Orthography of a City / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page Orthography of a City.

FleshMaddAvalon 09 Jan 2025 11:07

tysm to Em and Xex for your wonderful crit. I really hope this sparkles to everyone else as much as it does to me.

Credit for the picture goes to me!! And my silly phone.

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I watch the yonder hills
See foodwrenches toil in dust
Let their cacophonous calls
Rend our bodies to rust

Last edited on 25 May 2025 16:35 by FleshMaddAvalon Show more

cried a second time

Akhlys 09 Jan 2025 13:09

gut punch, like always, your words hit like a steel brick.

+1

Re: cried a second time

FleshMaddAvalon 10 Jan 2025 03:07

There was actually a part I cut about a particularly brutal depressive episode but I decided it was a just WAY too dark for the overall emotional experience of the piece

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I watch the yonder hills
See foodwrenches toil in dust
Let their cacophonous calls
Rend our bodies to rust

Maxyfran73 09 Jan 2025 15:55

I love this so much; the dissection of a city interspersed with much more personal moments that define the self as part of it too. So, so good.

+1

FleshMaddAvalon 09 Jan 2025 18:53

YES there was that piece awhile ago about a city slowly becoming way too ordered and it made me realize that I just. Love cities? And their feelings and the taste and the sense of living in them and I went with it.

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I watch the yonder hills
See foodwrenches toil in dust
Let their cacophonous calls
Rend our bodies to rust

zipzipskins 09 Jan 2025 16:20

i liked it enough to upvote, for sure. it has a lot of strengths in imagery and emotional weight. i actually think that the way it's cut infrequently with the italic text/more direct personal narrative works against the flow of the verse — i appreciated the messaging and emotional content of it but i don't know that in execution it worked especially well for me from a reading-experience perspective. this extends to the formatting in the last few stanzas - i'm not sure if running them together instead of giving spacing between them was intentional or not. i also think that there are a few lines that are a touch too literal, simplistic, or heavy-handed for my tastes. that being said you paint a really intense and vivid picture throughout the piece; "slot canyon sunset blotches," "rimming the edges of parking lots in gravel-spackled piles," "swaying gently in the angry wind" as a few non-exhaustive examples of things that stood out as particularly gorgeous. it's awesome seeing your poetry grow and mature over this past year and change, as an aside. +1

Last edited on 09 Jan 2025 16:21 by zipzipskins Show more

FleshMaddAvalon 09 Jan 2025 18:52

Having them run together was a MISTAKE ahhh
Tysm for the thoughts. I really respect your opinion and it makes me really happy to hear such lovely comments and criticism <3 TYSM comrade

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I watch the yonder hills
See foodwrenches toil in dust
Let their cacophonous calls
Rend our bodies to rust

UncannyClown 09 Jan 2025 18:05

zip's thoughts largely mirror my own. some of the formatting choices seem questionable to me, and there are some lines that could be refined ("from earl gray to brutalist gray" stands out as particularly tough to chew), but there's a lot of quite excellent diction throughout, and i'm a sucker for poems that a break a thing down into parts like this.

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poet

FleshMaddAvalon 09 Jan 2025 21:14

Grab I shoulda caught that. Thank you! The formatting was a genuine mistake but I think your point stands. The prose poetry style is really viscerally hard to master but I'm getting my white belt eventually<3

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I watch the yonder hills
See foodwrenches toil in dust
Let their cacophonous calls
Rend our bodies to rust

Snapdragon133 25 May 2025 16:14

I loved the connection of the personal with the more imagery heavy sections. I wonder which was the true interlude for you? Lovely poem, glad I got to it eventually