Gray Skies and Empty Spaces

I'm now trying to figure out what this say's about your own absence. I felt lost inside the thoughts of someone who constantly wonders about the actuality of existence and lies inside the voids of life, and I was fond of how you maintained great possession of the duality between fulfillment and emptiness, on what is there, and what isn't. Reading this more than once garnered me to see how unique this poem really is

Interesting poem. I like the opening stanza: on a first read through, given the title, the lines were enjoyably off-kilter and I actually liked the lack of end-stops, which led me down a few alternate readings (hail peanut butter!), before realising, syntactically, they were discrete units. Phonetically, I also enjoyed some of the word flows (jel-join, converse-converge). Lastly, thematically, the stanza functioned well as a wedge, honing down to the central absent figure, you (whom I took to be the narrator’s ex).

Immediately lurching into the second stanza’s opening you, however, (which, if we include the adjective your, is awkwardly repeated three more times in a fairly short stanza) I felt the poem’s rhythm wobbled and never really recovered to get back those elements which made the opening work.

The lines are often arythmically conversational and can suffer from word-bloat or awkward phrasing. The lineation, also, completely shifts, as now, unless they end with a full stop, the lines all syntactically flow one into another. Such a shift isn’t criminal stylistically, but more clearly divided the poem, for me personally, between the good and the bad. Nor is the lineation, after S1, ever really used to interesting effect.

All of these gripes can be seen in S3:

a friend of mine says gray skies allow
for more space for imagining
to fill in. blue is overbearing

I find L1 a bland line of poetry, both rhythmically and syntactically (and I don’t think the fact that it describes grey skies would be a convincing excuse for this). L2 is actually unpleasant to read; the double for is unwieldy (I would lose its first instance). Compounding this, the enjambment into L3 is awkward, as is the phrase “for imagining to fill in.” In a different scenario, substituting “imagining” for “imagination” might be used to interesting effect, but here I do not think it works.

For comparison (I guess so you can judge whether you agree with these criticisms), here is a rough alternative, which I still feel both flows better and creates some more interesting effects of lineation:

a friend says gray skies
are empty spaces for imagination
to fill in. blue is overbearing.

Thanks for sharing, I hope some of this is useful to you!