Critique of Reig's Poem

Sitting and Thinking is a poem about the author simply observing his surroundings at night while on a laptop. The style is written in prose. The beginning starts off the poem in concrete language, but then finishes in a more abstract way.

I think what this poem does right is its concrete language. A poem is often hazy, and you can get lost, but in this case, it was very easy to feel grounded in the environment that was written for us. My only complaint is that this wasn’t followed through for the entire poem.

The only other criticism I have, and this is, to me, the most important, is that the poem is written in prose. It barely feels like a poem because of this. This is something I would expect to find in a short story, not a poem. The language doesn’t even come across as poetic. This is especially apparent because of the use of punctuation and lack of grammatical errors.

All in all, I think it’s important that you extend your concrete language into the second half of the poem and break down the poem into more fragments and poetic language.