Bilk (Poetry) I am a male poet working on my thesis. Any critique would be...

[the killing moon]

...worthwhile. Is the voice a woman? Bilk

contrary to popular belief
the answer to making him
last longer isn’t found in First
or Cosmo or the millionth
rag that sits in the hard rack
at the grocery store


i wouldn’t be buying
18 bottles of Advil
if it did

i will say this:

there is an astronomic
moment that is either
the eye of storm or needle
depending on the momentum
of a long forgotten train

all the nighttime rubbing
in mocked sleep
gives way

i think about the krill
trapped in baleen
whose gummy biography
spills across an unwashed
flensing deck

[skumpfsklub]

No, not even a little bit. Who among your female acquaintances can tell a flenser's blade from a hockey stick? for instance.

Let me amend that: the first nine lines ARE plausibly female voice, thereafter it goes all testosterone and hob-nailed boots. Like, totally butch, Man.

If you're not working to meet a 'supply N lines of female voice poetry' requirement, just snip this down to those first nine lines. It'll be 'female voice' enough, for being enigmatically incomplete, and for the references to brand name products, if nothing else. Those are girl things, not guy things.

Chicks dig enigma and ambiguity. They steer wide of plain statements in poetry, for reasons that still defy my explanation. They don't get to the frickin' point, and they won't. (Of course there are exceptions. Don't build your career on those.)

So, in emulating the female voice, you do this: any time you have a choice, pick the 'squishier' word or phrase, that carries connotations that might lead a reader away from the path that transmits only one reasonable understanding. Don't ask me why, but many female poets dote on this kind of thing; sometimes it makes for a really good poem, but mostly it's maddening.

Avoid words that come from 'masculine' disciplines. E.g., the lines I would discard include a lot of terms from physics, a discipline women haven't yet moved into in large numbers, and whose vocabulary women mostly do not employ. The terms resonate for masculine readers and color the speaker as another guy.

Be ambivalent about your senses. If your [parts] tingle, it is pleasant and painful. If you catch a scent, it is honey-sweet AND [something else, perhaps, e.g., a nascent stink of decay].

For the love of duplicity, do not ever present a single crisp thought sparely expressed.


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I'm gonna stop with that. If you're workin' on your thesis, you're into this poetry thing deeper'n I am--but sometimes the unlettered clod on the street sees stuff they don't point to in Academia.

[Alobar]

Yes it is a woman, a very unsatisfied woman who many will sympathize with but whom I think needs to take the bull by the horns, to add to the pile of cliches her poem contains, and dump the guy--he just ain't any of that, never mind all.

[See how they run]

Well, parts of it sounds like a woman ( about the rags on the stand First and Cosmo are definitely women's magazines) then again other parts sound like a man krill trapped in baleen is a fishing reference known to fishermen ( I just know about it because I read). Maybe there is a female fisherperson? It's a good poem just a little confusing. I don't want to say it's bad because it's not really. Maybe it's me.