/lit/ - Literature

>>20803074
Thanks, this was very helpful. I really appreciate you taking the time to read this so carefully. If you’ve got the time to look over a bit more, I’m worried about the number of substitutions in some of my other stanzas. For example, this is the one that follows immediately after the two that you just read, and I think that using compound adjectives in both the first and last lines (“tight-jawed” and “dusk-blue” respectively) might create spondees that disrupt the flow of the iambic meter. At the same time though, it evokes a sort of tension that I like, so I’m unsure about changing it. Also, I generally like to keep my punctuation as minimal as possible, but I don’t know if the first line would read better if I used a comma after “tense.”

My other concern is that this stanza might seem like an abrupt change in subject— the poem makes sense to me because I know the larger context of what I’m writing about, but I think that to anyone else it might come across as disjointed. Maybe I need to incorporate more of a transition?