Iron Poet II

[PhoeKun]

I know, I know. I'm a bad person. I've read everything, but I'm having a difficult time deliberating... I'll do my best to get it up soon.

[averagejoe]

I'm a bad person.

How could you be a bad person? You have a halo. It doesn't seem physically possible.

Like if someone had a lightbulb over their head, and they weren't having an idea...

[truemane]

If everyone is too busy for proper critiques, perhaps either Phoe or Vaynor could just post votes for the winners, and allow us to move to the next round?

[PhoeKun]

I don't feel right about doing this, but in the interest of moving things along...

Amotis vs ZRS

Spoiler

Show

Winner: Amotis. Neither poem felt quite whole, but Amotis' held together a little better.

averagejoe vs rubakhin

Spoiler

Show

Winner: rubakhin. His poem could stand to be shorter, but on the whole (and in the beginning, especially), it was a stronger, more evocative effort.

I'll try to elaborate on these later.

[ZombieRockStar]

Yay! *throws confetti*

And my record of flubbing the 2nd or 3rd round goes untarnished. Good to know.

[PhoeKun]

We share that unblemished record, Zombie.

[averagejoe]

Well, that's that. Congrats to the other guy, and all that. I would like to hear more, Phoekun, on what you thought, but if you can't get around to it no worries.

[PhoeKun]

I will, if nothing else, PM you later with my thoughts, aj. I don't like this bare bones style of judging at all; I just didn't want to make everyone wait any longer...

[rubakhin]

Aw, Phoe. You sound so sad. Don't take it so hard. *hug*

[Vaynor]

New brackets will be up later, latest tomorrow.

[Vaynor]

First I'd like to say congratulations Amotis and rubakhin. Welcome to the final round.

Amotis vs. Rubakhin
Promps: I (as in you), Happiness
Remember to include both prompts completely in your poem.

Deadline: Thursday, November 29th at 11:00pm EST (Eastern Standard Time, GMT -5). Make sure you're not late by using this (set to the deadline, find the major city that is in your timezone to find out what time it is due).

[Vaynor]

Apologies for the double triple () post, but with the final round looming I don't want anyone to forget.

Come on guys, not much time left, I want two poems.

[Amotis]

Amotis vs. Rubakhin
Promps: I (as in you), Happiness

Beauty in the Temporal

Spoiler

Show

I drive
downstream southern california and blue roof dusk - and slowly
find air between gray darkened dashboard
and the open car windows,
and the buildings.

buildings
that blur into sky as monet would have it.
named for their cold high windows and their lantern eyes that talk softly from inside.
names like ‘sunrise’, ‘forever’,
and ‘trying.’

on the steering wheel, positioned over on the left
a thin string is tied - chains of deep turquoise mixed with
strands of aged green. you tied it there.
watched you tie it, remember the tiny warm rain it seemed to create
against the angled light and cordial day breeze.
how it felt on my hand as it moved across it.
wanted to take a picture, already could see it in black and white.
focused and ageless
and saved.
but there was no camera and the picture
felt fleeting.


with the silent tempo of asphalt; the scene’s a screen door.
as full as new water running off a moving wheel,
removed slipping and parted, but the feel -
it makes it. it sings blue gospel to cloth horizons.

but it's not horizons where headlamps face,
brake lights flicker valleys and exaggerations across your white garage door,
the wheel spins back into place and I feel the string brush across my palm,
a left turn unto memory,
headlamps face the west and the no endings there.

[rubakhin]

ETA: Yay, I made the deadline by ten minutes.

Quick explanation: My friend Akhmed was killed a few weeks ago in Grozny ... it's been fantastically weird being both back in America and without him, and that is what the poem is about. I freaked out about it over in the Depression thread if you want to know the whole backstory, but ...

Spoiler

Show

Ahmed Kalashnikov

It was Grozny, after the rain
and he was effervescent; filthy-minded
adolescent with alabaster
skin and trackmarks
Leading our pack through the ruins of a proud and distant empire

Ahmed Kalashnikov, innocent in his camoflauge and skullcap, bare toenails nascent in the dust and the sand
Ahmed Kalashnikov, innocent with his axl-grease fingertips and face buried in my shoulder during a dilaudid high, and I am kissing his hands
innocent in Ramzan and Kadyrov the elder, innocent in
Playboy mags and Stoli hidden under a steel beam that used to be a mosque
innocent Ruslan who holds us like a Pieta and sings prayers after sniffing glue in the old shelter in a voice that is naked and alone
innocent Sevastian who was recognized in the breadlines by a widow of war and asked "Can you describe this, Akhmatova?"

We were joy without trousers in one sock and leather jacket and fifteen codeine pills between us,
joy giving blow jobs in alleyways, against doorframes
dodging bullets during an irrelevant attack
collapsing white and laughing in the foundation pit where we were safe:

Seeing Ahmed's blue veins and thin arms and being hushed by the sudden presence of beauty.
Kissing him.

It was a week later, after the rain
and Ruslan bursts into my room sobbing
"Akhmed umer! Akhmed umer!" the meaning of which should be obvious in English
He had gone out with my manuscripts
and he was missing, I was kissing Ruslan's face and praying for him to be dead
instead of

Ahmed Kalashnikov, nailed feet and hand to a slab of plywood and left outside my door, twin bullets for eyes, still alive
Ahmed Kalashnikov, suffering burns and strange pricks and starvation, naming names and killing Ruslan the innocent

Innocent now in the governmental sense of the term, no more embracing like children, clothesless and direct, facing towards God and the Circassian dawn
but panicked on my bloodstained mattress above the grey walls where prayer cards pasted with bubblegum serve instead of ikons
panicked when we saw his body, on the kitchen table with its hands over its chest
panicked when I kissed its vaulted ankles and begged in Chechen for forgiveness

Ahmed Kalashnikov, little light of my life, died holy and murdered - by a punk with a handgun

whose face I cannot picture twenty hours later
in an American shopping mall by the airport,
but surely all beard and muscle and cap
like Ruslan who was stared at when we parted at the gate
whispering "God forgive you,"
Unspoken words: For I won't.

America, king of dreck in its robe of tinsel and mantle of advertisements
Play after play after play on words delivered by a cartoon chipmunk,
safe after sale after sale runs screaming out of the radio in stores,
and I, on the escalator, staring straight ahead
Already thinking of Makanin and the story I'll write about a war vet
who kills himself at the end to the tune of the most stupid, poshlosty
Christmas song I can find (thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot-po-o-o-o-l-e ... !")
Who is Sevastian? Only Akhmatov.

Friends. Condolences. And I, blunted, surprisingly calm. "I don't know. I don't know. Well, thanks for coming. Well, at least it was quick. I guess so. I guess so."
Come home and tell my mother I will beat your whore brains out with a tire iron if you don't shut the **** up about my smoking (god, if she had known our joy!)
and for the first time in my life she apologizes

Two days later, last words of sympathy, last cigarette.
Ruslan is in bed with me, for the helluvit. We are platonic. Our eyes align.
For the first time in his life it's
"Shame about your prick," he says.
"Yeah. A real shame."

America, with its college bars and smell of women
in perfume that is nothing compared to the
metal-scent of Kalashnikov bullets that I bless'ed with my lips
all cosmetics and white angles
or first world female ultrasoftness
Discussing, somehow priggishly
Absinthe, eternity-by-Rimbaud, the beauty of sin and
Self-congratulatory, giggling, references to Betty Page
and inside my heart Ahmed Kalashnikov is dying
YOU DON'T KNOW YOU DON'T EVEN ****ING KNOW HOW GOOD A BLOWJOB IS WHEN YOU'RE BEING SHOT AT
and we did it like animals
like innocents
without a single thought
because we looked at each other
because we wanted to
Freude, schöner Götterfunken
in our beloved country, peace in war.

So even sex with these people is an identity and an ideology and a set of fashionable clothes, fake British accents and the right books and the right stores
Ahmed Kalashnikov, my sorrow and my joy,
whose white smile and taupe lips are in my dreams
while I am in the shower
Afterwards I am cold
Afterwards I think "I am a pederast and a ******."
Afterwards I am alone.

Ahmed Kalashnikov, died holy and murdered
in my American thoughts, in my American arms.
Whose image cannot live amongst the rise and fall
Of plastic cups on the ocean: in pictures, on magazines, in supermarkets
Next to headlines, in whiny articles,
Ahmed Kalashnikov, king of purity, son of Elysium, flower of war!
I see you in my mind as you were on that night
In light blue headband and camoflague pants
Bare chest, touching your shoulders like a woman,
the three of us, standing atop the ruins
watching the slowly-coming dawn.

- Sevastian Rubakhin
Grozny, Chechnya
and Connecticut, America

[Vaynor]

Good job guys, judges, it's up to you now.

[truemane]

Okay, final round!

Amotis vs. Rubakhin
Prompts: I (as in you), Happiness

Amotis
Beauty in the Temporal

Spoiler

Show

Is this poem about Happiness? It feels REALLY melancholy to me. Perhaps it's about happiness that USED to be, but is gone now? It all comes down to that final image, right? What do you mean by screen door? Is singing blue gospel to cloth horizons good or bad? Hmmm.

Intriguing.

I liked this one a lot, Amotis. I think you're gotten closer with this one to paring down the words to the absolute minimum possible to acheive your effect. And you depend FAR more on simple, evocative imageges to acheive your effects.

So minimal, in fact, that I'm not sure what you're saying.

Which isn't bad. It's fine. It evokes in me a feeling that has no logical source. The words, as they are, have a colour and a tone in my mind. I can't point to this or that and say "this word makes me feel X and that comma makes me feel Y" but the whole thing has a pervasive weight that makes it a very effective piece.

I love the single image of the thin string. Love that. So small, so minor a thing, and yet how much space it takes up in the speaker's mind. I can think of dozens examples of things like that from my own past, and I imagine just about anyone could.

I like the cadence of sound-images that lead up to the string, which is the centre of the piece, and then the cadence of imagery that leads away from it.

I haven't got a lot else to say, actually. The only point of improvement I can offer is to make each small movement MORE of itself.

The images leading up to the string (stanzas 1 and 2) could be a little MORE disjointed, more evocative. Try taking out transition words like "that" and "and" and see if that makes things more fun.

Like:


"I drive
downstream southern california. Blue roof dusk. Slowly
find air between gray darkened dashboard,
open car windows,
the buildings.

buildings
blur into sky as monet would have it.
named for their cold high windows, their lantern eyes talk softly from inside.
names like ‘sunrise’, ‘forever’,
‘trying.’"


I'm not saying that's any better, but playing with the less important words is playing with the framing devices for the more important words, and so alters the way they inter-relate and therefore how they generate meaning.

You could then make the central string image more physical and more mundane. Describe it in more everyday, less symbolic terms. Use longer, more natural lines. It will gather weight as a result. The more specific you can be, the universal you'll end up being.

The final two stanzas are vey nice, and I wouldn't mess with them much. One thing I might recommend is to try and make them counter-point the initial images (or vice-versa). Creating a motif like that draws a straight thematic line through the poem, interrupted by the string, which the readers mind will include in the line without your even telling them to. And a linear prgression like that adds to the idea of time passing like water, like a road, like a car heading west.

But as it is, it's very good. One of the best I've read of yours.

Rubakhin
Ahmed Kalashnikov

Spoiler

Show

I'm not the least bit comfortable critiquing this poem, seeing as how it's an immediate and recent outpouring of pain over your friend's death. I'm shocked you would even feel comfortable putting something that new and raw out there for general critique. You're a braver man than I am.

But, seeing as how you did put it out there, I am pseudo-obligated to discuss it. If you're sensitive about it, I would recommend not reading the following until your wound has scabbed up some.

Now, before I start, I want to say that I greatly respect you, not only for your writing, but for how much you want to be a BETTER writer. That's even rarer than talent. There are only two or three people on these boards that I think really and truly want to be as good as they can possibly be.

So, while the following might sound negative, it's only because I know that you really want to improve. I can offer you no higher praise than the certaintly that you want more than idle flattery.

Discipline. Everything I have to say comes down to discipline. It doesn't show as much in your prose, since you're doing that Russian rambing pseudo-biographical thing, but even there you could use some more focus and direction. In your poetry, however, where image compression and density are the names of the game, it is more striking.

A few examples where there are just too many words, and fewer would have been better:

"It was Grozny, after the rain
and he was effervescent; filthy-minded
adolescent with alabaster
skin and trackmarks
Leading our pack through the ruins (of a proud and distant empire)"

That last bit in the parentheses. Do we need that? Is the "proud and distant empire" at all a part of your central thesis? Is it important that you were all young in a land that is old and run down like a worn clock spring? If not, delete it and replace it with something shorter and more appropriate. If so, then that needs to pervade the entire piece, and not just make an appearance, and then go away.

"We were joy without trousers in one sock and leather jacket and fifteen codeine pills between us,
joy giving blow jobs (in alleyways), (against doorframes) - 1
dodging bullets (during an irrelevant attack) -2
collapsing white and laughing in the foundation pit (where we were safe:")

1 - Pick one or the other. You don't need both.
2 - I understand why you included this, but try to place in the rest of the image: "dodging irelevant bullets," for example, is more compressed and would include the same information.
3 - Necessary? Who cares if you were safe? I think it's the "white and laughing" that's important there. Your safety, while the tuth, might actually detract from the image.

"It was a week later, after the rain
and Ruslan bursts into my room sobbing
"Akhmed umer! Akhmed umer!" (the meaning of which should be obvious in English)"

If it's obvious, why waste 9 words saying so? If the sounds of the words "Akhmed umer" are important in and of themselves, let the sounds speak for themselves. If not, just state it in English. Either way, saying it and then explaining it dilutes the effectiveness of either choice.

"(Innocent now in the governmental sense of the term,) no more embracing like children,"

Delete the ruminating. Keep the sense-image. It's more direct. Let us decide what's innocent and what's not, what's governmental and what's not. Just tell us what happened and what it looked/sounded/smelled/felt like.

"So even sex with these people is (an identity and an ideology and) a set of fashionable clothes, fake British accents and the right books and the right stores"

Again, give us sensual imagery, and let us decide what it means. Just delete that phrase in your head and feel how much cleaner and more immediate the image is.

"Ahmed Kalashnikov, king of purity, son of Elysium, flower of war!
I see you in my mind as you were on that night
In light blue headband and camoflague pants
Bare chest, touching your shoulders like a woman,
the three of us, standing atop the ruins
watching the slowly-coming dawn."

This is beautiful poetry. Magical. Not an extraneous word. Notice how there's no place where you tell me what to think? How to feel? You just tell me what it is, and I make my own decisions.

Now. Next is thematic unity.

I can tell from the tone and the flow that Ahmed meant a lot of things to you, and that your confusion is part of the story, and that you haven't resolved anything enough to make sense of it. That works.

What doesn't work, I don't think, is the way that you spend so much time on each small shade and gradient of each theme and narrative point. This is harder to find concrete examples of, since it's a full-poem issue, but you need to find ways to compress as many themes into as small a space as possible. Instead of spending time telling me about Akhmed in Russian, and THEN about you in America, tell me how much difference there is between there and here, now and then, and we'll get the message ourselves.

Maybe go at it chronologially. Tell us about him, and THEN, then shift to Now, and make your contracts similar in wording and in structure so we can link them up ourselves. Or go at it thematically, telling us how you feel now and then hpow you felt them, and the contrast tells the story. Or...

Ach. I'm not making sense.

Try this:

Write down what Akhmed meant to you. Be precise, be succinct. Write down two or three or five or however many THINGS. Phrases. Lines. Now think up one scene, image, picture, or trait that represents that. Now write down two or three reasons AROUND Akhmed (lost in America, for example). Make them precise and succinct. Now think up an image, or a scene, or a trait that represents them.

Now close your eyes and picture the images. In a row. Like a slideshow. Now tell us what you see.

And any time you can have on image that tells BOTH things at once, you've got something.

You see what I mean? Compress, condense.

Next thing is rhythm and flow. Although free verse needs to have no formal rhythm scheme, it should have an informal, identifyable one that comments on the action. Hard, explosive letters (k, t, p) make for harsh, agressive images. Flowing and meflifluous letters (l, s, m) make for soothing and lowing words.

Short phrases and lines speed things up, longer ones slow them down. Watch where your beats fall, which words get the stress as you read. Say the poem out loud. Note the overall 'beat.'

And each stanza should have a sort of standard line length and feel so that when you depart from it, it is jarring and noticeable.

For example. Stanza one. That last line is longer than the rest, which makes it stick out more. If you keep it, make the line about time, or distance, or something so that reading it is part of its meaning and not aside from it.

Notice the difference between stanzas 9 and 10 ("Whose face I cannot picture..." and "America, king of drek..."). Notice how the lengths comment on the content. Notice how different those two stanzas sound and feel as a result.

Last is the point that, although I now think I know VERY well how you felt about Akhmed, I don't feel I know him at all. Make sure that's intentional, and make it a part of your central thesis so that it's not something ASIDE from the poem, not a side-note or observation, but an integral part of it.

That's it.

Now, as I said, that was all needlessly harsh. It is a good poem. An effective poem. I feel your pain and confusion and loss very clearly. If you were anyone else, this entire critique would be more positive, and focus more on the things that work. Everything I said doesn't mean I think it's a BAD poem, far from it. It all just means that I think that YOU would like it to be a BETTER poem, and that's about the highest compliment I can pay another writer.

If anything I said makes no sense, feel free to PM me and I'll explain as best I can. This critique is already a novel.

THE VERDICT

Spoiler

Show

Another hard one. I respect you both as writers, and I respect your work very much. In the end, I had to go with the one that just felt more finished, more polished, that was tighter and leaner.

But it was close. Really close. You two deserve to be in the final.

Decision: Amotis

[rubakhin]

@Truemane

Spoiler

Show

Damn, the critique was longer than the poem itself. I'm touched that you took the time out to go through it like that. Thanks, man. I'll keep it all in mind when I clean it up. I might go and post the new version in Arts and Crafts when I'm done with it.

Certainly, this poem suffers a lot because, erm, I didn't start writing it until an hour and a half until the deadline. It's been a rough couple of weeks, as you can tell. I would've gotten quite a bit of that stuff if I had given myself a chance to clean it up instead of waiting until the last minute to get anything done. (I suck.) There's also the problem of emotional distance, some degree of which is important to have. I'll wait until this all blows over for a second draft... also, all sorts of things have happened since then that should really be in the poem.

I do have a huge problem with focus. I end up writing these tangential, sprawling short stories that resemble pointillism more than literature. (Oddly enough, my novels tend to go either way. They're either Slavonic Death Bricks or tight and streamlined.) I'll keep your suggestions about that in mind.

[Amotis]

@ truuuuuuemane:

Spoiler

Show

Happiness? Well...I wrote about my (you((I))) happiness. I kinda combined the two prompts I spoke about how I personally feel or take the word and feelings 'happiness.' I apparently am the type of person who doesn't normally feel ecstatic/ephoric, or happiness as most people would put it. By the same token, the down's are never too down anyway. Just always hovering around the middle. Hence the poem being kinda melancholy, like you said. Kinda grey, mostly physical and nature, and kinda the small stuff. Ya know? Viable? Or does that get lost?

As for the confusion on the latter images, I guess I got...too distilled? I don't know. I went for a more abstract image of the scene enveloped by the current feelings and how physical that made the scene, ya know? Perhaps the shift wasn't subtle enough? Or needs more image that can explain that more? To what extent to you think the questions you posed need to be answered? I know that's a weird question but I just wanna know if you were really begging for an answer to it, if you knew it posed a question but didn't cared if it was answered, or something in between.

Question (yeah, I like asking them ): does disjointing the images, taking out the little words, mess with the rhythm? I kinda concentrated on that too this poem. Did that come out? Or...not? Worth scrapping? Or can I do both? I like what you suggested, it makes it...er more? Stronger? Something.

Did you think this poem was missing anything? A strong line, a good feel? I felt that maybe I did the middle zone too much, that it was too much image? Most likely this is because I'm not used to doing this minimum thing too much. I'm doing it more, that's for sure, but it still causes a bit of doubt that I'm missing something. Do you get what I'm saying? Like I sit back and question if it's done.

I'll draft this, I will. Thanks for your comments. Again, always a pleasure.

[Amotis]

:O Page two?

Nuuu, we can't have that.

[truemane]

We need some more judgings, methinks.

@Rubakhin

Spoiler

Show

LOL. Slavonic Death Bricks. I like that. Good times. I just think that your writing would take several large leaps forward if you forced yourself into forms and situations that forced you to make choices, and forced you distill the voices inside your head into denser and denser images. You can always go ahead and write MORE. But if you can say all the importan stuff in FEWER words, then all the extra words are just gravy.

@Amotis

Spoiler

Show

You know what? At this point in the poem, any changes you make become choices between different kinds of effect, but not choices between bad and good. Everything I said is just various ways to play with what you have. Play with it some, see what happens, and then let it go. It's a nice piece as is. I recommend a little tinkering, and then go find something else to play with. You shoul have lots to choose from.

After all, you ARE writing every day now, right?

;)

[PhoeKun]

Guess who's buried under loads of work? Must be me!

I'll try to judge soon, but oh [expletive] [expletive] [expletive]-ing [expletive] in an [expletive], do I have a lot to write right now...

[Vaynor]

Guess who's buried under loads of work? Must be me!

I'll try to judge soon, but oh [expletive] [expletive] [expletive]-ing [expletive] in an [expletive], do I have a lot to write right now...

Don't worry about it Phoe, as long as it happens... sometime. Let's just try to finish this contest and move on to the next.

I can judge if needed, but it won't be in-depth.

[ZombieRockStar]

Being as I'm out of the contest this round with some free time on my hands, can I volunteer to judge? And it should be relatively in depth.

[Vaynor]

Be my guest.

[ZombieRockStar]

Okay, then. Thanks. Expect it sometime tomorrow or Saturday.

[Amotis]

Be my guest.

[ZombieRockStar]

Okay, then...

Amotis:

Spoiler

Show

Images...specifically, there seems to be a good deal of postmodern irony in these images you've constructed pretty carefully to give off an impression (literary Impressionism, like Conrad although this is in a different tone). I'll use one specific example here: "the silent tempo of asphalt; the scene's a screen door". The alliteration, which is always kind of ironic nowadays, and the synesthesia of asphalt having a tempo, which is ironic in that it kinda makes sense when you think about driving down an asphalt road and hearing the car roll over those cracks in the pavement. Also...the fact that "I was given as a topic yet it only appears twice to bookend the piece, essentially. I like that...how the first person is very much there, but left unspoken for the most part.

I think it works. However, there's a little bit missing, and I think it's coherence. You get an image here, but it's a little blurred (and not in the ironic sense). You have an extended image of driving through Southern California, but it needs something more unifying it.

I also think it's lacking something to give it a really thorough effect...because that's what this is definitely going for: effect. Again, something to cohere it could help this. The effect is there, it's just a little...ahem, blurred.

Rubakhin:

Spoiler

Show

Let me start by saying what I personally think poetry is all about. Poetry seems to me to be the attempt to say things that can't be said through "simple" language...we try to express an idea that's too complicated or abstract to properly describe without the help of metaphor or just going about it in a roundabout way.

So here we have the elegy, one of the most popular forms for poetry. Few emotions are more complicated, yet have such a need to be expressed as grief. In fact, the poem has a flow of emotions kind of like the five stages of grief in pop psychology, but I'm sure you didn't mean an analogy.

It begins with nostalgia, which is where the happiness part of the prompts comes in...moves through anger, depression, nostalgia again, anger again, etc. before ending again with nostalgia. Which I find curious, ending with happiness again.

But, moving onto poetic technique, you're telling a story here. But the power comes from how you blend the elements...sex and violence, love and peace (not quite sure about quoting Schiller there...seems a bit too much). I like it very much.

However, I think it was definitely written in a flurry of emotion and it shows through and is affective, but also seems to be falling apart, like when you're voice breaks up: it conveys the emotion, but it gets hard to hear the words. Wordsworth had a huge point when he said that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions later recollected in tranquillity." I love this, but it really needs a more solid and traceable flow of ideas. Maybe an extended metaphor to bring it all together, but that's just what I would do.

Verdict:

Spoiler

Show

The "I' in the topic kinda left this open for confessional poetry. Rubakhin took that path while Amotis didn't, which I guess sums up the dichotomy between these two. Amotis's is all about the images while Rubakhin's is all about the emotional reality. The problem here was that Amotis's was considerably more concerned with precision of imagery, but the question is whether Rubakhin's knocks you over with empathy like it intends to, which it does to a point.

Both are inspired, definitely, and certainly don't feel like they were written merely for contest deadlines. Both are missing something, on the other hand, that makes them feel a little incomplete. But it comes down to: Rubakhin's is powerful, Amotis's is visual, and which do I look for more in poetry? I usually look for powerful, so I think I'm going with Rubakhin on this one. (Sorry, Am )

[truemane]

We need either Vaynor or Phoe (or someone else with some time and a judgemental frame of mind) to post one more judgement so finish this thing.

...

for the Bump.

[Vaynor]

OK, I can do it later tonight, I don't have time at the moment. Sorry for the delay.

EDIT:

Just sneaking a bit on the comp, enough time to read the poems and post who won and why. Sorry for the lack of detailed response.

Spoiler

Show

Both of them were very good, but it all came down to the fact that Rubakhin's poem conveyed a much more emotional and clearly visible vision of happiness.

Verdict: Rubakhin

EDIT: After reading the other judgings, congratulations Rubakhin.

[truemane]

Congratulations, Rubhy. That was a great final round, and a great contest all around.

Good times.