WARNING: BLOCK TEXT INCOMING
After an analysis of your poem, I am firstly reminded of my own inability to write good poetry anymore. Tragic; I've gone off the deep-end of 'prose-poetry' and have not been able to come back since. Secondly, I am delighted in the simplicity of this poem, something I have also lost. I hope to preserve this best I can without compromising the critique. Just know that my personal preference / opinion is like the stench of a dead body: trying to hide beneath the floorboards but failing miserably. Take what I say with a dead-body sized grain of salt.
Preamble aside, let us get into the meat of this poem. I shall include specific tweaks and nitpicks at the end, which will be even more susceptible to personal preference. I want to increase the depth of this poem a bit. You have a nice point to the story, but I want more flesh on those bones! Right now your poem is starving, screaming for help from the basement you've trapped it in. But we don't want screaming hostages, so we must feed the prisoner. Your theme right now is something like "Life quickly and easily becomes a brutal cycle when overburdened" or perhaps the deeper, nihilistic approach. Your vehicle here is a narrative about a delinquent student struggling with life. Relatable- physics….. anyhow this is supported by repetition in the beginning lines of each stanza, and structure of each stanza. To make this engaging you need to tighten up word choice, and thus theme execution. That will let this breathe a little more, in my mind. Some other exercises might be rewriting the poem from memory without looking at it, and comparing the two (or more) versions to find the essential points of the poem. Or, consider the essential message this poem, write it out in only a single stanza, then take each line from said stanza and explode it into its own stanza. These are just some tips and tricks, prescriptions. Now let me show you some areas of improvement to whittle with. Speaking of, I once saw an article which apparently didn't know whittle was a word because the statement went like "Let us now "widdle" down the confusion around this conflict…" etc. Don't know why I mentioned this.
Anyhow, here is nitpicks.mp4
Bookends slumbering, midday deviant
Whereas the rest of this stanza has been about clay and pottery, this shifts to 'bookends slumbering', which is confusing… and the seemingly unconnected 'midday deviant' also hangs out in a strange ether of ambiguity
Burnt, when you've slung drugs to feed your sisters
This is an important phrase: I wish it was tighter-knit. Something like "Burnt, drugs produce food for my sisters" or something. Try not to use 'you'.
Battered against the loud bell am I, and
Maybe.. though loud seems weak here.
Spoiled, each twitch of hand and raising of voice
I don't know about 'spoiled' here, since all the other words to begin the second line are heat-related. Also I don't really see what you're trying to say here.
A clattering bell in the surf of sound
Mentioning the bell twice is a bit much, maybe use 'alarm' or something?
Yet I depart the delta crucible
Are you trying to reference change in time? 'Change in time crucible'? Or what does delta mean here?
And day by dawn and night, dusk, I return
Pretty clunky in my opinion.
Good stuff though! Can't wait to see this ruby you've pulled from the Earth refined and polished!
—Oli
