What if this is a poem I will feel should be a winning poem. What do you think?

Question

The night is like a cut

A cut of my strings

In the great puppet art

Of my dreams

I stumble around in a daze

A daze in my clumsy haze

My limbs again

My wooden dreams

Of these great puppet arts

Strings create me

My strings exceed me

As the puppeteer

As is me

In a paste of twine

A chreographed line

In dancing I would cut

Such that I as my dreams may dream

Of my great art of act of art

I am a deformed muppet

A snipped string clings to my arm

It is still

Like the night

Cold in the age of space flight

Answer 1

meaning is not clear but no doubt this a good poem.Can it be reconstructed with some theme and inner meaning.I think then it can be published to any good paper/magazine.

Answer 2

I am struggling to find the shape of this, it is somewhat disjointed and a few of the rhymes feel very forced. It could be the basis of something rather good but needs work to tidy it up and get some rhythm and sense into it.

The last line of verse 3 for example makes no sense.

Answer 3

Ok so basically though you might think this is worth some sort of unspecified award, I'm going to drive the hard line and say that though it raises some interesting imagery, it is probably not.

To begin, the repetition used in lines

(Example:

'I stumble around in a daze

A daze in my clumsy haze' )

do absolutely nothing for you stylistically. I think they even detract, especially considering the fact that the lines are already quite short. Repetition is much better used in longer stanza's with longer lines and preferably at the end of a line not at the beginning which ends up making the rhythm stilted. (also: the excessive use of the same words throughout the piece over and over, 'dream' being one such example, leads them to become almost meaningless and boring. A poem is about economy of words and saying as much as you can in as little as you feel is possible without losing meaning. Reusing words outside of well placed deliberate repetition leaves a piece flabby and boring.)

Next, the other comments on this raise quite a pertinent point- that the overall theme is lacking (or too obscure to even determine) and this leaves the entire piece as a gratuitous, egocentric diatribe.

Finally, though the imagery is the stand out point of this piece, it too falls into the usual cliche pitfalls: ie. 'still like the night' - which despite the use of enjambment to alter the direct correlation between the two that is typical to this cliche is still a sore point of the piece. On a lighter note I did think the following lines to be really clever, economic and powerful: 'The night is like a cut', 'In a paste of twine, A choreographed line' and 'My wooden dreams'.

You have some rudimentary skill, and could with practice be good- however, I would suggest that you read over bodies of work like Auden or even Frost (since you seem to favour the simple rhyme scheme they both employ) and read them aloud to yourself so you get a good idea of how rhythm, punctuation and overall theme works together. I noticed that you did not punctuate your piece at all so if you read it aloud it would sound like one long run on sentence. This is not great, simply putting a line gap does not indicate a pause, and you need places for the reader to stop, breathe and think. I would recommend copy and pasting the poems (of famous/published poets) into word and deleting all the line spacings so you just have them as a paragraph (leaving in all the full stops, commas, etc) and reading them that way just to get a feel of the flow.  

Good luck for the future! :)