tWR Critiques You! with nightshade-keyblade

To know more about this series and why it started, read more about it HERE, on the first blog entry we posted.

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First Blood by nightshade-keyblade

As last time, let me remind you to check the category! This is filed under "emotional, free verse" and you'll find it's well placed. (:

Reading the piece over a couple of times the first thing that jumps to my attention is the amount of telling, instead of showing that this poem does. A close second is some repetitions throughout that seem like they wanted to "strenghten" the message of the sentence, but not all repetitions do; some hinder the pace of the reading.

The "show, don't tell" rule that eveyone loves so much simply means getting read of these:

"The laughter behind me rings not like the bells of happy days
But blares and howls like the hunter's horn and the wolf's growl"

"While my own feet are like marble"

"The japes and barbs told to my face feel like drizzle on my head"

And so on.  It means creating sentences such as these:

"The laughter behind me isn't those bells of happy days
It's the blare and howl of a hunter's horn and the wolf's growl"

"While my own feet are marble"

"The japes and barbs told to my face are drizzle on my head"

The effect is much stronger, and much more poetic. It paints a much more intense image and poetry lives for that. (:
(Let me also mention, here, I personally found the choice of marble to describe the feet not able to move from their position a bit weird. Concrete would have been my choice, probably.)

Some verses are just too long. I understand your wanting to keep the stanzas with four verses, but a random verse as long as

"It didn't come from the poisoned whispers you uttered when you thought I was out of earshot"

"In the darkest moments of my solitude, I still hear the echoes of shoes slapping the ground "

Slows the poem down and the rhythm becomes weird.
I would consider rephrasing them, to fit the verses' length. A suggestion for the longest verses I quoted:

"nor the poisoned whispers uttered when you thought I wouldn't hear"

"Even in darkest solitude the echoes of shoes slap the ground"

Especially in the second verse, I took out EVERYTHING that was unneeded. You don't exactly need to mention the darkest "moments", in my opinion, because "darkest solitude" in itself is an instance, an event that isn't always happening, just sometimes, as it seems clear from this kind of poem; and I also took out "I hear", first because in the verse after that you mention the echoes ringing in your ears, and because even without it we know that what the verse means is that you can still hear them even when your solitude is darkest. In the first part, I took out "It didn't come from" because the repetition was a bit too strong and not needed, I felt and I changed "was out of earshot" to "wouldn't hear" because it was slightly shorter, but "was out of earshot" is fine too if you really want it worded like that.

In general, I feel like your stanzas contain more words than what they would need in order to send the same message across. Taking a random one as example,

The japes and barbs told to my face feel like drizzle on my head
A constant irritation too minor to acknowledge but too constant to forget
But the words that are said in my absence are rainwater
Drowning me in the flood of my own self-hatred

(especially that repetition of constant, it needs to go) Reworded as:

The japes and barbs told to my face are drizzle on my head
An irritation too minor to acknowledge, too constant to forget
But the words said in my absence are rainwater
drowning me in my own self-hatred

Says the same exact thing, but the thing with poetry is that you must only use the absolutely necessary words. Everything else is just background noise that distracts from the message in the poem, and in this case, unnecessary words do that. There has to be no barrier between you and the reader, and too much embellishment takes the magic of your words away.

(Random thought: "I am the quill that will write my life's story" made me think of the poem Invictus, which I really love, by William Ernest Henley)

A few other nitpicks that are too spread out to be mentioned all together.

"It didn't even come from the silence of the witnesses around me"
You have a chance for a good rhetoric figure here. Rewording it as "It didn't even come from the surrounding witnesses' silence" would give you an excellent consonance, and the meaning stays intact.
"The pain comes from the memories."
You used a past tense before, I think you should keep it past in this verse too. Also possibly not saying "the pain" again, just "it". I think the repetition isn't that effective.
"Fear is a latent poison that slows you down"
The use of the word "latent" is a bit weird there. Analyze the verse a bit and see if it really is the term you needed?
"So the burning trees and the bodies of my tormentors"
I don't really know where the trees come from and why they're placed there. I would take that out.
"Must never leave my heart so full of wrath"
This is tricky. I understood that what you said was that your desires for revenge on those people must never be anything but a secret thought in your heart, but like that it could also sound like "these thoughts must never leave my heart angry", you know what I mean? I would replace the verb "leave" with "escape" and maybe rewrite it as "Must never escape my raging heart", or a synonym. Is wrathful viable? If so, that would work too.
"To return their cruelty would make of me a reprobate"
I would omit the "of me", it's unnecessary.
"But when did a hero avenge himself and live happily ever after?"
The "but" is in contrast with the previous stanza, but what you say in the current stanza AGREES with the previous one, in a way, because on the previous you say that you mustn't be as evil as the people tormenting you, and on the current one you say how revenge is meaningless. I would replace it with either "for"(because) or "and". Both work.

Your feedback questions were these:
1.) It's a highly personal piece with certain verses based on my own memories but can you understand or relate to the imagery present in this piece?
2.) Do my allusions make any sense or should I remove them/have less of them?
3.) What parts make sense? What parts don't?
4.) Does it read smoothly?
5.) General ideas or opinions

And I think I replied to all but the first. The imagery is very relatable, I think everyone can understand from this piece the feeling of being bullied. (:

And now for the good things about this...

nightshade-keyblade has the insight of someone who has been bullied, and that is central to the success of this piece. He's also a deviant who doesn't write as much poetry as he does prose, and this is very noticeable in this deviation: the structure reads almost like a prose with linebreaks. However, the images, the choice of words and examples he gives for his feelings scream "poetry" at me, and I was happy about that. Maybe when the time is right, this is the kind of poem he can look back to and say "now that I learned more, what is there that I can work on?".
The poem's strength, in my opinion, is the realisation that revenge isn't the right path to follow. I enjoyed the positive, hopeful ending, maybe because there are too many unhappy ones when it comes to bullying. And the imagery was sharp and not cliché, which is a VERY good point.

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He's been a deviant for 5 years, so that's a lot of time for writing and developing!

The first work I chose is

The Potter's Den
It's one of the very first lit pieces in his gallery, from 2009, and it's a short story centered about a boy slipping out of his home to see the nearby village where he's not allowed to go.

The story was nice and has a lot of potential. Beginning and end are definite, and it could definitely be a good prose. The things that stood out to me were these:

• in the first paragraph especially, sentences start out being really short. That doesn't happen as much in the following ones, but it's still here and there.
• punctuation is weird at times. A random example is "With a few pieces of gold that I carried in a small pouch, I paid the guard, a tall and well-built man, to keep an eye", the first comma is unneeded.
• there are adjectives for everything. What I mean is, every person and object seems to have a description attached to it, and that's often not necessary but especially for people just starting out, it feels like it's required and needed.
• the character Hannaha a bit too easily decides to just show to a random boy how to make vases. I can totally see it being because she saw William's interest in the pottery, but it's not mentioned at all, she just randomly decides to show him how it's done. A bit weird.

The second is

There He Goes Again
This one is much more recent, from February 2013, but I think it really shows a lot the general improvement of nightshade-keyblade!

• sentences are generally well written, of the right length, and punctuation is also good.
• the use of adjectives is improved, too. There are still parts where it gets almost overly descriptive, but overall, the stress is on the story and not on the tiny details we can do without.
• the story - it's non-fiction, but still - follows a logic succession of events, is intriguing, has some very interesting imagery here and there and it's relatable, but is set in a different country from usual, which is refreshing.

There is still room for improvement - there are a few things here and there that I think didn't need as many words about them, and others that maybe wanted more -, but I personally found it a great difference!

The last work is poetry, to show the improvement from the first work I critiqued to this. "First Blood" is from end of 2012, and this is an improved version (submitted in 2014) of an older poem this deviant wrote.

In Her Embrace
Just to recap, what I highlighted about his older poem, First Blood, was essentially how it was a bit too much prose-y, it told more than it showed, and used more words than necessary to send the same message across.
In this other poem, however

• the verses' structure is definitely that of a poem.
• the words he uses paint a picture in your head. Unlike in "First Blood", where too many words where used to described things (which slows our imagination down, I believe), "In Her Embrace" does what poetry should do: shows!
• almost ( ) every word in there is necessary. I find this to be the most important improvement, because it eventually leads to the two above.

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Whether huge or small, each of us makes improvement over time, but only if we're willing to work hard! nightshade-keyblade is the example of how this hard work pays off. He's the kind of deviant who's always willing to take feedback and consider suggestions on his writing, and that always gives you something back. (:
It doesn't matter if you don't get a Daily Deviation, a group feature, a Daily Lit Recognition, if you don't win a contest or that dA Premium Membership your friend was giving away: if you have learned and keep learning new things since joining deviantART, you're already more successful than many deviants here.

Do you, as a member, have any deviation that you have submitted to us more than a week ago and hasn't received enough feedback? Would you want the admin team to give you some in-depth constructive criticism on it, and check out your gallery for a chance to show not only the community, but you, how much your writing has evolved since you joined here, and what are its strong and weak points?

A poll will be posted soon. Leave a comment on there with the deviation you'd like more feedback on, and good luck! see you in a couple of weeks.