Reviews for Random Excess Memories |
---|
![]() ![]() ![]() Flow: The wall-of-text format of this poem made it all flow continuously like a collection of sound bites read by Siri on my husband’s alarm app that wakes him up by reading the news. It works for the kind of poem this is! Imagery: I love how you open with “brains in vats”; it’s a perfect way to get across the image of helpless individuals, force fed info for others’ benefits. Besides that, most of what I imagined in this poem was like, text streaming through a person’s head. Tone: This poem conveyed a kind of defeated feeling. I think it gave off the feeling of people who are unaware of the degree to which they are influenced. Word play: for the most part, the main word technique you utilized was repetition. It gave me the feeling of someone trying to force an opinion into another person by repeating over and over. |
![]() ![]() ![]() Why does the haiku structure serve your purpose? What custom did Japan purge? What are you saying about cross-cultural interaction? Does the poem serve to contradict the title? Who is we? What does French culture have to do with this? Is there some kind of class inequality going on here? Is this about culture swallowing culture or animal swallowing animal? Why is the goose green? Why wash down Oysters with lattes as opposed to any other kind of drink? Is this some twisted menu? What is km/kz? Maybe I don't understand this poem because I don't know French? |
![]() ![]() ![]() The poem flows quite nicely. There are periodic disruptions of iambic meter and sentences flow from one line to another. However, the lines across the page interrupt the flow a little. I am still unsure of what they add to the poem. There is rhyming in the first three stanzas, but then it stops. Why? Were the rhymes accidental? Or is there some breakdown in the poem that accompanied the rhyme that I missed? I like how you incorporated several sensations into the poem. There are references to music (tones, key, high), touch (soft, finger's kiss), and smell (wine, perfume), and taste (honeysuckle). I can't visualize the matter of this poem, but I can certainly feel it. You have a good variety in diction. There are words that I wouldn't necessarily group together in one poem like cosmopolitan, synthetic, outcast, and garment. I appreciate the use of irony (naked garment, heavy and thin). |
![]() ![]() ![]() Hey, remember the review game? That still exists. I usually like the bunched up paragraph prose-ish poems when they are used to express run on flow of thought. The ideas in the poem could work in a stream-of-conscious format, but your use of frequent periods, commas, parenthesis, and many-syllable words slowed me down. Given that your theme is the contrast between individuality and conformity, I think a structure that allowed individual lines to seem unique while actually giving them similar structures would work better for your idea. I do like the theme of individuality versus conformity. You seem to give the "is" to conformity but the "ought" to individuality. "We are a collective breed" shows your stance on the "is" and your word choice (failures imbued, stamping, hatred, toxin, etc.) indicates your dislike of the reality of our "we" spirit. Some of your diction is redundant. "round blue sapphire orb" is doubly redundant. I don't think the alliteration with "molecular molarity..." works. I don't see the relationship between chemistry and marriage. "non-elite, common folk" is also redundant. Use em dashes (long dashes) when interrupting yourself and short dashes for compounding words. Neither dash should have spaces on either side. If you use a highly specific adjective in a poem twice, the reader is inclined to look for a relationship between the two uses. We are purple grapes and there is a purple horizon. What effect does this have on the poem? What do we have in common with the horizon? I probably fulfilled the requirements of the review game. Someone else can count. |