killtime sonnet #23

and the truth is that a killtime sonnet is BY DEFINITION a dashed off thing. Criticism is thus a double gift, first, for that it is criticism at all, of what does not (in its nature) warrant proper criticism, but only a grunt of understanding or approval; second, for that it gives me a headstart on a rewrite, when, as sometimes happens, a killtime sonnet holds a thought worth proper development. This one, though, is a tough call. Without its context--you supposed rightly that the poem was 'sparked' (I cannot say 'inspired' with a straight face) by the recent flame war--the poem is only a weird little thing about my attitude toward gnats. And who the [pickanexpletive] gives a [disgustingphrase] about that? In my count, I come up with a clean ten per line--but, as we both know, we count the syllables as each of us produces the words in the piece. There is probably a serious critical discussion in that observation; reading your critique, it occurred to me that the distinction 'stressed/unstressed' is kinda unrefined when it comes to English. We should perhaps revise the measures, as by picking out the dynamics of speech, the pronunciation of dipthongs (e.g, as I say the word, 'oil' is a tight single syllable, whereas around Beaumont, Texas, that word has seven syllables.), suppression or recognition of semi-vowels, etc. In that light, your suggestion of 'stalked' is apt--and it works! Ditto, the punctuation suggestion for the last line of the couplet. I had yielded, in a moment of weakness, to the ghost of an English teacher now perhaps dead. That one was always murdering my semi-colons, and replacing them with periods. But now I have your bolstering suggestion in hand. Die, Mrs. O! And stay dead, this time! The line L12 was okay. That suggested verb replacement was off, with regard to my purpose, that was to give purpose to the swarm qua swarm; the emergent behavior of a mob is given a degree of autonomy with 'achieves'. The suggestion was not off, though, for if my purpose had been the modest aim of saying 'I ignore gnats and go on about my business,' it would have been precisely right, referring to my visceral perception of the swarm. I'm rating this a four-star critique. I call it B work. It's noticeably better than average (C) work, which is how I grade about 2/3 of the whole (population of critiques). Yeah, that standard bell curve. It's a lazy measure, but it's what I use, and what I'm gonna use until the world of Neopoet adopts 'match point scoring.' ------------------ By the way, what happened to the flame war? It seems to have been blown off by the winds.

Kopa tiki o popa, ita, kakotika pota topiti! Kinda looks like it might mean somethin', don' it?

Why write another faux comment, you ask? Because the poems I'm doin' that for today have not been visited a hundred times yet---and their 'visits' include a substantial number of 'visits' engendered by my returns to the pieces, and some spurious 'visits' that appear to be artifacts of bugs in the program. So, get used it: I keep recommenting until I feel that the poem has had enough exposure to lend value to the numbers.