A Longing For Utility by Mulekick

I loved this. The conversational tone is what got me. Reminds me of the New York school poets: O'Hara, Ferlinghetti. What a first couple of stanzas! Been nine days since the end of the year for sweetness and dogs but I’m not done talking about dogs, the sweetness, maybe. My main gripe is with the line breaks (and quite a few of the stanza breaks..). They don't help the reading of the poem. Particularly awkward are the single word lines. I'd like to see this redrafted into longer lines with stanzas only broken when it is important to the meaning of the poem. Otherwise I think this is one of the best poems I've read on ABC... I love that it's long but keeps up the interest. The phrasing is so charming and there's a real intelligence at work here. Fab. Joe

Oh yeah - and the title is too restrictive. In my view, 'a longing for utility' is just one of the many things that this poem touches upon. Joe

I liked this one, a lot. I don't mind the style at all (as it's one I've used before on a number of occasions). The breaks serve (IMO) as a kind of punctuation or to emphasise a certain part of the stanza. The single-word-lines I also liked. I actually preferred the short stanzas to the longer sentences at the end; whilst I can see that it must represent some kind of suddenly-released feeling (freedom, communication, what-have-you), for me, it sort of messed up the -form- of the poem, although the content itself remains fantastic. Such a melancholy poem!

I loved the poem as well. I just started out with poetry but me and my friends agree it's excellent.

Thanks everyone, it's lovely to read such flattering things about my work. I'm not actullay new to the site, I have been posting occasionally for a few years, first under the name wtate, more recently as mulekick. I usually delete my stuff every so often so there is only the one poem on at the moment. I appreciate the imput and most especially the critiques of the poem. I share some of your opinions about the formatting. I'm embarrassed to admit that the way the poem appears on this site is simply a result of my ignorance of html. Most of the lines were supposed to appear long across the page with large tabbed space between certain words and phrases in place of punctuation. However when I pasted it in all that formatting got squished together and so I had to go back and just put line breaks in so that is made sense. Also the full title of the poem is "A Longing for Utility in the House of Saturation" but the last bit got cut off, but I didn't notice until you guys started talking about it. Some other concerns: The repeated line is supposed to first introduce a large unwieldy abstract, then put a qualifier on it by cramming it into the packed house. In other words: "There is not even enough room in the house for Ideas." I guess it didn't work very well though. I might remove it. The use of a name "Chris" is actually pretty essential to the writing I do. I undestand it limits the work, and that the interuption in the middle of the poem is unexpected. But all of my writing for the past few years has been an attempt to write true autobiographical verse. Putting in real names is important to what I'm trying to achieve, as the entire arc of my writing will tell a full story at the end of my life. I feel an obligation to make the people around me the heros of the work. So those who are interested can see what I'm talking about I'm going to post a long autobiographical work that I spent all of last year writing. It's quite lengthy, but some of you might like it, at the very least for the voyerism. It's called Year for Sweetness and Dogs. Thanks again everyone, Will Also please excuse my spelling, as I'm hopeless in this regard and I'm too lazy to put this through a spell check before I post it.

Beautiful evocation of frustration and uselessness, and such a powerful and haunting resolution. Loved it.