Working on poetry is tough. It's often thankless work that most people read and end up scratching their heads over. It elicits responses like "It's nice" or "Sound's pretty," which amount to little more than nothing. I don't expect a Freudian dissection of the work and there is no right answer, but from now on, non-readers of poetry, make your best efforts to focus on a specific
—if only one
—facet of a poem that will give the artist the satisfaction of a valuable comment toward improvement.
Below are two drafts of a poem I wrote for my seminar in poetry. The first is what I handed in to be workshopped, and with the help of my peers' excellent critiques, I revised it to the poem below the first for submission into my end-of-semester portfolio. Compare and contrast and let me know what you all think of the changes.
Raconteur
Setting
craftsman, you crosshatch revelation
quilts
for been-theres and wistful savants.
Pages
pop with organic glow, an ebony clarity
pixelated
dreamers take into their wisdom chambers.
You
serve tonics marked joy, grief, and misery
mixed
specially by your sensitivity for savory scribbles made
into
sensory salves. Under honeycombed membranes,
a
deceptively voluminous body lies waiting
for
the jolt to spring forth from comatose layers.
The
void's cloaked edges flake, and strips bow back and collapse
to
reveal that brilliant, fanfare-confident
Ah
Ha!
My
Sweet Muse
She
comes without warning,
never
at my behest,
to
baptize my blotched mind
in
sensory salves marked:
joy,
grief, love, and rage.
Honeycombed
brain chambers ooze
through
to fingers and secrete
savory
scribbles
in
ebony purity
toward
that rich, darling
Aha!
moment.
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