A Good Critique

dllgrant · Sep 11, 2010

Below is a critique of “That's Life Version 2” by Magdalen. This is good stuff and very beneficial to this humble wannabe poet. This is the way a critique should be written.

One line cryptic statements or insults don’t work. Loose that critique approach. It’s discouraging.

This is a great forum for poets, to which I aspire to be. And I am very grateful to Magdalen and I would humbly suggest that this type of critique approach be adopted in this forum.

This is the critique he wrote:

You have a lot of excess verbiage and the sound of the words you do use seems random, try:

Alliteration - The repetition of initial consonant sounds.
Assonance - The repetition of vowel sounds.
Onomatopoeia - The use of words which imitate sound.

You actually do pretty well on capturing the scene:
Imagery - Words or phrases that appeal to any sense or any combination of senses.

Within a good poem, there’s usually a guiding comparison being made, sometimes through the use of double entendre, Homonyms or Heteronyms, also see "Extended Metaphors."

Metaphor - A comparison between two objects with the intent of giving clearer meaning to one of them. Often forms of the "to be" verb are used, such as "is" or "was", to make the comparison.
Simile - A comparison between two objects using a specific word or comparison such as "like", "as", or "than".

Meter is something that takes years of study and practice. The use and placement of monosyllabic and multisyllabic stressed and unstressed words, along with punctuation and line length determine the rhythm or beat of your poem.
Meter - The recurrence of a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Repetition can be a good thing or a bad thing. You do repeat some phrases in your poem, but the placement and choice don’t seem to add anything.
Repetition - the repeating of words, phrases, lines, or stanzas.

Free verse can and does include rhyme and rhyme schemes – it doesn’t have to be a rigid thing as in a sonnet, but too much of it (especially when poorly done) can give too light-hearted or foolish a tone in an unintentional contrast that will detract from the poem’s meaning and significance.
Rhyme scheme - The sequence in which the rhyme occurs. The first end sound is represented as the letter "a", the second is "b", etc.

And finally, my personal preferences lean toward poems that make me feel and think and understand things in a new way. I’m not into stream of consciousness or angry rap-style verbal assaults (well, maybe sometimes!) that don’t really mean anything. After reading your poem I just thought, “WTF!?”

The below is an edited version of the first half of the first stanza. It would be nice to know where (in place or time) the ships exists.

A Spanish Galleon –
an imposing, apocalyptic,
Armageddon-type ship
full of gold bullion,
five decks high, about a million
white sails.

I think you have a typo in the cliche used in S1L11:

A King’s random (should be ransom?)

Thanks …. Dave.

Norman D Gutter · Sep 13, 2010

Dave:

Yes, that was a good critique. Magdalen spent a lot of time on it, looks like maybe 30 minutes to an hour. Have you responded by putting that much time into the critique of another poem?

You can't expect that kind of critique all the time, especially when your critiques are mainly ego-boosting one-liners.

But I would argue with you that there is value in one line critiques, even negative ones. Less value than in a detailed critique, but still value. Suppose you received a critique that is simply, "This poem sucks." Not much to go on there is there? The critter would have been more helpful to the poet if he had said why he felt to poem sucked. Then the poet could have taken the suggestions and done something with them. All you have with this critique is the knowledge that the poem caused a strong, negative reaction in one reader. Still, the poet is best advised to look again at his poem and try to figure out for himself why someone would say his poem sucked, and seek to improve the poem.

At the same time, a critique consisting of only, "This poem is great" does the poet no more good. He doesn't know why the poem was great. He knows the poem caused a strong, positive reaction in one reader. What poetic devices or language use caused that reader to respond positively. The poet doesn't know. But still, the poet can look again at his poem and try to figure out what worked in it, and do similarly in a different poem.

NDG

dllgrant · Sep 13, 2010

There is a difference between an insult, opinion and a critique. I'm not qualified to critique. A critique should come from someone who is an expert in their field.
An opinion is personal and should have a personal explanation of what appealed to the reader or what the reader disliked. An insult is just ignorant. If someone says my poem is a seven thousand pound wheel of cheese, that's ignorant.

Dichroic · Sep 13, 2010

dllgrant said:
There is a difference between an insult, opinion and a critique. I'm not qualified to critique. A critique should come from someone who is an expert in their field.

That implies we have two kinds of people here, poets and critics. We don't. We have one kind: people who read poetry. Some of them happen to write it as well. Furthermore, the attitude that only 'experts' are qualified to respond to poems is probably one reason that poetry gets less attention than most of us would like. Here's the qualification you need to respond to a poem: you need to be human. And OK, you need to be able to understand the language it's in, to hear it if it's recited or read it if it's written down. (I've heard of sign language poems as well; for those I guess you'd need to be able to see it.)

Now, I'm not saying that everyone can tell whether something is a perfect villanelle or sonnet, though that's truly not so difficult to learn. But everyone is qualified to say whether a poem strikes a chord in you, is clear or confusing, whether the rhythm lilts or staggers, whether the language is vivid, whether it makes you see the world in a new way or says nothing you haven't heard a hundred times before. Does it start off in one mood and then switch unexpectedly? Do the words fit the meaning or are they just stuck in there?

Admitted, Magdalene is a talented critic who knows a lot about poetry (and who writes great stuff herself). But it's simply shirking to say, "Oh, I'm not that good so I won't do any work myself."

Norman D Gutter · Sep 13, 2010

Dave:

We are all amatuer poets here at AW. I don't think any of us would qualify as an "expert in their field". If you want the critique of an expert, you need to find an expert and pay them for their time and accumulated knowledge.

All critique is opinion. Even that expert you'd pay to critique your poem is giving you nothing other than his opinion.

I agree that insults have no place in poetry. But an insult is personal, directed at the poet. Negative critique is directed at the poem. The poet should never take negative critique directed at the poem as an insult. It's not, it's just opinion based on the limiited viewpoint of one reader.

As to your not being qualified to critique, this site works on reciprocity. If you want learned critiques, you must give learned critiques. When I fist started posting to Internet poetry boards I knew almost nothing about poetry except what I wrote. But the rules said I had to critique three poems for each one I posted. So I bought some used poetry textbooks, studied like the dickens for a couple of months, read everything I could on poetry and critique thereof, read a bunch of poetry at the same time, then began full participation on the forum. Poetry critique is an acquired skill, not a talent someone is born with. And you will learn more about poetry by critiquing the poems of others than you will ever by having your own poems critiqued.

NDG

thehairymob · Sep 13, 2010

I agree with Norman. By giving a short one or two lines telling someone of my thought on what they have put down I hope that it might help them. I also hope that when I show my average verse that with the help of others one liners I may improve what I have written. Sometimes though no matter how hard I try and how good the advice i still fail to bring the gem to the surface, so to speak. :Shrug:

A Good Critique

dllgrant

Norman D Gutter

Engineer Sonneteer

dllgrant

Dichroic

that's di-CROW-ick

Norman D Gutter

Engineer Sonneteer

thehairymob

If I had a brain I'd still be dumb