Drilliad

I really love the word play and juxtaposition of Hellenic classics to modern vernacular. But quick question:

of sirens poor and out,

is it supposed to be pour or poor?

The fist five stanzas are amazingly versatile with rhythm, meter, rhyme, and enjambment. I feel like from there it gets a bit more...traditional isn't the right word, but I feel like the scene setting and form give way to the narrative a bit more. Maybe that's not a bad thing, but I wouldn't be against a but more formal play later in the poem.

I do like this a lot. I think your "invocation" section is the most effective part of this.

The rest, possibly, is offensive. People interested in the Iliad might be offended or chafe at the casting of the Iliad's dramatic heroes as thugs as well as boiling the Iliad down to a series of events rather than an, at times, dramatically fleshed out and psychologically complex narrative. Basically, the source material here is being updated to a modern setting and leaving off mention of the main emotional and psychological driving points of the story. (Here, Patroclus mugs somebody, Hector kills him, finds out the baddest dude in town was Patroclus' bro, and then Achilles fucks up Hector. Unless I'm missing something.)

In the end it reminds me of "O" or whatever that movie was. Those modern upgrades of Shakespeare you see all the time that are dated immediately upon release.

Those criticisms only matter if you hold the classics you're referencing in high esteem, however.

There is also the possibility of your vernacular sounding affected and minstrelsy.

Soundwise and poetically-wise, this sounded great to me on a first read. I was pretty initially blown away and annoyed considering the mutated monster you've seen of mine. But I can't say I wasn't one of those people who was a little bit like "Troke?" and "...don't say 'whip'..."

I think the idea behind this is interesting: finding a certain identity between Homeric honor culture and a distinctly American honor culture. There's a question of how one should take this identification

1. As just a lark.
2. As an attempt to elevate American honor culture.
3. As an attempt to denigrate Homeric honor culture.

It's most likely intended as some mix of these.

Puzzling this out might be interesting, but ultimately my problems with the piece are not conceptual, but in implementation.

In attempting to fuse / juggle hip-hop and more traditional lyric, the style here clunks between the worst of both. It takes from the former lines chosen more for their sonics than anything else

who fucked this sad skit

hits us immediately in this category. The piece seems a little more comfortable with its lyric and can pull together decent moments in this style, e.g.

the size of pupils swell
like the wine dark sea.

But even these are mostly awkward when they appear because they jut so far in terms of rhythm and voice.

There are a couple of spots where the piece briefly manages to find some cool middle-ground between the two, e.g.

was drowned by gundrops

but mostly it does not.

I am not sure exactly how one could implement this well. I think Omeros is a good touch-point as narratively it has some similar goals but it's not attempting any of this style. Maybe Langston Hughes (esp. "Raisin in the Sun") is a decent guide here?