Case studies in cognitive dissonance. Riky Cohen’s interesting, let’s see what her poetry is like:
The Chinese neighbor invaded
The country of conquered dreams
At five in the morning
Muffled shouting in the parking lot
The slamming door of a diplomatic vehicle
And sleep is vanquished
Her foreign tongue mumbled me throughout the day
not softly
not softly
I am a nation of ambivalent feelings
And my mother tongue is disorder
There’s a delightful little undergrad lecture in how to not write poetry buried in here. The rhythm (yes, you can have rhythm in free verse! It’s okay! Strict adherence to meter isn’t necessary but that doesn’t mean one should simply chuck words in a blender!) is nonexistent; why are the dreams being invaded if they’d already been conquered; why the passive voice of “sleep is vanquished.” Why the gerund “the slamming” when you could make it a straight onomatopoeia, why “the vehicle” when you could go simpler or more specific, either ‘the car’ or something about its make and model that signals that it’s diplomatic? The diplomatic towncar’s door slam // vanquishes sleep could probably do with some additional revision (by which I mean the whole poem should be tossed in the bin, but assuming we commit to trying to salvage it) but it’s an improvement. There’s some mystery in how the narrator would know it’s a diplomatic vehicle given that she presumably is not fast asleep in the parking lot, but we can chalk that up to inference from another language being spoken or license.
How does one mumble not softly? “A nation of ambivalent feelings” is like an antimetaphor, it takes an idea and makes it less immediate and relatable. “My mother tongue is disorder” doesn’t really seem to relate to the rest of the poem, which suggests that the disorder is being imposed by someone from outside your cultural context (Chinese/foreign tongue), so why is that your conclusion?
The more I look at it the more annoyed I get. You don’t have to be a good person to write good poetry, but you do have to be an interesting person, or at absolute minimum a person who takes a keen interest and, if you aren’t or don’t, you get this drab and stilted style.
Case studies in cognitive dissonance. Riky Cohen’s interesting, let’s see what her poetry is like:
Poetry is supposed to express a lot with a little and this dumbass needed a dozen lines to say “I heard someone speak Chinese it was so scawy”
Well tbf it is saying a lot. Its screaming “I’m a racist I’m a racist” a million times over and over
There’s a delightful little undergrad lecture in how to not write poetry buried in here. The rhythm (yes, you can have rhythm in free verse! It’s okay! Strict adherence to meter isn’t necessary but that doesn’t mean one should simply chuck words in a blender!) is nonexistent; why are the dreams being invaded if they’d already been conquered; why the passive voice of “sleep is vanquished.” Why the gerund “the slamming” when you could make it a straight onomatopoeia, why “the vehicle” when you could go simpler or more specific, either ‘the car’ or something about its make and model that signals that it’s diplomatic? The diplomatic towncar’s door slam // vanquishes sleep could probably do with some additional revision (by which I mean the whole poem should be tossed in the bin, but assuming we commit to trying to salvage it) but it’s an improvement. There’s some mystery in how the narrator would know it’s a diplomatic vehicle given that she presumably is not fast asleep in the parking lot, but we can chalk that up to inference from another language being spoken or license.
How does one mumble not softly? “A nation of ambivalent feelings” is like an antimetaphor, it takes an idea and makes it less immediate and relatable. “My mother tongue is disorder” doesn’t really seem to relate to the rest of the poem, which suggests that the disorder is being imposed by someone from outside your cultural context (Chinese/foreign tongue), so why is that your conclusion?
The more I look at it the more annoyed I get. You don’t have to be a good person to write good poetry, but you do have to be an interesting person, or at absolute minimum a person who takes a keen interest and, if you aren’t or don’t, you get this drab and stilted style.