Thread: Knife

Knife

Revive, Revolve
Dance a deadly kinesthesia
Tear night apart
Sing your way to a gruesome shock
End destinies
I balance on your lethal edge
Your prose precise

Sorry for double-posting, but this is gonna get buried.
Comments? Critique? The latter of the harsh kind is welcomed in particular.

Hey Moon,

for me, really, this doesn't add up to much more than a few generalised statements tacked together. I don't see much thought behind the structure of the poem, the images blur because of lack of punctuation, and the centre format is kinda gimmicky. Cliches like 'tear night apart' shouldn't have made the cut. Generalisations like 'end destinies' give the reader nothing firm to hold onto, no real concrete image. The only interesting verb I find is 'sing', which doesn't really make sense but at least adds something a bit different. It's all very stock 'knife' images, when in a poem like this (basically purely descriptive aside the end) I'd expect much more originality. The final two lines try for something edgy, bringing in the first person, but fall somewhat flat after the preceding lines. I also kept reading 'pose', but then realised it was in fact 'prose'? This doesn't make much sense to me, a knife that writes? Hm.

Anyway, that aside, what I would suggest first and foremost is reading. Read lots of published poetry. Writing about this kind of thing is hard. At least, it is if you don't want it to tip into the cliche/angst category. I found a couple of contemporary pieces which use the image of a knife at the end, but do so simply and in a way which really enhances a sharp image: Education for Leisure by Carol Ann Duffy and What We Must Not Forget by Hazel Perryman (scroll if the link doesn't take you straight to it). I think they work particularly well, and hopefully you'll enjoy. Good luck writing,

Sophie

Hmm...I do see what you mean. "Sing" was mean to personify the faint whistling as a knife moves through the air. "Prose" is deliberate, moving along with the image of an artist behind the knife, leaving corpses to tell a story. I suppose I could have lengthened this out a bit and spent more words on defining and connecting the images properly. The impression of cliche probably arises from that. Thanks a lot for the comment!

Yeah, it's sometimes easy to forget that the reader isn't inside our own head, making all the leaps/connections we're making when writing. A poem is there to communicate, so working on defining and connecting your images is a great place to start.

rainhands has given you a very good critique. The poem makes little sense and I'm not sure you even know what some of the words mean. "Dance a deadly kinesthesia"... what? How can kinesthesia be deadly? How can you dance it? It's the awareness of one's movement in space. But really, I don't want you to write me an explanation in your little comment box. The poem should have all the explanation it needs folded inside of itself so that a reader can come along and piece the poem together by simply using the words you have given. It has to be self-containing. Yours is not.

@rainhands

Exactly what I was thinking. Thanks.

@MisterSpider

Well said. Now I feel really crappy because I say that to a lot of other people. Blind to myself, I am. Thanks for the comment.