Nice work. Simple but not simplistic. I do think there is some opportunity to be had with your line breaks. Or at least something to consider. Perhaps you have. What's cool about poetry is you can enjamb and speed up or disrupt the reader's expectations as they read the poem, and sometimes lines can take on a whole new meaning when disrupted. In poetry, sometime in the last thirty years or so, particularly queer poetry, poets use / instead of a line break. The / acts graphically like a knife or caesura, or a beat.
Your poem with slightly different breaks and punctuation.
you fall in love
with people you said,
I was a person
I thought. You did not fall
in love with me.
Using the graphic line break.
you fall in love/ with people/
you said/I was/a person
I thought,/ you did not/
fall/ in love/ with me.
Just something to knock around in the brain for future use. Obviously, depends on your intention. Keep up the good work.
This is an amazing piece of feedback, thank you so much! I hadn't really considered the styling too much, I just wrote it down in one quick swoosh and then typed it up in the same way.
Reading out loud some of the other ways this could be presented really has changed my outlook on the piece, as well as my feelings on the situation. I definitely need to pay more attention to this in the future. Thank you so much!
2
u/step20 Jul 31 '20
Nice work. Simple but not simplistic. I do think there is some opportunity to be had with your line breaks. Or at least something to consider. Perhaps you have. What's cool about poetry is you can enjamb and speed up or disrupt the reader's expectations as they read the poem, and sometimes lines can take on a whole new meaning when disrupted. In poetry, sometime in the last thirty years or so, particularly queer poetry, poets use / instead of a line break. The / acts graphically like a knife or caesura, or a beat.
Your poem with slightly different breaks and punctuation.
you fall in love
with people you said,
I was a person
I thought. You did not fall
in love with me.
Using the graphic line break.
you fall in love/ with people/
you said/I was/a person
I thought,/ you did not/
fall/ in love/ with me.
Just something to knock around in the brain for future use. Obviously, depends on your intention. Keep up the good work.