Charisma - Please critique!

[(Wordy)]

I'm planning to submit this one to a magazine soon, but it's not quite up to scratch yet. Feel free to pick it apart, offer constructive criticism, tell me what's working and what isn't - don't hold back!


Charisma

When was the last time you
faked
charisma?

Were you wasted?

Profiling your interests for a dating site?

(“wild parties, unhinged picnics,
balloon sculpture”)

Sometimes making a fake is a waste,
like breaking a lake
or trying to pick up in a pickup.

Sometimes language is a loser
and dejected hacks are behind everything

like right now in this country,
so conned and immobilised.

I know, you don’t want to talk politics,
but fuck!

Basically charisma is hard to get,
so if you’re faking it
let me remind you:
even the sky lies.

(hope that’s some kind of consolation)

I mean
what can things mean?

I give up, what?

Is it easier to be a ‘fun person’
when everything looks meaningless?

Some days I deflate, wonder
(is it just me?) whether
everything queuing to be heard / seen / read
is not worth knowing,
cannot be swallowed.

All this
wasted content.

But there’s beauty in the
city’s hip highflyers,
confident sleep of Tibetan monks,
sham squabbles that end
in consensual climax –

a charismatic beauty.

After all,
charisma derives from the
Greek kharisma, “divine
favour”.

The way we are a couple of days
after peaking on MDMA
is the opposite of charisma:

our faces deserted,
all but the most animal
entertainment fails;

all is lost
until found again.

We resort to re-heating
leftover charisma,

find it’s hard to conserve
through cold corridors,
fluorescent-bled office,
files fat with complaints.

(I think blind officeworkers
are very lucky compared to
their sighted peers.

They don’t catch the protesting
eyes, carcinogens, under-
appreciation, murderous
décor).

My manager wears charisma
like headdress feathers
of an Indian Chief
that I see reflected on my monitor
while he peers, arms folded, behind me.

Meanwhile, in another corner of hyperspace,
charisma is
leaking everywhere
in the gym.


(c) Stu Hatton 2006

http://wordyness.blogspot.com/2006/03/charisma-2006.html

 

[wesmdow]

sorry to tell you wordy, i find this one boring.

its too long-- i got tired of reading it half way through-- that is just weakness on my part, but i feel it says something about the poem.

i dont feel like going back and quoting right now (im a bit drunk and tired) but the second half is much much stronger in my opinion. i think you should try cutting some (or much, simplicity is good in poetry, i think) of the less relevant stanzas out.

but what do i know? im just a novice.. maybe they all have some interwoven meaning im missing?

 

[(Wordy)]

I'm glad you've been honest - when I said not to hold back, I meant it!

And I think you've definitely got a point about paring it down. I've got a few stanzas marked for pruning, but it'll be a case of retaining some kind of flow. At the moment I think the flow is very contrived in places. There are jumps, but they aren't intelligent jumps.

It's funny that you think the second half is better. I'd more or less convinced myself that the opening section was ok, then after that it fell away, with the occasional half-decent line. But now you're making me reconsider the opening as well. This is all good... thanks for the feedback!

 

[lostNfound]

1. the first thing i dont like.

When was the last time you
faked
charisma?

This should really only be one line for greater impact OR two lines, first ending at you and second line containing faked charisma but you need those pause dots after you at the end of the second line.

2.
(“wild parties, unhinged picnics,
balloon scsulpture”)

Sculpture should be sculptures to follow suit.

3.

Actually, I'll stop here and be completely honest.
I dont like it at all.
I think you should scrap it all and start again.
You always write awesome pieces where the words and everything twists and moulds itself together.

But..... I just dont feel anything reading this.

If you were to submit this the way it is now, it wouldn't be fair having such a wide audience read something that seems rushedand cleary isn't your best work.

Try again, you can do 1000 X better on a clean slate, or was there a reason you wanted to stick with this theme/format?

HONEST!


Only my opinion and from my perspective.

 

[lostNfound]

I should have mentioned why i got bored so early in the piece.

For me, when reading short pieces like this one, it really needs to gather all its momentum at the beginning. Think of a snowball rolling down a hill, building its momentum at the beginning, or something similar. Without that momentum early, or without intrigue its no fun getting the bottom of the piece slowly and saying, wow, got here safely but fuck that was boring to watch.

hope that made some sense, im drunk and this laptop is so much effort to typ on.

 

[Mary Poppins]

Wordy - i'm gonna go with the other commenters...i love a lot of what you write, but I found this boring. I got bored and didn't go past the second half until I read the first comment, then I went back and read the 2nd half and liked it a lot.

For me, the first half is not 'poetic' enough. I know that's an extremely ambiguous let alone subjective criticism, but I just felt like you were writing prose rather than poetry, whereas the second half actually got me conjuring up imagery and enjoying the language you were using.

Maybe to illustrate your point about the whole hiding behind a facade of charisma theme you could use a series of language devices (which i got the feeling you were trying to do at one point...) to suggest that over the top style of faux-charisma.

Hope this helps, make sure you post the edited version

 

[(Wordy)]

Well, what can I say? I'm glad I decided to post this for critique. Like I said, I was planning to submit this to a magazine (along with a couple of other poems). The mag mainly publishes humorous / satirical poetry and prose which is usually contemporary without being particularly experimental. So maybe I'm guilty of trying to fit my work to the publication a bit too much, at the expense of my own style.

I think I'll probably put this one on the back burner - it would take a lot of effort to save it. I can see ways in which it could be improved, but maybe I'm better off starting with a clean slate and writing something else.

Thanks for the honest advice, everyone.