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WebSlam VII – Round 2
Poems
The Burning Bush
Kenneth Nieto — Santa Fe Indian School
kooneya@asiamail.com
The unfriendly fire
Campaigns surround
In NM the race is close
Bush ahead in the polls
Nader’s back in
Kerry gains blue states
Re-Elect Bush?
You crazy? Or Blind?
What ever happened to
separation of church and state?
War goes on
back into the fire.
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Reviewer:
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Rebecca Seiferle, seiferle@yahoo.com
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Rating:
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7.1
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Review:
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While I appreciate your sense of the political realities here, I think the poem suffers from a lack of being grounded in a particular reality. It reads like the sort of general questions one might ask in conversation and in poetry one would hope that the questions would take on such resonance and vividness as to be truly unanswerable. Also the “are you crazy” is addressed to the reader, being here the general ‘you’ rather than a particular person, and the reader may have been agreeing with the speaker all along. If the poem is arguing, it needs to argue against someone in particular or a particular view, etc.
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Posted: Nov/7/2004 9:11 pm
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Reviewer:
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Kenn Rodríguez, maspoetry@yahoo.com
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Rating:
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6.4
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Review:
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This is just kind of a journal entry, man. But you have the beginnings of a poem.
“War goes on/back into the fire.”
Man that is a great line.
You could build a whole poem around that. What you have now is kind of trifling. I can feel the frustration, but just a little. And “NM” instead of “New Mexico” come on. That’s just lazy.
My suggestion is to condense the first ten lines into four lines as a beginning then really explore what happens after “back into the fire.” I mean, were we in the fire before and going back or are we going into now. This kind of reminds me of Rage Against the Machine’s “Sleep Now in the Fire”. You have the passion for it. Now just write it down. Following the prompt might not help you get there but that’s okay. Work with it.
You have a really great poem trying to get out of you. Go with it and see what happens.
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Posted: Nov/8/2004 10:32 am
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