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Forum Home » High Critique » A 100 year old rosewood door.

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12/27/2020 3:50:46 PM

mike porter
Posts: 10
A Hundred-year-old rosewood door,
was Imported from Brazil and hung before the civil war,
according to the local folklore,
It was an impressive reddish brown wood door.
That belonged to a liquor store.
Old local newspaper clippings found on the floor
Describe the terrific uproar.
When a hundred women or more stormed the liquor store.
They became unhinged and ripped down that old eyesore.
Singing and marching no more liquor stores
no more rosewood doors.
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12/28/2020 8:14:36 PM

Jack Webster
Posts: 255
You have a lot of good artistic elements going on. You have a single subject/ image that unifies the piece. you strive to make the rosewood door a metonym to represent a feeling within the persona of the poem, a relationship between the persona of the poem and an experience or element that added to the quality of the persona’s experience of the human condition. You develop this intangible experience without overt statement of emotion, but successfully convey it by describing the qualities of the door, it’s relationship to the community, and it’s significance to the shop. once you have developed and evoked its significance you juxtapose it with loss, by using concrete situations to illustrate how it’s relationship to the community has changed, even though it’s relationship to the persona remains the same,



I’m on the fence about the use of mono rhyme. I also feel the phrasing is awkward in some portions. I would rewrite the first few lines as:




A hundred-year-old rosewood door,

was imported from Brazil.

It was hung before the civil war

according to local folklore.




It breaks the mono rhyme but it sounds both more conversational and more measured in terms of meter. Though not in strict metric feet, it follows a pattern of 4,3,4,3 stressed syllables per line, allowing an arbitrary number of stressed syllables between the stressed syllables. This is idea of counting stressed syllables and allowing an arbitrary number of stressed syllables comes from Welsh meter, though they used hemistitches, so using it this way for your poem, is somewhat novel — borrowing the 4,3,4,3 pattern from the ballade stanzas of English verse and hymnal verse (which is more strict in the number of unstressed syllables).




I’m feeling iffy about the phrase “reddish brown wood door”, mostly because it’s redundant. You’ve already said it’s rosewood. Spelling out the color of the door could come across as spoon feeding the reader. It might be useful for readers that don’t know what rosewood looks like, and don’t want to do a little investigation on their own. If you really want to keep the over5 statement of color in, I would drop the wood door portion which just makes it feel like you’re saying rosewood door again but just substitution reddish brown for the word rose:




It was an impressive reddish brown.




In the next line, I would switch That for It and a for the. It, because the sentence needs a proper subject, and the because your line about local folklore establishes the liquor store as being in a specific community. Actually, instead of the, you might want to get really specific and give the liquor store a name — if the door was so memorable as to enter folklore, surely it made this one store stand apart from the others in a way that the entire community would know the name of the store. Making it a specific store ads to the power of the folklore and to the power of the door that it could make one place so memorable.




It was an impressive reddish brown.

It belonged to (insert name of liquor store)




I would tighten up the line about the women, for brevity:




Unhinged they ripped down that...




The immediacy adds intensity and power.




The phrase eyesore might be confusing. Is it being used because the women see the store, or the door, as an eyesore, or is this line to mean the persona was being ironic when describing the door in beautiful terms?




All in all I thinks it’s a really good draft, and I’d keep developing it,
edited by superlativedeleted on 12/28/2020
edited by superlativedeleted on 12/28/2020
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