Future Noir

[[Cameron]]

I handed this inot my English teacher today, but for personal improvement I wanted to know what you think about it and how it could be improved.

Future Noir
   
   High rise buildings,
   Neon flashing lights,
   Scum at ground zero,
   Underground trains moving filth,
   Free access drugs melt their minds,
   The iron fist of the corporation,
   Moulding them into the living dead,
   The average man a slave,
   Corporations rule as nations,
   Happiness is not an option,
   Corruption riddled police,
   Brutalizing innocents,
   Free will crushed,
   Aspirations crumbled,
   Sanity abolished,
   Religion a thing of the past,
   Unbearable suffering,
   Reality or illusion,
   Fantasy or future?



Regards,


Alec

[Raider]

Wow. Very deep and meaningful, but at the same time it sounds grusome. It sounds like the city. It is no doubt about people going to work day after day being slaves to the city and big corperations. Nice work.

- Raider

[[Cameron]]

Come on people, I need some C+C

[Kweepa]

I think the last two lines are cliched and unnecessary.
Well, it's all cliched, but it would be much better without them. IMO.

[[Cameron]]

I did not find the last to lines to be great, but i needed them to make it 20 lines.

[Renal Shutdown]

Firstly, as I said in #ags, poetry is a very difficult thing to criticise.  We can't point out technical issues like bad perpective or double pixels or the fact that red and orange don't look good together.  Poetry is a very vague art form.  It doesn't even have to rhyme for heavens sake.  So I think a lot of folks won't post because they can't really suggest anything to improve it.

Personally, I suck at poetry.  I've never really payed attention in my English classes, since I found the story writing section far more interesting.  Usually, for me to like a poem, it has to make me laugh.  However, I said I'd give you an honest opinion of it, and here goes.

Steve's right.  It is a clichéd subject.  Not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm sure it's something to think about.  The last two lines do seem tacked on just to make up the numbers.  However, there's one thing that sticks out to me more than this, and that's the flow.

It's not something I can explain well, but I'll do my best.  It seems too staccato for my tastes, it's short line, short line, short line, etc.  It doesn't seem to have much of a melody to it.  The current flow of it makes me feel uneasy, and for some reason I start to tense up when reading it.  This is probly a good thing, considering the subject matter but I, myself, am not keen on it.

[Snarky]

It's not a poem, it's a laundry list of cyberpunk clichés.

Sorry to sound harsh, but I'm afraid it's pretty bad. On the positive side, you're writing, you're willing to show what you've written to others, and you're looking to improve. That means you'll get better.

Poetry doesn't need to rhyme, but there needs to be some rhythm to the words. I can see the relationships between the meaning of each line, but not between the words and structure of the sentences.

It also helps to have something to say. Next time, why don't you try writing about something personal, instead of something you've read?

[Sinitrena]

First, I must say, english is a foreign language for me, so I can't say much about rhythm (sp) or things like that. But I think there are more important things in poetry than the way it sounds. Poetry wants to describe feelings or wants to transport feelings so that the reader can feel wathever the writer wants them to feel

The following is just my personal opinion...
The first for lines sound good and they fit together. I read it and I felt as if I could see it, like a poem should make you feel. But the next three line doen't fit at all, not mainly because of the meaning of these lines but because of the feeling of these lines (I can't explain this very good, sorry) I seems as if these lines where taken out of an other poem. After that it get's better again.
It still needs a lot of improvement but you shouldn't try to change it because this always makes a poem worse IMO
About the cliche thing: Yeah, you could call it a cliche and, yeah, you could decide not to write cliched poems or tell it a bad thing to write cliched things, but why? Something is just cliched if you make it a cliche. What I mean is, if you stop writing about a cliche it still is a cliche, the only difference is that some important things about it won't be said (does this make sense?  )
Well, at least, something about the last two lines of your poems: I like them. They finish the poem with a question and that's the best way to end a poem because it makes the reader think. (Well, perhaps there is a better question, but this one is OK)

[fertoff]

mmm,,,the poem didn't create any kind of feelings in my mind, not a single one...

the idea of the poem is overused, but i'm not against that....but you wrote it in a not original way, i would have thought of some kind of metaphor instead of just enumerating your ideas...

and i would have used some simils and oxymorons(never remember how to spell it right...) to create some contrast and give the poem some more "texture"
some thing like "your dreamed reality, nothing but slaved freedom...."(this is bad,,but just an example...)

bye

[stuh505]

Anything that is written with the intent to be poetry IS.  Don't tell him that it's not poetry...it is.  It doesn't particularly speak to me either, though....except for one line, "corporations rule as nations" which I think is clever.  Your poem here looks like how I often prepare to write a poem...just write down the thoughts you want to convey on separate lines...then FROM that try to make it poetic.  I say, see what you can do with it from here?

[Cerulean]

As a purely technical note, it looks to me as if you might be incorrectly using "ground zero" (the center of an explosion, the exact place where a bomb has, is, or potentially will be dropped). From context it seems like you mean street level. If you do mean it correctly, I guess it doesn't make sense to me.

[[Cameron]]

I understand it what Ground Zero is. I was trying to say something important by using it but now i forget what it was.

[Ali]

I think the last two lines are cliched and unnecessary.
Well, it's all cliched, but it would be much better without them. IMO.

It's not a poem, it's a laundry list of cyberpunk clichés.

Alec seems to be trying to establish the characteristics of a genre. I'm not sure it's fair to criticise them as clichéd. If I wrote:

The Western

Cowboys
Good vs Bad/Ugly
Reluctant Heroes
Grit
etc.

Would I be criticised for using clichés?

I'm not sure, however, that this does work as a poem in itself. It seems more like a stimulus for further work.