two simple poems

someone calling themselves Dissident submitted to my website. Opinions?

September 11

Flights of demons
Glory bound

Sleeping nation
Towers brought down

Hatred of freedom?
Payment of debt?

Has the smoke and rubble even cleared yet?
-Dissident


Memo

We always wanted the war
the memo says, the memo says.

We'll bring friends from distant shores
the memo says, the memo says

Coalition of deceit, dogs of war in heat
the memo says, the memo says

Come Britan share the meat
the memo says, the memo says
-Dissident

I'll pass on your criticism though. I thought they were simple but powerful.

Wonder who Dissident is? Could it be a DUer???

Here's a snip from "Still I Rise", from one of my favorite poets, Maya Angelou:

...You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise....

Really rings true in this day and age of the chimp regime.

mmmm could be ;-)

and to the point. Very nice.

Regarding the poem September 11

I'm leery of 9/11 poems, which can too easily straddle the line between maudlin pandering and maudlin catharsis. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with catharsis, but it doesn't always make for good writing.

The current poem troubles me on several levels: "Demons" is a pretty heavy invocation, and despite this it's an empty stock image. Sure, I guess the hijackers can be thought of as demons, but it's not usefully descriptive, IMO. And it doesn't evoke the commentary of the time, either, because I don't recall hearing them decried as demons.

"Towers brought down" is discordantly concrete next to the more abstract imagery of "Sleeping nation" and "Glory bound." Discord can be effective, but here the discord serves no apparent end, other than to mention the event. Is there anyone among the likely readership who doesn't know what happened on 9/11? Therefore the poet needn't foreground the falling Towers, which are already the primary image of the day.

The questioning couplet is okay, and it reflects the casting-about that we all did at the time, desperate to understand the event. But the closing question suggests that these questions are/were asked too soon, and this just doesn’t ring true. Perhaps the speaker means it as “is it even safe to ask questions yet?” but it doesn’t come across that way. Also, as a grammatical preference, I would have gone with “Have the smoke and rubble even cleared yet?” instead of “Has the smoke and rubble even cleared yet?” An argument could be made that the latter accurately reflects colloquial speech, but it’s the only non-grammatical example in the poem and therefore seems out of place.

Regarding the poem Memo

“Distant shores” is something of a stock phrase, and its inclusion here doesn’t greatly benefit the verse. Additionally, “Coalition of deceit” is a discordant clunker that doesn’t fit the meter, and again the discord serves no apparent end except to preserve the rhyme at the expense of the rhythm. “Dogs of war in heat” isn’t bad—in addition to the Shakespeare allusion, the bloodlust/estrus pairing is a cool image. The image suffers a little because “in heat” is separated from “Dogs,” so it sounds like “war” is “in heat.” Moreover, Pink Floyd employed the phrase “Dogs of War” in their execrable song of the same name, and this only shows that the phrase has itself tumbled into cliché. Still, this part is workable.

“Come Britain share the meat” is the poem’s strongest moment, and it echoes the previous bloodlust as well as evoking the clandestine and exclusive two-nation alliance.

To be honest, I don’t think that the refrain benefits the poem, and the repetition seems arbitrary. It would be more powerful if the phrase “the memo says” appeared only once, as the closing line.


YMMV, of course, and no offense to Dissident meant, either. The danger in this kind of writing is that, if you don’t hit it right on the head, you risk having the work become trite and simplistic.

The best post-9/11 topical poem that I’ve heard is Ani Difranco’s Self Evident, and I recommend that everyone seek it out.

and many good points. Remind me not to show you any of my writings. I don't think my ego could handle it. ;)

By all means, share them! Mine is a single opinion, and if a work doesn't resonate with me, it will surely do so with others. The critical give-and-take is part of the process of writing; if the writer didn't want a work to be critiqued, then the work wouldn't be exposed to the readers' view.

In college I endured a whole bunch of crit courses, so I've developed a fairly thick skin re: my own work; however, I can sometimes forget that other writers haven't had to run that same gantlet and may not have the same calluses.

If my critique seems overly harsh, I hope that at the very least some comfort can be drawn from the knowledge that I've read the poems very closely, out of respect for the poet's effort.

your critique was intricate and exacting and that's the only way a writer will improve himself. It's a lot better to hear criticisms in that fashion as opposed to a hearty "that sucks"