Sabrina's Response to ALL from 11/30

In Response to ‘Anytime is a Good Time”

“Anytime is a Good Time’ seems to be about a perspective of the world/society that the author observes. One line, “Now move your lips and stop your brain Once more with feeling, we’re all insane, there’s never been a better time” could mean that everyone needs to stop talking because it doesn’t matter what comes out. That’s what I got out of it. That we’re all just talking, talking, talking and doing, doing, doing, but what for? What’s the point of it all? I liked it. I related to it and a good poem does just that. I only wanted more elaboration after a few lines, like “We’re all foaming at the mouth for something real.” I wanted a line after that like an example or a metaphor that explained what “something real” is. Then I’d have more of an idea what the poem was getting at.

In Response to ‘Poetry Queen’

This is a love poem. The girl in the poem must be a writer, and he author of the poem longs for the girl to be writing her poems about him. He wants to comfort her in the same way she comforts him, even though she doesn’t realize it. But there are lines that suggest that they do have an intimate relationship: “Your skin feels so warm against mine” but then there are lines that suggest that there is no relationship at all: “So bat those pretty eyes and write your sonnet, tell me it’s about me.” I could be wrong. Sorry if I am. I like the line, “We’ll climb to the top of the world and we’ll live there together til we die,” because that is the typical feeling that a person in love longs for. It was appropriate. I also like “Our passions collide,” because it is a beautiful line.

In Response to “Eight by Eight”

This was a very interesting and very detailed story. It was so detailed, though, that I got a little confused what the idea of the story was. I could be completely wrong, but I think the story was about an FBI team that thought these coded postcards were a plan to attack the heart of the city, but it turned out it was really about a chess game.
I liked the idea for the story: that something big is being investigated and it turns out it’s about a silly chess game. That was a cool twist for the end. It wrapped the story up nicely. Because of that, I wouldn’t change the ending at all.
I was a bit confused in the beginning because there was so much detail and so many people being introduced in one small area of the story. Maybe you could take out some of the characters and write the story with only important characters so that not so many characters are needed to be explained. I understand, however, that all of the characters may be needed to explain the story, so it’s difficult to cut out some characters. There was just a lot going on and a lot of ground that had to be covered in order to tell the story and some of it could have been cut out to get the same story line across in a more clear way. I enjoyed the storyline and the ending. Great idea.