Anxious

Hello, sister, I hope you're well
It's been 25 years and to no avail
I've tried crying, and begging, and hurting like hell
And you're still gone, you left, you fell

I was 9 when you got here, 10 when you left
You nearly died in the basement, left us bereft
Then the hospital, the life flight, the cold, the theft
You were gone but your heart beat continued so deft

There were wires and monitors and doctors and more
There were relatives and friends and a line out the door
The people stood waiting and watching the floor
You were leaving, unplugged, mom's arms, excrucior

There are the the faces of everyone here
Standing away, solemn, sodden, choking back a tear
Bleak, dear God, bleak can we speak of something so dear
Of that last little breath that you took and my fear

I needed you back and wanted you home
But you left and it hurt and it stuck in my dome
I needed you and you left me so now I just roam
Past feelings and emotions and wisdom from tomes

Everything fell off the world when this hit
The trees, lakes, buildings, cars, all of it
We were nowhere because you had to get
Finally nothing happened and it still feels like s**t

Reviews

[JayG]

There's a converse side to wanting to write. It's the unspoken contract with the reader: they give us of their time, and perhaps money, and we give them something they'll find meaningful. In other words, "The customer is always right."

But in what I see of your fiction and poetry, you're making a common assumption—one you share with over 95% of hopeful writers—which is that the skill your teachers called writing is useful for all applications where words are to be read.

But in reality, we were given ONLY nonfiction writing skills because employers find skill at writing reports, papers, and letters useful. So, that's what we practice via the reports and essays we were assigned, year after year. But...they offer degree programs in Fiction-Writing and Poetry, and you have to figure that at least some of what's taught there is necessary. Right? And if it is, it follows that we graduated exactly as prepared to write fiction and poetry as to pilot a commercial airliner, or to remove someone's appendix.

At the moment, in both your poetry and fiction, someone the reader can't hear or see, is talking TO them about you, your feelings, and, your experiences...all in a 100% author-centric and fact-based way (nonfiction's methodology).

But poetry's goal is to move the reader emotionally, not "express yourself." And talking TO the reader can't work. You need to involve them, make them feel, and care—which a report can't do.

As E. L. Doctorow so wisely put it: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” And how much time did your teachers spend on how to do that?

The necessary skills aren't all that hard to learn, though mastering them, as with any profession, takes time and work. The library has sections devoted to writing fiction and poetry, and they can help a lot.'

For poetry, Hit the Shmoop site for starters. It's a great resource on lots of subjects. Select Student, then use the button next to the midpage search window to choose Poetry. Lots of great poems there analyzed to great depth, to show why and how they worked so well. If you can find a copy of Mary Oliver's, A Poetry Handbook, lots of people swear by it. And read the excerpt from Stephen Fry's, The Ode Less Traveled. For what he has to say about the flow of language, i recomnd it to both poets and fiction-writers.

For fiction, I’d suggest starting with Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer, which recently came out of copyright protection. It's the best I've found, to date, at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader. The address of an archive site where you can read or download it free is just below. Copy/paste the address into the URL window of any Internet page and hit Return to get there.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

So...I know you were hoping for better news, and that this was a lot like trying to take a sip from a firehose, but since we'll never address the problem we don't see as a problem, I thought you'd want to know.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/