hi i'm new. what do you think of this poem???

Question

i'm a lonely
young man
looking for love
not misery.

i've seeked high
and low,
searched left
and right.

yet no girl has come,
not the right one at least,
so my lost search
continues once again....

i know. it's not very good.

Answer 1

what about me
have pizza in Pasadena
Im waiting candy maker

Answer 2

Good news, bad news. The bad news is that it is not all that good. The good news is that you've gotten the most difficult part out of the way...you sat down, put something together, posted it and are willing to listen to criticism. Trust me, that, by far, is the most difficult part of being a poet: starting, posting, listening.

Now, about the poem...you first have to understand what a poem is, and what it is not. Your first stanza is either the first line of a poem, or prose. Why? because poetry "shows", it doesn't "tell"...your first entire stanza is a single sentence, "I'm a lonely young man looking for love, not misery"...it doesn't matter how many times you split it up with line breaks...it's still prose if it stands alone. However, this is a common problem with new poets because they're still trying to find out "how" to do a poem. If you had said,
"What you see is not just a young man
but misery in search of love"...That! would have been poetry. So it wasn't what you said, it was how you said it. Do you see the difference? Your original "said" or "told" what you were...the second one denied what the first said and substituted an intangible, "misery" as the speaker...this is called "personification"..."misery" is not really a person, but when you "show" yourself as being the personification of misery, it becomes both what and who you are...that's what poetry does.

Next, you've "seeked high and low"...no, you "searched high and low"...I understand that you didn't want to use "searched" twice...but you could have said,
"I've searched high and low, both left and right"...why add "both"? to add a beat so it didn't sound too short.

Next mistake: "yet no girl has come"...do things "come" when you search for them...or are they "found"? see the difference? you used the wrong word...that's called a malapropism...and you didn't "lose" your search, so it was never "lost"...your search was not fruitful, not successful, so you "continue"...not "continue again"...that's like saying "I will keep going again"...that's another error. But hey, don't worry about it..the nice part about writing poetry is that you get to make mistakes in your early drafts that you simply fix in the next...or you learn and try not to make the same mistakes with the next poem. It cost you nothing but time to write it, and each poem will teach you something new about poetry...so...

Keep writing!

Answer 3

I don't think it's bad at all. Just a couple of suggestions. On line 5, there is no such word as "seeked". I'd substitute either sought(the correct word for the past tense of seek), or looked, which would work a little better with the verse. And on the next to last line, "lost search" just doesn't seem to fit. Maybe futile search. And I'd take the word "once" out of the last line.

So my futile search
Continues again.

But you have a good grasp of rhythm in free verse, which is not always easy. Keep it up!

Answer 4

I like it. Keep up the writing.

Answer 5

hey, it was good, don't be so quick to put yourself down, (as i have been told enough times for it to go through my thick head),

and i know this poem holds your true feelings, you just want someone to be there for you, to love you, and for you to love them back,

it was a good poem.

Kara

Answer 6

i wonder. anyways, most poems rhyme. i know because my daddy joins a club and it's called Ben Song May, anyways i like it!

Answer 7

ur sooo sweet wanna be friend ur poem is so good hunni just so sweet

Answer 8

I liked it :-)... just keep doing what you do and you'll get better all the time.

Answer 9

lovely! its so sweet. keep up the writing. :)

~em

Answer 10

Not bad. Keep at it.