1. You have so much promise, but you NEED TO FIX YOUR ARBITRARY LINE BREAKS. They undermine you. Line break at the end of phrases, places you’d put pauses (if you’re not reading like the stereotype of a beat poet). If you want to work some jarring line breaks in for effect, break your poem per the normal rules and THEN decide which lines you want to be jarring. If you decide you want all of the lines to be jarring, at least be intentional about it. Not that it’ll help much.

2. Punctuation and poetry aren’t enemies. Your work reads like one enormous run-on sentence, or a car with no brakes. Exert control! High speeds feel higher if you start out slow, or if you stop. Punctuation marks are the stage directions to your poem. They needn’t be extravagant, but marking the end of a scene is helpful for the actors, the director, and the audience.

3. Repetition is like a knife! Used properly, it will cut the breath out of your reader. Too frequently or improperly, and IT GETS DULL. If you enjoy playing with repetition, underline the word when you go to edit your poem, and then rate the importance of its use in each of those places, 1-10. If you use the same word more than 10 times, you’re REALLY in trouble. Cut at least half of your use of the word- play with synonyms, allusions, or even rhymes. The remaining uses of the word will be more poignant.

4. Plot your poem! If you return to the same scene over and over without exposing the audience to something new, they will get impatient with you. This goes for poems without characters or “plot”, too. If your poem is a still-life photograph of a garden, and you keep returning to a garden gnome in the one corner, each time you return to describe the garden gnome, the description of the gnome should change or deepen our understanding of the gnome.

(more advice when I’ve had more sleep)