This is another beautiful poem, from a poet who cares about what he see's. Regards Roscoe..

even I was swinging
how you create such verse
is wondrous

but too many use
virgin
and we all know why
you too Stan

I read this aloud to my lady. Thrice.
It rolled off of my tongue with ease.
I paused ____ to breath comfortably between it's lines. I wanted to deeply inhale the imagery before leaning into the next curve.
I felt confident that I would safely navigate these curves in the road to come.
I indeed did. One might call this river of words slippery smooth.

I felt the 8 beat symmetry skip but a few moments here and there.
I dare say the bumps only remain because you deliberately say they should.

After a bit of chewing on it.....
It felt to me like a confusing and conflicted story or an introspective play. Not of the actual plantations being reclaimed by sentinels of the earth but rather your own conflict.
That of what you the author truly finds important. The essence of this piece. The message.
It could be so many things.

Do you care about the foolishness of the man that called them "Virgin" Woods when they are clearly nothing like an old growth forest? Is this you speaking of our detachment from what a natural landscape looks like when left to its own devices? Does this contrived grid of trees frustrate you? You begin by speaking of the way their shade protects those that stand beneath them from the heat but the remainder of the poem leads me to believe that you resent them.

Everything afterwards feels like a mournful tear gaining momentum down your hearts cheek. You paint us a picture of yourself as a brooding silo that is angry because he is out of work and therefore feels little purpose. Of cows no longer chewing on man spread grass to create pounds of edible flesh. Commodities that could make a family comfortable when sold at market. You yearn for this land to still be tamed and for it to be the destiny of man kind and his stone stacking huts to rule it once more. As if dreaming is no longer possible here. As if because the family died and their offspring did not continue to sow the land there is somehow a great injustice placed upon the dreams of the people that did once live here. Is this where you stand?

"between what was and might have been"
This affirms to me that the poem's perspective is indeed not from that of nature, or trees, but rather man seeing a missed opportunity to live a romantic dream of plantation life and all of the baggage that comes with a cotton strewn past.

I as a spectator to your conflict want you to push it a bit farther.

If you really believe that something amazing could rise here once again...perhaps paint us a picture with a few lines?

Your rhymes are fairly comfortable throughout and do not feel forced...except for the most important one.
The last line you leave us with is quite forced. We must say BEAN instead of BEEN to make the rhyme work. Not a great way to send us floating off into poetic ether.

Perhaps:
This story repeated on each ridge;
lost dreams beneath a roof of green.
Stone ruins are the only bridge
from what is and what we might have seen. (too long but you get my point)

The use of the word "Virgin" in your title to me seems to imply that this location is now a farce.
This is a more original contextual use of virgin than we are used to seeing.
If this is your intent then I feel we can all look past how over used the word is.

But who knows...sometimes poems rename themselves after a few revisions. Something bubbles up that you did not see beneath the murk of an early draft.

I really enjoyed reading this over and over and would enjoy an expansion pack. I rarely want a poem to be longer and certainly would not recommend it unless I thought you had a tad more story to tell. Even if only closing us out with a bit more about "Virgin" woods. They feel abandoned at the beginning and they do not get to bow before the crowd.

Cheers and thanks for the target practice :)

_Danny

I read this a few times and hadn't commented as it is part of the ongoing workshop, now I think it is open season.
This was up to your usual standards of rhyme and reason , though I felt the mix of the old what had been and the maybe, could have been clearer. But I loved the write all the same, Yours Ian .T

I was standing in the shade of those trees looking out across the vacant place to where the family rested, surrounded by the defeated scenery of gone days, Lovely picture But I didn't move ??

but I tend to agree with Jess. Not that it's too long (I love a well thought expansive critique and read them all), but there is too little of the nuts and bolts I desire in critique of my work. Not that I want to see line by line dissection. Danny discussed the content of the poem far more than the poem itself and I applaud the approach. However, there is so much elegant discussion in his discussion that I do believe it could have been discussed with much more brevity and still succeeded in getting his point across.
An "A+" for style, but a "B-" for the necessary substance that we seek to improve the poem.
Danny obviously liked the poem a great deal (as did I), but there was little to direct Stan to what the critic truly liked and therefore should be emulated in later poems. A critique need not be negative (constructively) to be helpful.

As to my opinion to the content of the poem (not my job, I know), I agree. I saw an interview with James Watts once who said "I can do what nature does faster and just as well by planting."

Bullshit.

I agree with the others that the review is just not direct enough. That being said, I believe the review did cover all of the aspects that the writer requested, with the exception of one overwhelming point. The writer did not ask for the review to be sugar coated. They asked to be knocked on their butt.

With the amount of time put into the critique, I believe the author would have been better served with a more direct critique and with the time saved by being direct, I feel that more discussion about the "mechanics" of the poem could have taken place.

I liked Stan's poem. For any minor problems, the whole thing casts a long shadow. It is melancholy, filled with a definite sense of longing. It is a great Autumn poem. The imagery about the woods reclaiming the man-made structure until only the silo and chimney fell could be pressed into a Freudian phallic reading if one had to glean a couple thousand words out of this for an assignment but I don't honestly feel Stan intended that imagery to be sexual in nature. The whole thing to me represents that human long to know more, whether looking at a run-down farm or looking overhead at a jet at 30 thousand feet. I see no problem with mechanics or rhyming but for the example given and I feel that eightmenout did a good job in writing what he saw. This shows that critique is not a gave of who can shred who's poem best but instead is the recognition of the theme, technique, content, and craft in a poem. They can be good or bad, even in a shark tank.

Ron

not kind, but honest was my grade.
Beau's and Stan's comments are insightful. I choose the "knock me on my butt" option because I really want to be knocked down. As they said, not in an unkind way, but... brutally honest. I cannot grow if I am not watered. I don't ask that you give me straightforward critique about my work (negative or positive)... I beg for it.
Your opinions are often spot on and I encourage you to leave "spots" all over everything I post.

There is an elegance, a quality of agelessness in your poetry that is very compelling.

Joe

This workshop is now ended.

Please give me feedback, either on the workshop thread
http://www.neopoet.com/workshop/show-and-tell-intensive-critique-workshop
or by PM, as to how you benefited from the workshop, criticisms and ways future workshops could be improved,