Posting poetry, reluctantly.

[thalia]

I've been goaded into putting this up, but here goes. It's rather old, BTW.
Be as mean as you like in your criticism. I can take it.
.................................................. .....
on multiplicity

I remember:
a beach, a chill grey sky.
On cursory inspection,
nothing different;
but let bare feet sink in sand, and something is altogether new.
The beach is alive with tiny grey life.
(a conjunction of the tides; or the seasons)
Not one of a hundred will live to maturity;
but here and now, in the grey sandy dawn,
a million unknowable lives wriggle against my skin.

Away with your prophecies! Open to me
this brave new world, that builds
chance upon chance upon chance,
alerts us to our own improbability -
so briefly the swallow flies!
And our minds tingle at the touch
of a million might-have-been-universes

[Shea]

I'm glad you were goaded. lol great imagry! The poem, I gather is about sea turtles and statistics for extinction? I like the comparison in the first stanza of the bland to the amazing. :)

[tadpole]

Couple of things (constructive criticism, not mean) . . .

• Tone: I like the gentle tone of the poem but that think that several elements cause a sudden shift. 1) the colon in the first line of the first stanza. I may be too much of a grammarian, but the colon forces me to pause, which disrupts the flow and changes the tone from what I consider soothing (a nice reflective mood) to declarative in nature. 2) The line "Away with your prophecies!" For one, I just don't think it "fits" the general style of the poem--it's too blunt a statement. Two, it's cliché. Honestly, I think the poem is stronger without it, and the stanza would be much stronger if it were to begin with the sentence "Open to me . . . "

• You use the word "grey" too much. Since the "tiny grey life" is so central to the poem, I would choose to revise it. I also think that a lot of your readers aren't going to know what "tiny grey life" means, so I would encourage you to describe it more explicitly with more concrete language.

• I like the idea that the poem is a single person's (the speaker's) experience that becomes universal because of its themes, but at the end of the last stanza you use "our" as in "And our minds tingle at the touch." I suggest you revise and use "I."

• I would encourage you to revise "brave new world" because your readers will immediately recall Huxley's work. Also, I like the idea of a world "that builds chance upon chance upon chance," but I'd prefer you describe that world to me rather than explain it. Can you find imagery to visualize a world that builds chance upon chance upon chance?

Overall, I especially like the tone of this poem because it's very soothing, but because the theme and subject are so abstract, I think you to need to develop some more concrete imagery to help you reader better understand the concept(s) you explore.

[american_bad_angel1407]

impressive! 8) I like the way you used all the comparisions and metaphores! Nicely done! and by the way, you shouldn't let anyone goad you into showing any of your poetry is you don't want to, don't get me wrong, i'm glad that you did! ;)

[Koa]

I like it... as someone else said before, it seems very abstract to me too, but that's something i often see in poetry... and maybe you, the writer, think is too clear, because you abviously know everything about it! (that's what happens to me at least ;)). I don't think being abstract is bad, and that's something thnat sometimes almost 'annoys' me about poetry: i always would like to know, to understand more, but i'm bad at analysing..

I like this line:

Not one of a hundred will live to maturity
catstrophic as i like things to be lol ;)

I think most of use here are trying to overcome the fear of sharing. But, if that fear has to be overcome, i think this forum i a good place to learn to show, because we can get constructive criticism, and moreover most of us can sympathise cos we're all interested in poetry and we write our own little stuff, so we know how it feels... We might like or dislike other people's work, but we'll always know how to collaborate constructively. And i think at least 3 or 4 people here agree with what i've said :)

(and don't you think i always talk too much lol ;))