Carr's comments on Meghan's poem 9/22

To: Meghan Harris
From: Carr
Re: “Best Friend”
Meghan,
There are some things working well here in your poem, “Best Friend.” First, this is a very god subject for a poem. Friends are an important part of our lives. As you say, they are often the ones who are closest to us during pivotal moments of our lives: “First kiss, first fight, first break up, first goodbye.” At the same time, friendships also contain an aspect that makes them different than familial relationships: they don’t always last. Family members are always there, often when we don’t want or appreciate them. But friends can move away or become distant if we don’t nurture the friendship. They are delicate. And it is this aspect of your friendship, it’s fragile nature, that I am most intrigued by and that is signaled at the end of your poem. There you ask, “Best friends forever, nothing could be better?” right before you tell us you made a promise with your friend not to forget. That’s good stuff.
OK. So what to work on in revision? The first thing I would suggest is to try and bring a sharper focus to your poem. Right now you are trying to include every aspect of your relationship in the one poem. That leads to the kind of general, abstract writing that we see here. You tell us about then kinds of things she did for you, but no specifics. For example, we don’t know why you lost trust in her (or someone else), why you had to forgive, what you fought about, why you were afraid, etc. We don’t really have any sense of who you are in this poem. Nothing here is specific to your life. So focus. Choose one aspect of your friendship, choose one situation that is meaningful to you. I suggest the parting, because it seems the most acute here. Perhaps you could show us the scene of your goodbye and really probe this aspect of the human condition – that we are afraid to lose our friends. But show this by using specific, concrete details. Show us what you saw, heard, felt, tasted, smelled. Show us what you did, how you acted. And through this showing let us understand your feelings, your humanity.
All right. So keep working on the poem. This is the kind of topic that can be super powerful if you get real with it. Good luck.
CK