Crossing the Grassland

Hi Charles,

Thanks for entering this piece into the workshop. Let me see if I can leave a some constructive criticism and a couple thoughts on the piece.

The first line contains the metaphor "A dream is a grassland" and opens up the poem. I can already guess at a few similarities between dream and grassland -- the vastness, the openness of it, the way it stretches out and out, inhabited by interesting creatures and adventures. But let's see what the poem itself says. The second strophe mentions how big it is and points out how it's rarely crossed. Many think about crossing it, but that idea is never realized.

In this way, the poem suggests that the dream itself is very real and can be achieved, but people are daunted by the scale and don't try. Reading on, the poem shifts away from the dream-is-a-grassland idea and focuses on the people, standing at the edge.

In this way, the poem veers away from the point of the of the workshop. It does not develop the metaphor outside of a brief couple mentions of it, rather, shifting to focus on the journey the people (do not) make. The piece has a nice and inspirational message, but I feel that the grassland could have been a dash more prominent. The use of all the senses (sight, smell, taste, touch, sound), for example, could have given the piece more context and more texture. The use of concrete imagery would have let the reader imagine himself standing on this dream-grassland.

In a way, I feel cheated. There's this really great idea and message, and it's very abstract. There's little for my imagination to gnaw on -- it's the difference between being in Venice, and reading a guidebook.

That said, I'll move on to a few poem specific comments. I noticed a few grammar mistakes/typos. In "It's perimeters", there should not be that apostrophe. "It's" means "It is". The punctuation within the piece was also slightly off. A way I use to check for punctuation is to take out all the linebreaks and read the poem as if it were prose (after all, the same rules apply most of the time). When that's done, the linebreaks no longer confound or hide the punctuation. For example, in "Yet, it's rarely ever crossed, / most just gaze into its horizon and hope." the comma connects two separate sentences. Here, a period, semicolon, or dash would be needed.

Rereading this, I can't help but wonder who is speaking. Perhaps it is a god, perhaps it is the dream/grassland, or perhaps it's a character/narrator. I had a same sense of uncertainty when I read the rhetorical questions. My overall impression of the piece is that there are some great ideas there, but they're somewhat bare -- as if I have the skeleton of a wonderful poem laid out for me, but the flesh and skin aren't there yet. Maybe the piece could be expanded some more to let the skeleton put on a bit more flesh.

Ambiguity in poetry is perfectly fine, but there's a line to be walked between having several layers of meaning on the one hand, and frustrating the reader by being too vague on the other. I felt a dash frustrated and confused in that I didn't quite "get it", so to speak. Perhaps the piece could be focused more?

Winding down, I noticed that some lines were much longer than others. Was there a reason for this? I also noticed that these longer lines tended to have the least content/focus. Perhaps a line like this one: "They wait and they wait as their lives pass them by with each setting of the sun." could work just as (if not more) effectively in this form:

"They wait and they wait.
Their lives pass with each setting sun."

I took out the "them by" for example, because I'm not certain that it's actually adding any new meaning. It read like potential filler to me, though I'll freely admit that it's also a stylistic choice. Still, for me, if a word or phrase isn't driving a poem forward, there's not need for me. <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/s/s…" width="15" height="15" alt="" title=" (Smile)" />

Also, I just saw that you entered it into a contest. Fingers crossed and good luck!

So yes, I'm going to wrap up and say that I'm glad I had a chance to read and respond to this. I hope my thoughts will be useful -- and if not for this piece, then perhaps in the future. Please don't hesitate to message me or shoot me a note if you wish to discuss something I wrote. Good luck writing!
<img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/w/w…" width="23" height="23" alt="" title="w00t!" />

=nycterent

PS. I have to star this, since dA makes it so that one must rate to submit a critique, but please know that the stars here are completely arbitrary. They have nothing to do with my opinions or this critique.