speech surrounding "natural" "disasters".

probably the most classic in this field is "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. Yeats was responding to the senseless violence of the first world war by flipping imagery from the biblical Book of Revelation on its head…

not a poetic work, but i'm also reminded of a photography exhibit i saw at the Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam by Giath Tata called Becoming a Ghost. the artist is from Syria, and the photography in the installation largely consists of screenshots of the video game PUBG: Battlegrounds. it's in large part about the strange popularity of PUBG in Syria and the ways in which games about war respond to and interact with circumstances of real war, death, and despair like the Syrian Civil War.

something you'll notice is that all of these works are responding to a specific atrocity rather than atrocity in the general sense. i think this is something your poem would benefit from too, as right now you risk turning "the horrors of war" into a genre cliché itself. what is the horror you are actually responding to? how does it feel to you, as the author responding to it? what is your personal relation to the event of atrocity?

Philip has legal writing, Halpern has the speech of radio broadcast, Yeats has the awe of the Book of Revelation, and Tata has the design of digital battlegrounds. more to the concept of your poem, i think you should absolutely explore a deconstruction of the casual language of war as deployed in board games and in chess!! i want to encourage you to really delve deep into this, be daring about it! there's a very rich linguistic world surrounding chess and its metaphors; you might find inspiration listening to commentated chess tournaments, maybe even doing some light research on chess and war metaphors (some interesting stuff about the Great Game and the cold war in there!)… maybe there's a chess match that really inspires you—what happens to the white king's pawn, or the black queenside knight's pawn, in that match…?

i hope this isn't discouraging! my point is that you should figure out what really drives you towards these themes, what gives you a passion for pawns. for a first poem, this is an excellent start; you have a great sense of rhythm and meter, and i really get an impression of war drums, rolling and intensifying beats, and indeed hoofbeats, from the way you've constructed the piece so far. i think that's something to absolutely keep thinking about as you develop this further… the tempo of a chess match, the intensifying speed as opponents run out of time, the call-and-response…? it might even end up that the poem isn't really about the horrors of war at all, but about fantasies of war surrounding chess, perhaps to do with the masculinism of the chess world…?

depending on what motivates you, you could develop this piece a LOT of different ways. i hope this is useful! i'm excited to see where you take this :>

Reading it again now I see what you mean about this still being a rather broad strokes poem. Perhaps I can go back and make each of the little sections here into a larger stanza here to go into greater detail. Maybe some details about him marching over the bodies of other former soldiers, or how his feet are near falling off from walking so long.

Also, perhaps it could be good to go into further detail about the generals ordering this attack. What I didn't like about "The Charge of the Light Brigade" was how it brushed off the "blunder" that the speaker admitted had happened, so I do think it's somewhat hypocritical for me to not get into the callousness of them either. My thinking right now is maybe I can frame them being "pawns" as the perception of the command, rather than just reducing them to that like you said. Of course I won't know until I try, so I'll get back to you later after I get another draft done.

So, thank you for all of your advice here! It helps to have a more experienced eye help me refine my message more.

quick note: the word is "cavalry," not "calvary."

i like the imagery you have going on and it's clear youre thinking a lot about the people who suffer from war. i think a couple of things:

1. a piece this short has very little space to impress. you have to create an arc or paint a really vivid portrait in a really small area and every single word is incredibly important. i actually think the repetition of "a pawn" hurts you here. that sort of conceit works better to establish rhythm or cadence in a longer work but feels like it waters this one down. i think a case could be made that it hurts you thematically too by recentering and renaming a cog in the war machine and it seems the general thesis is that pawns are decontextualized and dehumanized and rendered out of center, so there's a bit of cognitive dissonance there that i'm not sure works, but your mileage definitely may vary there.

2. more importantly to me, if you want this to be about the horrors of war, it has to be a lot more horrific. this is still pretty abstract. i think you could go a lot more immediate, a lot more visceral with your imagery, or it runs the risk of ending up feeling samey to a lot of other writing on war through history, which ostensibly portrays war's horrors but ends up sanitizing them through lack of focus or clarity.

overall nice work, especially since you say this is one of your first poems! i think it's solid but could really shine with some editing, polish, and care. best of luck!

( http://wanderers-sandbox-2.wikidot.com/nformer another link in case the one above doesn't work)

What I think may be the weak point of my poem is that fifth line about the calvary. I've considered omitting some/all of the words "thundering gallop of the" to make it more concise, but I don't know if it would still get the same image across that way. My goal here was both to make the reader imagine the heart of the pawn beating loudly and quickly like the clip-clop of heavy calvary while also emphasizing the difference between vulnerable pawns and the armored calvary. So would it be more effective by cutting the fluff since that could be inferred, or should I keep it? And of course if you notice anything else that could be improved, feel free to let me know.