Vote for the poem(s) you feel is the best (up to two). Remember to adhere to the "Honor Code" when voting.
While it is understood there is no absolute means to monitor the intent of a vote, we ask each PRC participant to exercise integrity when voting out of respect for the contest:
- Please give each poetry submission an equal opportunity in attaining your vote.
- Please read, or at least skim, all the entries before voting.
- Please do not vote for your friends just because they're your friends.
The Poetry Running Contest puts good faith in its participants to act in an honorable manner.
Contestants, remember, you are required required to vote (and you can't vote for yourself)!
Happy voting!
*Interested new participants should submit their poems here.
Since school is starting next week for me, I'll take my regular hiatus until summer break rolls around, so this will be my last entry for Winter 2013. See you guys over the summer!
my mouth is full of winsome lies -
and eyes are full of death besides
but luckily the soul is wise -
it sees beyond my blindness and
forced failure makes a better guise,
so as i come again alive,
it feels like life's a decent plan
Ilvaldi, q: why's your poem a picture? Just curious ...
The poem is a prose poem, but I'm actually using a more forced means of incorporating line breaks into it by manipulating the margins. The format is also left justified. Thus, this prose poem actually does have line breaks. They're just there by "accident" if you will.
So in order to maintain the spacing and margins in the poem, I had to crop a picture of it from my laptop, since the advance posting features on this forum aren't the greatest in the world for things like this.
Voted for Atlas and 'Fences'. Just liked em, too tired to critique.
In other news, the Submissions thread is -finally- 100% up to date, and from now on it shouldn't fall more than one or two weeks behind. Blippy can sleep again, his cursed work now at an end.
my mouth is full of winsome lies -
and eyes are full of death besides
but luckily the soul is wise -
it sees beyond my blindness and
forced failure makes a better guise,
so as i come again alive,
it feels like life's a decent plan
iCwalzy, I saw the post that got you suspended, and so I would vote for your poem simply out of sympathy. But I wanna see if we can get a super-huge tie here.
Lucknorris, your work is improving keep it up! A minor suggestion is to not use "reality" a second time because it dulls the sound of the poem.
Preve, the written form of this poem does not do it justice! From reading the poem closely with consideration to punctuation and line breaks, I figure this poem would sound far better if performed. That is, this is less of a lyrical poem, more of a slam poem/performance poetry. At least, that's how I hear it when I read it.
Pancake_Puffs, excellent rhyming there of the couplets. The syllabic count per line is a little bit off and so it throws the rhythm wayward a bit. Though it's more than 14 lines, the poem's form works itself very well as a sonnet. I think that the content after the volta (the turn in the poem) when you jump into the subject about the fence needs the most work in revision. You're telling too much rather than showing there, and the language you're using to work around the rhyming couplets starts to become too strained, bogging you down. The tone grammar, thus, becomes too awkward and forced, as if you're trying to get yourself across to the reader but we don't really identify/sympathize. To put it in an analogy, and I don't mean to be cruel when I say this, it is the difference between rallying the public versus begging to the public. I'll edit this post again to show you some changes I would make in terms of making the poem more "succinct." Keep at it, though! This poem definitely could not have been achieved without some considerable effort put here!
Talore, there is a sense of a William Carlos Williams, William Stafford, Mark Strand, or John Ashbery in your poem in that it goes quite a bit meta here in commanding the reader to do something while at the same time sort of ironically mocking itself. If the subject were anything else, I would say the tone fails here, but the irony is a bit too strong. The language in your poem sounds a little exaggerated and lofty, but the beauty in this is how you subvert that airy cliche of poets in advocating "having fun" which works well in the irony. Thus, it gives the impression and tone that you're not serious, that the poem is playful, and the overall output comes encouraging. Subtle, yet fine.
Blippy, your poem is very similar to Lucknorris' in that the setting of the poem both takes place in a location that is cold. Oddly enough, it's at home. I'm a bit of a sap for landscape poetry because it can say quite a lot for not really saying anything at all. Compare it to Pancake_Puffs's poem, I like how most of the subjectivity is gone in the poem. Just observations. What makes this work though is not that the poem is purely lacking in subjectivity, it merely succeeds in bringing subjectivity without the reader really thinking about it. The hardest part in writing in general is to make others believe. When I read the poem, I was convinced there was winter, that it was cold, that you were alone. Though it may seem easy for anyone to write about those details, I should point out that this is the reason why love poems and political poems are so difficult. People try to reach an idea across to you--"look, believe this!" or "look, I'm suffering? Can't you see?"--but we can't associate with those things. It's difficult to have others come up to your level of pathos, so I applaud you for your 7 line work and your blunt, pragmatic use of the title. I would suggest, however, that you cut "mournfully"--it's rather out of place with everything else I just said.
Aha~ I am fond of William Carlos Williams after studying some of his work last year. I think the funny thing is that beneath the mockery -at the heart of it- I am dead serious. I have no great love of academia, and for myself poetry serves as the only way I can translate what I experience and think effectively. Thanks for the analysis
Aha~ I am fond of William Carlos Williams after studying some of his work last year. I think the funny thing is that beneath the mockery -at the heart of it- I am dead serious. I have no great love of academia, and for myself poetry serves as the only way I can translate what I experience and think effectively. Thanks for the analysis
Well of course you have a message there. You're just being ironic in your approach to deliver it.
I appreciate the critique, Ilvaldi, and would love to see your revisions to my poem! The poem is actually a draft for a song, and when sung it sounds much better. I also feel the strained and awkwardness coming from the latter half of my poem, and have also been told in other works that I tell much more than show. Oftentimes, I find it hard to show more than tell, and I would love to work on improving that aspect of my writing. And the poem itself is actually based on real life events of mine between my ex girlfriend and I. Never bothered writing something out like that until after the relationship ended, because, well, my emotions were focused elsewhere
It'd be easier to list whoever didn't win, but here goes. Congratulations to iCwalzy, Talore, Blippytheslug, Lucknorris and Ilvaldi, the -FIVE- winners of PRC 192, I hope to see you all again next week.
Here are the Poetry submissions for this week:
Modded in the Face by iCwalzy
The Fence in Heaven by Pancake_Puffs
RAP (poetry) BATTLE INCOMING by Talore
Alone in an Empty House at 9PM When it's 40 Below Out by Blippytheslug
Emo by Preve
Sometimes I Dream by LuckNorris
Atlas by Ilvaldi
Vote for the poem(s) you feel is the best (up to two). Remember to adhere to the "Honor Code" when voting.
While it is understood there is no absolute means to monitor the intent of a vote, we ask each PRC participant to exercise integrity when voting out of respect for the contest:
- Please give each poetry submission an equal opportunity in attaining your vote.
- Please read, or at least skim, all the entries before voting.
- Please do not vote for your friends just because they're your friends.
The Poetry Running Contest puts good faith in its participants to act in an honorable manner.
Contestants, remember, you are required required to vote (and you can't vote for yourself)!
Happy voting!
*Interested new participants should submit their poems here.
Join the Poetry Running Contest!
Too late. No Fun Allowed, you're stuck with what you got. Welcome to meta.
Join the Poetry Running Contest!
Laaaaaaaaawllllllllll.
Will read and vote later.
and eyes are full of death besides
but luckily the soul is wise -
it sees beyond my blindness and
forced failure makes a better guise,
so as i come again alive,
it feels like life's a decent plan
The poem is a prose poem, but I'm actually using a more forced means of incorporating line breaks into it by manipulating the margins. The format is also left justified. Thus, this prose poem actually does have line breaks. They're just there by "accident" if you will.
So in order to maintain the spacing and margins in the poem, I had to crop a picture of it from my laptop, since the advance posting features on this forum aren't the greatest in the world for things like this.
In other news, the Submissions thread is -finally- 100% up to date, and from now on it shouldn't fall more than one or two weeks behind. Blippy can sleep again, his cursed work now at an end.
Join the Poetry Running Contest!
Unintentional jokes are the best kind. Fixing that, and a couple minor errors now.
Join the Poetry Running Contest!
and eyes are full of death besides
but luckily the soul is wise -
it sees beyond my blindness and
forced failure makes a better guise,
so as i come again alive,
it feels like life's a decent plan
iCwalzy, I saw the post that got you suspended, and so I would vote for your poem simply out of sympathy. But I wanna see if we can get a super-huge tie here.
Lucknorris, your work is improving keep it up! A minor suggestion is to not use "reality" a second time because it dulls the sound of the poem.
Preve, the written form of this poem does not do it justice! From reading the poem closely with consideration to punctuation and line breaks, I figure this poem would sound far better if performed. That is, this is less of a lyrical poem, more of a slam poem/performance poetry. At least, that's how I hear it when I read it.
Pancake_Puffs, excellent rhyming there of the couplets. The syllabic count per line is a little bit off and so it throws the rhythm wayward a bit. Though it's more than 14 lines, the poem's form works itself very well as a sonnet. I think that the content after the volta (the turn in the poem) when you jump into the subject about the fence needs the most work in revision. You're telling too much rather than showing there, and the language you're using to work around the rhyming couplets starts to become too strained, bogging you down. The tone grammar, thus, becomes too awkward and forced, as if you're trying to get yourself across to the reader but we don't really identify/sympathize. To put it in an analogy, and I don't mean to be cruel when I say this, it is the difference between rallying the public versus begging to the public. I'll edit this post again to show you some changes I would make in terms of making the poem more "succinct." Keep at it, though! This poem definitely could not have been achieved without some considerable effort put here!
Talore, there is a sense of a William Carlos Williams, William Stafford, Mark Strand, or John Ashbery in your poem in that it goes quite a bit meta here in commanding the reader to do something while at the same time sort of ironically mocking itself. If the subject were anything else, I would say the tone fails here, but the irony is a bit too strong. The language in your poem sounds a little exaggerated and lofty, but the beauty in this is how you subvert that airy cliche of poets in advocating "having fun" which works well in the irony. Thus, it gives the impression and tone that you're not serious, that the poem is playful, and the overall output comes encouraging. Subtle, yet fine.
Blippy, your poem is very similar to Lucknorris' in that the setting of the poem both takes place in a location that is cold. Oddly enough, it's at home. I'm a bit of a sap for landscape poetry because it can say quite a lot for not really saying anything at all. Compare it to Pancake_Puffs's poem, I like how most of the subjectivity is gone in the poem. Just observations. What makes this work though is not that the poem is purely lacking in subjectivity, it merely succeeds in bringing subjectivity without the reader really thinking about it. The hardest part in writing in general is to make others believe. When I read the poem, I was convinced there was winter, that it was cold, that you were alone. Though it may seem easy for anyone to write about those details, I should point out that this is the reason why love poems and political poems are so difficult. People try to reach an idea across to you--"look, believe this!" or "look, I'm suffering? Can't you see?"--but we can't associate with those things. It's difficult to have others come up to your level of pathos, so I applaud you for your 7 line work and your blunt, pragmatic use of the title. I would suggest, however, that you cut "mournfully"--it's rather out of place with everything else I just said.
Well of course you have a message there. You're just being ironic in your approach to deliver it.
Join the Poetry Running Contest!