A Review, Before My Next 100

This article is my 100th ‘story’ on Vocal, so I think it’s a good point to stop and reflect, before I move on. This community came at a perfect time!

I first started writing because I enjoyed reading immersive stories like the Harry Potter and the Artemis Fowl books (two of my favourite series). I wanted to build worlds like those and add in characters that flow seamlessly and are believable, despite being set in a fantastical world. I started writing two different stories to achieve that but I stopped writing them for years now and am slowly getting back to it.

In the midst of writing these stories, a friend and I started talking about interesting subjects and for some reason decided to record and upload them as podcasts (just a phone recording with no editing, so podcast is a stretch). Along with each recording we did, I thought I could write a little article to summarise the topic and try to deliver it with a little more structure (because the podcast episodes were free flowing, with no set structure). The articles helped me learn more about some of the ideas that we had talked about, and I found some people have found them interesting.

And then the most recent addition to my writing resume, poetry, came in. I honestly don’t know how or why I first decided to writing poetry. I had absolutely no link to poetry beyond listening to rap music. Rap lyrics are written in poetic rhythm often, and that is what I based my poetry on. I wrote my first ever poem and published it on Vocal back in 2017, and then I wrote 2 more after that before I stopped writing altogether, until I came back to Vocal earlier this year (February 2023 I believe). Since I came back, I somehow wrote around 70 different things (poetry, articles and stories), which shows you just how bored I was.

Most of what I write now is poetry, because I find it the most enjoyable at the moment. Finding a way to express a certain idea and compress it into a poem felt like quite a challenging idea to me, but it was fun trying to construct poems. At first, I thought I was writing poems because they take less time but, while it is generally true, it does sometimes take me over an hour to write a poem if the topic is particularly interesting, or if I decide to add a twist to the structure. I just found that I simply enjoyed writing poetry.

Despite saying I enjoy writing poetry, I don’t really know much about it. My main reference for poetry is rap music, so when I write poetry, I’m listening to the rhyming of my words and syllables, and I always thought that is what poetry is. I later found different forms of poetry and I have tried them out, but I have no idea if they are good or not. The form, for the lack of a better word, that I struggle with most is free-verse (which technically has no form). I tried to write one but noticed later that some rhyming slipped into the writing.

Anyways, the reason I’m writing this is to ask for critique on some of the poems that I feel are my best, and try to improve for any future writing I do.

I will list some of my poems and write a little about my motivation behind each one. I would love some feedback on the structure, the rhyming (or lack thereof) and whether it is appropriate, and possibly the content of the poem itself.

This is the first poem I had ever wrote. I have no idea why I started writing poetry, nonetheless, I started with this one. I don’t remember exactly what the circumstance were when I wrote this, but I do remember I was still in university. At the time, I realised how some people were devoting their whole being to studying and completing their assignments and not taking the time to relax (I don't mean to party or anything like that, just hanging out with friend and relaxing). The theme of this poem is to not let things cloud your view, and to enjoy life.

I think this was a good poem, but I’m not sure about the progression of the theme within the poem itself, whether it was concise or not. When I first wrote this I’m pretty sure there was no comment section, so I had no idea if it was good or not… so if there were any issues, they simply perpetuated on to every other poem I wrote

This is an interesting one. I wrote this for the sensational challenge on Vocal. I have no idea why I decided to do this, but I wanted to write a poem within a poem. I don’t remember the thought process behind it, but the complete poem came out nice I think. The challenge, in general terms, was to write a poem about one of the senses, so I decided to write about sight. I wanted to write a poem praising sight as the best sense there is, but when I thought about it, I just couldn’t choose which sense was the best. To balance it out, I wrote a second poem within this poem to go against sight.

The main poem is a discussion between two people, and it seems like the one praising sight had won, because he had 2 stanzas (I learnt this about poetry recently, before I just called them sections), whereas the one talking against sight only got one stanza. I had to choose the second poem carefully because hiding a poem inside another is hard. If the second poem was long, it would mean I might have to make the first one even longer! So I decided on a haiku, which I learned about from a previous Vocal challenge. A haiku is made up of 3 lines, so I made the original poem 3 stanzas, to hide each haiku line. It worked out perfectly because of the conversational structure of the original poem.

The haiku was “Sight is believing, But also it’s deceiving, To the mind alludes”. This is based on the known saying “seeing is believing”, but I had to change seeing to sight because of the syllable restrictions of haikus. I think this worked out really well, because the haiku is warning that sight can be deceived, and it is a hidden poem (hidden from sight). I thought that was a nice accidental level added to the poem! I bolded the words for the haiku though, so technically it wasn’t hidden.

I have been thinking of ways to improve this more, like seeing if I could add two hidden poems, but I haven’t really gotten ideas yet, so if you have any do let me know. And if there is anything about this poem you think I could do better please do let me know.

I’m always looking for interesting ways to write a poem, and for some reason I decided to write a poem using the alphabet. Each line would start with a letter from the alphabet and it of course would be in alphabetical order. Later a fellow Vocalist (or Vocalite? What are we called!) mentioned that this is called an abecedarian poem. I thought I came up with it! Shows you how much I don’t know about poetry.

For this I thought it would be hard (and probably boring) if a wrote a 26-line alphabetical poem on the same subject, so I came up with the idea of 2 mythical beings discussing what to do about humanity. Each of them has 13 letters to present their argument.

Weirdly enough, the most challenging part of this poem was the letter “X” since not many words start with it. I didn’t want to use x-ray since it was an obvious choice, so I search for words beginning with X, and found Xenial, which is related to hospitality or relations between host and guest. It worked out nicely with my theme, so I used it.

This is my first free-verse poem (I think it’s the only one so far), so I really just want to know if it feels like a poem. For me, it’s hard reading free-verse poetry like a poem, because in my head poetry needs to have rhyming and structure.

I’m not a writer, and writing is not involved in my work (except maybe emails), so I am writing mainly as a release, because I find it satisfying to change an idea into something solid like a poem or an article (or story once I start writing more of them again). I want to keep improving and finding more ways to express ideas so any constructive criticism is more than welcome! There are many great writers on Vocal and I would like to learn bit and pieces from everyone here.

Vocal has been quite helpful with their poetry challenges, because I discovered interesting forms of poetry through there, but there are also Vocal writers (I’m going to use this until I find out the official name for us) who are always innovating and writing in interesting ways, and it would be quite amazing to learn from them.

If you can give any feedback on any of the poems above, i would be grateful.