I Heard You Cared To Look For Me

I heard you cared to look for me
I am lucky out of the blues you remembered me
A lot is going on in the world, in your mind
Regardless, you are thoughtful and very kind

I heard you cared to look for Me
A reward for all my shut-down communication efforts
To calm your conscience and your mind comfort
Like a bird, you have been set free

I heard you cared to look for me
Not what you want but there are things you need
You are deserving of good deeds
And any other thing that can be

I heard you cared to look for me
To work a tool that makes you feel relevant and good
To talk at, not to, all you need to boost your morale and mood
And to also check in on me

I heard you cared to look for me
Though your heart differs from your actions
I don't judge though I see through your intentions
And I quietly let you be

Then I heard you came looking for me
Like you, for me, I am searching and
myself, I am finding
Sitting but moving on a quiet journey to becoming
You will see me, looking for the old you will no longer find me

Reviews

[JayG]

• I heard you cared to look for me

Rumor. I’m glad to be free of you, Selma. And, uhh… that is you, isn’t it?

• I am lucky out of the blues you remembered me

It’s “out of the blue,” an old expression meaning something that it might as well have fallen out of the sky it was so unexpected.

But that aside, you, someone unknown to the reader, are talking to someone not you've introduced, as-if-the-reader-knows-them. But they don’t. And why would a reader be interested in someone unknown talking about what matters to them in terms too general to provide context?

At the moment, you’re using the nonfiction approach to writing that we all practiced in school by writing all those reports and essays we were assigned. That’s a fact-based approach that’s inherently dispassionate.

But poetry is emotion-based. The reader doesn’t care that YOU cried, or loved, or… They want your words to make THEM feel that emotion. While you may be pouring your heart onto the page, the reader is seeking to be entertained by beng made to live, not know of, an emotional experience.

You don’t care about the people in my life unless I make you care. Reverse that and it’s your situation. But...can you make anyone care by talking AT them, and listing what matters to you? No more than can I do that to you.

My point is that poetry, with its very different objectives requires an approach that draws the reader in. It must make THEM feel and care, not be better informed on your wants and needs.

A really good resource, to make your poems more reader accessible, is Mary Oliver’s, A Poetry Handbook. You can download it free here:
https://yes-pdf.com/book/1596

The Shmoop site is also a great resource. Log in as Student. Then, use the midpage button by the search window to select poetry. Lots of great poems there, analyzed deeply to show how and why they work so well.

Here’s a great poem, on that site, one that shows the power of prosody used well.
https://www.shmoop.com/cremation-sam-mcgee/poem-text.html

Not good news, I know. But it explains why you’ve not been getting more responses to your poems. You may not be able to control what’s happening to you, but acquiring the skills that will help readers better relate to you and your situation, is something you can control.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

[DarkPoet]

Thank you very much Jay for the brutal and honest review. I deleted the first response to compose a more appropriate one,I will go through the link and download the recommended book. Thank you

[JayG]

Don't let it throw you. The trick with any critique is to ask yourself how the reader could have misunderstood so badly. Solve that and you've solved it for a lot more than that one reader.

Our own writing will ALWAYS work for us, because we have full context and intent guiding our understanding, and will fill in any blanks in neccessary information without noticing it happening, Tha'ts why we need to edit from the seat of the reader, who has only the context you provide or evoke.

For example, if you speak of the screams of children at play the reader has context.

For us the narrator's voice—our voice—is filled with exactly the right emotion, The reader has punctuation. That's why one great editing trick is to have the computer read the work to us. But even there, the computer looks at punctuation in determining how to read. The reader sees it after reading it.

Don't let it throw you. As Sol Stein puts it:

“A writer, shy or not, needs a tough skin, for no matter how advanced one’s experience and career, expert criticism cuts to the quick, and one learns to endure and to perfect, if for no other reason than to challenge the pain-maker.”