Writing Twisted Maiden (M) Please Critique

[Noir_vagabond]

Her hair falls about her face, just a placcid expression
Oh how he loves her taste, an orgasmic definition
She fights against her restraints, how he loves her screams
His face is her morbid fantasy, he rapes her in his dreams
He wants to see her beauty as he slices her sweet veins steals her flesh
Maschistic tendicies justified homicide how he loves taking in her breath
Her smell of fear her delicious fluid both blood and cry alone
This is what he lives for to snare at marrow and bone
Clothing her in her ceramonial gown
He then cuts it away to listen to the shredding sound
Now shes bleeding nows shes screaming
And he is enduring all the euphoria of her needing
To be let go from his loving arms from his knife
This is his Twisted Maiden his last kill for the night
Just maybe he might find another as sweet and innocent as she
But if not her blood will sustain his cruel brutality

[Mitch]

My intent with this review isn't to tell you what's wrong with the piece...but to try to give you some general suggestions so you can get on the right track. I will try to go a bit more in-depth from time to time, but mostly I'm just giving you suggestions that have helped me grow as a poet.

First off, this poem just screams STANZAS out loud to me. Reading it is like trying to breathe in space without any space. We need some breathing room as a reader! Also...the language is very hackeneyed. The bread and butter of poetry is images, and the images you offer in this piece are far from startling, but instead pretty cliche. Poetry is all about being fresh with your images. Anyone can write about a morbid type of love...or however you want to put it...but not anyone can come up with amazing images that stay with the reader even after reading, and not anyone can use language to a higher point like it's meant to be in poetry.

Everyone has to start somewhere, of course, and I take it you're pretty close to just beginning. Believe it or not, I used to write a lot like this: an Edgar Allan Poe-esque type of poetry that just isn't the higher state of language that is poetry. The main thing is that you never give up on finding your own type of style, and to read other poets' poetry as to inspire you and bring about the change you'll need to get better.

About the second thing I noticed, once I started reading this piece more, was that it has quite a few spelling errors. Remember, always run a piece through a spell checker or spell check it yourself before posting it up here. When a reader is reading a piece of any writing, and they find a lot of errors, it's easy to see the writer a) doesn't know what they're doing or b) doesn't give their work the time of day and just post it raw as when it was first made. By having a lot of spelling errors in your piece, it's pretty hard to take what you're writing seriously, and as a writer you lose quite a bit of validity as far as the reader is concerned.

Many times in the poem you shove a whole bunch of words on top of another.

e.g.,

[quote]He wants to see her beauty as he slices her sweet veins steals her flesh[/quote]

And so on. This further shows me that as a writer, you haven't worked on this piece all too much (in fact, I'm willing to bet you just wrote it right here on the spot). Poetry isn't like prose - in poetry, the word choices matter so much, and how they sound as you read it, and how it comes together as a whole matter just as much, too. Shishkebobing a whole bunch of words together, as in the example above, just doesn't work. I don't want to give you any certain suggestions, because you're the writer of the piece, not me, but definitely look at tightening up the language in this piece and getting rid of all the extraneous stuff like what I showed above.

Finally, I have three last suggestions for you. As I said before, good poetry has strong images. Figurative langauge is truly a higher, heightened language...and in order to use it effectively, you need to write figurative langauge using concrete things. This piece is all about abstractions: as a reader, I can't get a beautiful, clear image of anything in my head. It's all abstractions about abstractions. You see, something like a metaphor or a similie works best if you're using something concrete to compare something abstract. So give that a thought, as well.

My second suggestion is to tell you that poetry is often compressed. In this way it's kind of like a riddle, and as a reader you have to take far more active participation in the poem than if you were idling reading some prose or anything of the like.

The third suggestion is to impose some rules on your poetry. In my poetry, I often brim from being free verse to something inbetween free verse and verse that's full of rules. I try to get the best of both of those worlds, rather than always being at the extreme (I do, however, go for the extremes at times). Just something like attempting to write a sonnet, a kyrielle, metrical poetry - you name it, it'll help you out. What you write using only rules may be terrible...but it's always a growing experience. It allows you to, when you go and write what is mainly free verse, impose some type of rule on what you're writing (no matter how small it is) that adds another dimension to your poetry and helps it along, too.

So try to go for tight, compressed, and [i]concrete[/i] images and eventually some good poetry should happen for you. And don't be afraid to impose rules on your poetry, as chaining as it might be (after all, Robert Frost said free verse is neither free nor verse, or something to that extent...sometimes having rules is even more freedom than freedom itself). I hope I've said something that will help you out as a writer of poetry, and I hope to see you improve and grow. I've been where you are, and I know you could reach where I am with the proper effort.

[Drix D'Zanth]

My honest critique? This poem really isn?t salvage-able. The macabre is really clichéd when it becomes so ?up front?. It feels like all you are trying to do is write a shock and awe poem. Leaving the reader to fill in metaphorical hints or spaces works as a far more effective horror than leaving nothing to the imagination (Think [i]Alien[/i] as opposed to the later [i]Jason[/i] movies).

Your rhymes are forced (take the first.. ?expression? and ?definition? don?t have any valid cohesion), and there isn?t much pace to the poem which makes it very difficult to read. I would suggest developing a metronomic stress [i]first[/i] before you think of rhyming patterns. Sure, the first rule to lines is that there are no rules, but there are some general guidelines to poetry that most would follow to share his art/perspective with the [i]reader[/i]. You obviously didn?t seem to take that into consideration before posting this?. It?s harsh, but ask yourself if this is a poem you wanted to share [i]for[/i] the people around you, or [i]to[/i] the people around you (and for [i]yourself[/i], in effect).

Let?s look at the lines, after my harsh review, I do owe you that.

[QUOTE=Noir_vagabond]Her hair falls about her face, just a placcid expression
Oh how he loves her taste, an orgasmic definition[/QUOTE]
The last portions of each of these lines don?t really add anything to the poem. It appears as though they were contrived for the purposes of rhyming, and only rhyming. What is ?orgasmic definition? supposed to mean? Modifiers should be used to spice the poetry, not substantiate it.

[QUOTE=Noir_vagabond]
She fights against her restraints, how he loves her screams
His face is her morbid fantasy, he rapes her in his dreams
He wants to see her beauty as he slices her sweet veins steals her flesh
Maschistic tendicies justified homicide how he loves taking in her breath[/QUOTE]
The first two lines I?ve quoted are the best structurally, and an example of rhythm and rhyme working together. But the second line doesn?t make any sense at all. ?His face is her morbid fantasy? and the fourth line reads ?Masochistic (corrected spelling) tendencies (corrected spelling) Justified homicide??. So does this show (awkwardly) that the victim fantasized over her rape/murder?

[QUOTE=Noir_vagabond]
Her smell of fear her delicious fluid both blood and cry alone[/QUOTE]
?Sometimes can poets write sentences without understand grammar proper and people to expect them.?
Sometimes poets write sentences without proper grammar and expect people to understand them.

[QUOTE=Noir_vagabond]
This is what he lives for to snare at marrow and bone[/QUOTE]
It should be ?to [i]snare[/i] marrow and bone.?
I lied? I just can?t keep reading this.

Edit: Note, I am not criticising you as a person or even as a poet. My crit. here is towards this particular work. I know every poet has written a bad poem or two (I have!). As far as general poetry tips go, Mitch's crit. suffices in this case.

[echoavalon]

You are an origianl voice in this world of poets with the same writings
I think your original style doesn't need to be "salvagable."
Though there are some valid points brought up by my critiquing predecessors, you still have a unique talent.

Perhaps if you created better flow too your words then fellow poets could better understand your work. Poetry is like a puzzle and it is hard to put the pieces together.

Keep doing an excellent job, edit, re-edit, and keep writing.

[2010DigitalBoy]

Damn, all the good critiquing is gone. How come no one ever review my poems like that? Doe sthat mean im good? Anyway, back to the matter at hand.

Your poem is pretty messy, and, as was said, pretty cliche. Try to focus less on being fucked up and more on making sense.