Latest / Rachel Oates / Why Does Everyone Hate Marina’s Poetry?

Transcript

Why Does Everyone Hate Marina’s Poetry? · Rachel Oates

• 0:00
  Hey everyone, welcome back to new video.
• 0:01
  My name is Rachel and I'm so happy to have you here.
• 0:04
  I am really excited to announce that today's video is sponsored
• 0:06
  by one of the most exciting sponsors I've ever had, and that
• 0:10
  is Hungry Minds, the company behind the book, The Ultimate
• 0:14
  Guide to Rebuilding Civilization.
• 0:15
  It is fantastic and I can't wait to tell you a little bit more
• 0:18
  about it very, very soon. But first, what is today's video
• 0:22
  about? You guys have been asking for
• 0:24
  this literally since before the book even came out and I'm
• 0:27
  finally doing it today. We are reviewing Marina
• 0:30
  Diamondis Eat the World poetry book.
• 0:33
  So in October 2024, Marina Diamondis, who was formerly
• 0:37
  known by her kind of stage name Marina and the Diamonds,
• 0:40
  released her first ever poetry collection, Eat The World.
• 0:44
  Now Marina has been a musician I've listened to since I was
• 0:47
  probably about 17. I think that was a long time
• 0:50
  ago. I definitely remember her first
• 0:52
  little 6 track EP, Slash album. It was more of an EP, let's be
• 0:56
  honest, being released and it had songs like Hermit the Frog.
• 0:59
  I think 17 was on there, Simplify.
• 1:02
  Then she started to get a lot bigger when she released her
• 1:05
  first studio album, The Family Jewels.
• 1:07
  I also really enjoyed her next album.
• 1:09
  There was some really, really fun songs on there.
• 1:11
  But I have to be honest, her third album Fruit kind of lost
• 1:14
  me a bit. But I have to admit I did fall
• 1:15
  off a bit and I didn't listen to any of her other new stuff until
• 1:19
  it came to researching this video.
• 1:22
  So I would say for Full disclosure, I'm a fan of a few
• 1:25
  of her songs. I like her, but I'm not a super
• 1:28
  fan. I've never liked seen her in
• 1:30
  concert. I would never like go out to buy
• 1:33
  her merch or of record or anything like that.
• 1:35
  I just do like a few of her songs.
• 1:37
  I don't know anything about her personal life, but what I will
• 1:42
  say is she has an absolutely fantastic voice.
• 1:44
  I think that's undisputable, and she has some very good, catchy
• 1:48
  songs. I've always found her lyrics
• 1:49
  entertaining and she's clearly very talented, which is why this
• 1:54
  was such an emotional roller coaster to read and experience.
• 1:59
  Let's talk about it. Overall, it was a bit of a let
• 2:02
  down which was really really disappointing.
• 2:06
  Don't get me wrong, there are definitely parts of this that I
• 2:09
  really enjoyed and appreciated and I'm going to be talking
• 2:12
  about them plenty don't worry. But there was also a lot that I
• 2:15
  felt just wasn't developed or explored fully and it just left
• 2:19
  me frustrated and wanting more. I have to admit, when I first
• 2:24
  got this book in the post and I flicked through it, I had really
• 2:27
  high hopes and they were not met.
• 2:30
  OK, so I'm just going to jump in here really quickly.
• 2:32
  I am so excited to introduce you to this chunky little boy.
• 2:36
  This is the book, the Ultimate guide to Rebuilding
• 2:39
  Civilization, and I am so grateful to say they are the
• 2:42
  sponsor of today's video. I have wanted to get my hands on
• 2:44
  a copy of this for quite a while now.
• 2:47
  So when they reached out to me to work with me, I was like,
• 2:50
  yes, absolutely jumped at the chance.
• 2:52
  I was like, there's no way I'm not doing this.
• 2:54
  And after getting the book, looking through it, reading
• 2:56
  through it, I am not disappointed that this book is
• 2:58
  everything I hope for and so much more.
• 3:00
  This is easily one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen,
• 3:03
  with over 400 pages of stunning handmade illustrations.
• 3:07
  There's a whole lot of beautiful watercolour stuff going on in
• 3:09
  here. If you would be like ink
• 3:10
  washers. It's absolutely gorgeous and
• 3:13
  it's incredible. It has information on pretty
• 3:15
  much anything in the world you would want to know about, like
• 3:18
  how it works, how to make something, how to do something.
• 3:21
  So we're talking types of not basics of medicine, anatomy,
• 3:25
  metalworking, sewage works, childbirth, baking, yoga, and
• 3:30
  it's just absolutely insane. Anything you can think of pretty
• 3:33
  much is in this book. You guys might know that when
• 3:35
  I'm feeling overly anxious or I can't sleep, I love to turn to
• 3:38
  big reference books like this and just sit down with them for
• 3:41
  half an hour, lose myself in learning about the world, look
• 3:43
  at the beautiful illustrations and it's really, really
• 3:46
  relaxing. But that's kind of not all I'm
• 3:49
  getting out of this book. It's pretty amazing.
• 3:50
  So I'm finding a lot of the artwork is a massive inspiration
• 3:53
  for my own art and my own style. Because you guys might know, I
• 3:56
  love watercolour painting myself and I adore the style of artwork
• 3:59
  in here. So there's a lot of things I'm
• 4:00
  trying to like, replicate and take inspiration from.
• 4:03
  And I also think that if you're an author yourself and you're
• 4:06
  really into like world building and you want to get your facts
• 4:08
  right and know how something works before you write about it,
• 4:10
  this would be an absolutely fantastic reference to use.
• 4:14
  I have just honestly never seen anything like this book before.
• 4:17
  It is incredible. It was put together by over 50
• 4:20
  contributors, including artists, scientists, architects,
• 4:23
  designers, whole bunch of people.
• 4:25
  There's a massive Kickstarter behind it that raised like
• 4:27
  $3,000,000. And it's just so clear that so
• 4:29
  much love and care and attention to detail went into this and
• 4:34
  it's just something so special. I've never seen anything like
• 4:36
  it. So if you want to get a copy of
• 4:38
  yourself or maybe gift it to someone special in your life
• 4:40
  because this would be an absolutely incredible gift to
• 4:43
  give or receive, then you can check out the link that is in my
• 4:47
  video description and also down in comment.
• 4:49
  And if you use my code Rachel 10, that's RACH EL10, then you
• 4:55
  can get 10% off your order, which is pretty damn good.
• 4:57
  So thank you so much to Hungry Minds and the book for
• 5:00
  sponsoring this video. Thank you so much for you guys
• 5:02
  for listening. And I really hope if you have a
• 5:04
  copy of this yourself or you go ahead and get one that you
• 5:06
  really, really enjoy it as much as I do.
• 5:09
  And I can't wait to just go back and read some more of this.
• 5:12
  I've got a couple of clips to you here from when I first got
• 5:14
  the book and after I finished my first couple of reads through.
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  Just give you some first impressions.
• 5:18
  So a lot of you really liked when I reviewed the new
• 5:22
  Jacqueline Wilson book, when I did the kind of updates and
• 5:25
  thoughts as I went along and gave you little snippets here
• 5:28
  and there to kind of break up the video.
• 5:30
  And I figured I would do the same with this book.
• 5:32
  So it's literally just arrived. I've just got it in the post.
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  And honestly, it's smaller than I expected.
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  And it's very light as well, which is interesting.
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  But yeah, it's a smaller collection than I expected,
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  which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that.
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  I've. I've always said like I prefer
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  quality over quantity. So this to me is a very good
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  first impression in a way because it means she's probably
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  really carefully selected the poems in here.
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  She's probably not gone over the top with it.
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  Like Halsey's collection I thought was really good.
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  That's a good length. There was a good collection of
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  poems in there. Some of them were a little
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  redundant on the whole good. I'm hoping Marinas is going to
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  be the same. I also really love the cover
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  art. I think this is great.
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  It's very reminiscent of the whole like 90s riot girl music
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  and movement and the art style is very similar to what they
• 6:19
  were using scenes back then and I think that's cool.
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  I'm hoping this is going to be a kind of riot girl esque
• 6:25
  collection with lots of strong feminist messages and lots of
• 6:30
  female empowerment, lots of kind of female rage.
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  Like that's, that's what I'm expecting just from the cover.
• 6:35
  That's what I'm hoping for. I've not read anything yet.
• 6:38
  I have had a quick flick through though and again, the art style
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  inside is like I say, quite reminiscent of little
• 6:47
  independent scenes. There's some really cool stuff
• 6:50
  going on with this. She's clearly playing around
• 6:51
  with formats and getting quite creative with her page layouts
• 6:56
  and stuff going on. And I'm hoping, obviously I've
• 7:00
  not read it yet, but I'm hoping she really is like leaning into
• 7:04
  this kind of creativity and doing something fun and pushing
• 7:08
  the boundaries a bit. And you know, I want that kind
• 7:11
  of messiness of the whole 90s riot girl kind of all very do it
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  yourself, very wild, very not necessarily angry, but
• 7:21
  passionate, very in your face, unapologetic.
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  They're the vibes that I'm getting from just kind of
• 7:28
  flicking through this. And that's what I hope is
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  represented in the content, in the poems.
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  At a glance, it looks very creative.
• 7:37
  It looks like she's pushing the boundaries.
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  And I have really high hoped so far.
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  So I think I think this is great.
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  I'm very excited to to read it now.
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  It's interesting because I haven't really listened to
• 7:46
  Marina's music in a while. I remember being a big fan of
• 7:49
  her first album when that came out.
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  God, I don't even know what year that was, but I remember
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  listening to it on the way to and from university open days
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  and some of her like earlier singles in the first DP and
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  stuff. I I listened to that when I was
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  like 17 going to uni open days. So it's that that long ago right
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  of mine. I'm nearly 32 now, so it's a
• 8:07
  while. I think her second album was the
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  one that had like Teen Idol and Hippocrates and Value the Dolls
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  and all those songs on, which was like a little more
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  mainstream, but I still really enjoyed it.
• 8:22
  There was some fantastic song from there, really catchy.
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  And then I think she released Fruit after that and I didn't
• 8:26
  really like anything on the album, so I just didn't listen
• 8:29
  to it. And I don't really know if she's
• 8:30
  released anything since or what she's been doing.
• 8:32
  I kind of like Fallen Off listening to her a bit, but I
• 8:37
  got the impression like back in 2017, she was very much like
• 8:40
  just your average indie kid who was kind of just doing her own
• 8:42
  thing and then got into the pop world.
• 8:44
  And like, I liked that. It felt fun.
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  She was still in the early stuff that I listened to.
• 8:48
  She was still quite independent. Like I think it was like the
• 8:51
  video of like Mowgli's Rd maybe was like quite simple and it's
• 8:55
  just like her on a white background, like dancing and
• 8:57
  some effects and whatever. And like it wasn't anything over
• 9:00
  the top or too produced. But then I felt like with the
• 9:03
  second album that was very like over produced and that was like
• 9:06
  a whole image and there was a vision and it was way more
• 9:08
  professional. And then again with Fruit,
• 9:11
  again, very like over produced and well thought out and again,
• 9:15
  very professional. So this feels like a very
• 9:19
  different vibe to all of that that I've seen so far.
• 9:22
  So I'm just actually editing this part of the video and
• 9:25
  future news jumping in. And, you know, I still haven't
• 9:27
  even finished the video script. I'm halfway through it.
• 9:29
  I've got about 10 pages in. I'm taking a break to just edit
• 9:32
  this first part of the video. And then I think this is just a
• 9:39
  kind of commentary on British pop and music and stuff in
• 9:43
  general. But I find that this has
• 9:45
  happened to me a lot with a lot of especially female artists
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  from around that time. And there were some really,
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  really cool ones back in that kind of like 2016 to sorry, no
• 9:57
  2006. I think I said 2017 in here.
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  I can come in 2007. And, but that kind of 2006 to
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  around 2010 era, there was some really, really cool, especially
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  female singer-songwriter type music stuff and I remember
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  really, really enjoying it at the time.
• 10:17
  And Ellie Goulding was another big one.
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  I absolutely adored her. I thought, I thought her first
• 10:22
  album was absolutely fantastic. And I remember going to see her
• 10:26
  at the A2 Academy in Sheffield and it was, no, I think they did
• 10:30
  put her in the bigger room, but it was still a relatively really
• 10:33
  small crowd. And it was just a fantastic
• 10:36
  night. And it was amazing.
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  And she did this great thing with when she played Salt Skin,
• 10:40
  she did the sort of like drum solo by herself.
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  It was fantastic. It was so damn good.
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  And then I just found like, as she released more and more music
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  of the years and it became like more and more, I don't say
• 10:54
  mainstream, like that's a bad thing, but I just found myself
• 10:57
  like enjoying her music less. And it all just sounded a bit
• 11:00
  more generic and boring. And I kind of feel like that's
• 11:03
  happened to everybody. That's happened to Marina to a
• 11:08
  lesser extent, but still a bit. And.
• 11:12
  And yeah. Is it because I'm talking that
• 11:17
  you don't even talk into two seconds ago?
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  And yeah, I just find that a little bit of a shame because
• 11:24
  like, the other night I was going back and I really
• 11:26
  listened. Hello babies here.
• 11:28
  I really listened to Ellie Goulding's first album and
• 11:30
  really, really loved it. Really enjoyed it.
• 11:32
  And then I listened to some of her newest stuff and after it
• 11:35
  didn't I And it just wasn't as fun.
• 11:37
  It was not. And it's the same with Marina in
• 11:40
  making this video. I've gone back and really
• 11:41
  listened to some of her first music and it's still just as
• 11:43
  enjoyable. It's just as good.
• 11:45
  But I don't find some of her newer music like captures my
• 11:50
  attention that much and I'm not quite sure why.
• 11:53
  It's interesting something, if you think about it might be
• 11:56
  something she's doing more recently in her music like that.
• 11:58
  Like say, I don't know. I can't I can't say because it's
• 12:00
  just first impressions. I've not done any research for
• 12:03
  this yet. So I'm I'm interested maybe why
• 12:07
  there's been such a change in direction from this kind of over
• 12:10
  produced, professional, very well managed image, like
• 12:14
  everything thought out to kind of at least the vibe they're
• 12:17
  going with. This is a lot more kind of like
• 12:19
  underground and independent and and kind of angsty is the wrong
• 12:25
  word and very raw. Raw.
• 12:27
  There you go. I like that vibe.
• 12:31
  If it's authentic. I think it's a very, you know,
• 12:35
  this idea of like women underground producing their own
• 12:38
  little scenes at home and handing them out to talk about
• 12:40
  abortion rights and fighting back against rape culture and
• 12:43
  speaking up for women's rights. And in the 90s, like there not
• 12:48
  as much as there is today, but there was a lot more talk about
• 12:50
  like finally accepting like lesbians and not so much
• 12:54
  bisexual people a little bit, but like accepting lesbians into
• 12:58
  like the feminist movement and starting very slowly to accept
• 13:02
  trans women. And I would like to see like an
• 13:06
  in here, like a kind of updated modern version of that where
• 13:09
  you've got that raw, angsty passion speaking out for all
• 13:12
  women and giving them a voice and being very like inclusive
• 13:16
  and intersectional. I just, I don't know.
• 13:19
  Now actually thinking back over like her musical history, I'm
• 13:21
  not sure that's really her vibe. So I don't know how authentic
• 13:26
  this is going to be, but I hope it will be.
• 13:28
  I I do. And so far it looks really cool.
• 13:31
  I'm intrigued. I'm hoping it's as creative and
• 13:34
  fun and passionate as it just looks at a glam a glance.
• 13:38
  But you can't really glean any real knowledge from just
• 13:41
  flicking through a book, can you?
• 13:42
  And not reading anything. So I'm going to go read this,
• 13:46
  digest it, have a think and get back to you.
• 13:50
  OK, so let's give you a little bit of a middle of the night
• 13:53
  update on where I'm at with this book.
• 13:56
  I finished reading it for the first time and just before
• 14:00
  Christmas, After Christmas, I don't know.
• 14:01
  Time doesn't exist at this time of the year.
• 14:04
  And write her again. Made some notes and I'm still
• 14:08
  struggling to write my script because I just have so many
• 14:12
  thoughts that I'm really struggling to put into words.
• 14:15
  I feel like my main emotion is disappointment because of like
• 14:24
  unfulfilled potential and it's a little bit frustrating.
• 14:29
  I'll say this, I really loved a lot of the topics that she chose
• 14:34
  to speak about and write about. I felt a lot of them were really
• 14:37
  relatable. I really liked some of the
• 14:41
  imagery she used in some of the poems.
• 14:43
  My main issue was there was just no consistency.
• 14:49
  She would start off a poem with like 1 theme or like one kind of
• 14:55
  big metaphor and then suddenly it would all just shift to being
• 14:58
  about, well, not about something else.
• 15:00
  The subject was still the same, but how she wrote about it.
• 15:03
  The entire tone just shifted. There were, you know me, I'm a
• 15:06
  big fan of the extended metaphor and it was just like it was very
• 15:10
  all over the place. There was no consistency.
• 15:12
  It was like these poems hadn't been planned out.
• 15:15
  She just word vomited them on a page and then left them without
• 15:19
  any forethought and without any editing.
• 15:22
  And that was a big problem for me.
• 15:24
  The other big issue, which I think I'll speak about more when
• 15:27
  I get to the video essay portion of this video and I've written
• 15:30
  my script and everything is that she says in the introduction
• 15:34
  that she started out writing lots of stuff for songs, but
• 15:37
  they weren't working as songs. So she just decided they must be
• 15:41
  poems and then just left them at that.
• 15:44
  And it kind of undermines the entire art form of poetry.
• 15:47
  It's like, imagine if I was like, oh, I have this idea to do
• 15:51
  a big series of paintings, but then I start to make them and
• 15:57
  I'm like, actually, you know what?
• 15:59
  I don't think I've got the skill to paint these.
• 16:01
  I'm just going to leave them as the rough draft sketches and say
• 16:04
  that they're high quality drawings and get you to pay me
• 16:08
  for them. You know, it's that would be a
• 16:12
  misunderstanding of what drawing as an art form is because I'm
• 16:18
  just like, oh, any rough draft sketches, like quality drawing
• 16:21
  when it's not. And I feel like this is like a
• 16:24
  misunderstanding of what poetry is.
• 16:26
  She's taken what were like rough draughts of songs and then just
• 16:30
  been like, yeah, they're for their poems.
• 16:33
  And she doesn't ever. I'm trying to say this in the
• 16:37
  nicest way possible. She doesn't ever display any
• 16:39
  understanding of poetry as an art form or because she does use
• 16:45
  some poetic techniques and some of them are used really well and
• 16:49
  some of them aren't. I just get the sense throughout
• 16:52
  that when they work, it's out of luck rather than skill, which is
• 17:01
  annoying because she clearly knows how to craft a damn good
• 17:04
  song. She has some really catchy
• 17:06
  songs, she's got some good lyrics, and that's the thing
• 17:10
  about these poems. There's some really good little
• 17:12
  lines here and there. There's some great imagery in it
• 17:16
  and there's some beautiful symbolism in places, but none of
• 17:19
  it is developed because I think she lacks that fundamental
• 17:23
  knowledge about what poetry is. And she clearly has that
• 17:26
  knowledge when it comes to songwriting, but just not
• 17:29
  poetry. And I think people think poetry
• 17:33
  is easier to write than it is because I like, oh, it's just
• 17:35
  words with line breaks. And as I've said in all my
• 17:37
  poetry videos, it's not. There's so much more to adapt
• 17:40
  than that. There's there's skill.
• 17:42
  But then I guess that's the difference between like a poet,
• 17:46
  a good poet and an excellent poet.
• 17:48
  Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I'll try and do some
• 17:53
  examples going forward like as I'm still struggling to write
• 17:56
  the script because I just have a lot of thoughts are very jumbled
• 17:59
  at the minutes on. I'm taking my time with it.
• 18:01
  I'm thinking things through, but I'm definitely going to try and
• 18:05
  as always, find some examples of like, so I think I've said this
• 18:10
  before, but like one of the examples I always give, like
• 18:12
  when I've made photography videos and stuff like that is
• 18:14
  I'll show people a pretty good photo and they're like, oh, you
• 18:18
  know, I couldn't take that. So it seems quite good.
• 18:19
  And then I'm like, yes, but this is a great version of that
• 18:23
  photo. And usually it's something to do
• 18:25
  with different lighting, different techniques, different
• 18:26
  composition, like, and it can be something that seems quite
• 18:29
  basic, but that just elevates that photo to a whole new level.
• 18:32
  And it's the same with poetry. There's a lot of good stuff in
• 18:35
  here, but she just doesn't quite have the skill to elevate it to
• 18:39
  that next level. And it's that level of elevation
• 18:41
  that I'm looking for that I want to see, and then I'm
• 18:44
  disappointed. Isn't there?
• 18:47
  Actually, no, it's not that I'm disappointed that it's not
• 18:50
  there. I'm disappointed that she's not
• 18:52
  tried because at least with some poets, when they're just
• 18:57
  starting out and stuff, they might miss the mark.
• 19:01
  But when you can see someone's tried, it's like, I like that.
• 19:05
  I like that you've given it a go and like that you've tried.
• 19:07
  I like that you've understood. And even if you haven't quite
• 19:10
  fulfilled it, I respect that you gave it a go.
• 19:14
  And that's what I'm not seeing. And that's why I think I'm a bit
• 19:16
  frustrated. Yeah, that's why I am right now.
• 19:21
  Actually, though, I am just going to train in with one more
• 19:24
  thing. I have been looking at reviews
• 19:26
  of this book and some of them are very, very harsh.
• 19:30
  And this might not sound like me, but I think a lot of reviews
• 19:33
  are too harsh. You have a lot of people
• 19:35
  comparing her to like Rupee Core.
• 19:37
  I don't know, on top of it, Gabby Hannah, you have people
• 19:41
  comparing her to like Atticus and stuff.
• 19:42
  And I see where they're coming from, but I actually disagree.
• 19:47
  I do think she is in many places better than them.
• 19:53
  She has I guess kind of more. She might have the same level of
• 19:58
  skill and knowledge as them or maybe maybe a bit more.
• 20:02
  But like, at least when, even if it is out of luck, at least when
• 20:08
  Marina's minds work and they hit well and they're and they're
• 20:12
  good, they are miles above the likes of Ruby Call.
• 20:21
  So I do actually think a lot of the negative reviews are maybe
• 20:24
  too harsh, or maybe I'm just mellowing in my old age.
• 20:30
  I don't know. OK, but back to today, enough of
• 20:34
  the vague thoughts. Let's get specific and talk
• 20:37
  about the world. And we're going to start with
• 20:39
  the introduction to this book. Now, my first point here is
• 20:42
  something that I did mention in that last clip, but my thoughts
• 20:45
  are a little more put together here and I actually have the
• 20:47
  script, so let's talk about it, she writes.
• 20:50
  Of course, how I came to write a poetry book is a fairly curious
• 20:55
  one. At first I thought there were
• 20:57
  songs, so I tried to box them into their usual structures, but
• 20:59
  they refused to obey. A few weeks later I realised
• 21:02
  that they were poems, not songs, and from that moment onwards my
• 21:05
  love for this new medium was born.
• 21:08
  So my first thoughts here are that one.
• 21:09
  I don't mind that she's new to poetry.
• 21:11
  You don't need to have had 10/15/20 fifty years of writing
• 21:14
  experience to be a good poet. Absolutely not.
• 21:17
  You just need a good idea, a lot of passion and a lot of hard
• 21:20
  work. So I don't don't mind that at
• 21:23
  all. The thing I do mind, and I think
• 21:26
  I mentioned it in that clip before, is when people are like,
• 21:29
  I try to do one thing. But it didn't work, it was too
• 21:31
  hard. So I just settled for calling it
• 21:33
  poetry. So that bugs me now, this
• 21:36
  doesn't mean that you can't switch mediums or formats
• 21:39
  halfway through an idea. That's half the creative process
• 21:42
  sometimes, you know, absolutely fair.
• 21:44
  If you want to express yourself in a different way, you go for
• 21:46
  it. You try something new, why not?
• 21:48
  But you also have to remember that each style of writing or
• 21:52
  format that you're doing something in or medium that
• 21:54
  you're working with has its own rules and techniques and theory
• 21:58
  behind it that you need to understand if you want to
• 22:01
  execute a piece of art. Well, I can't just try and build
• 22:04
  a car, realise it's too hard and then call 2 tyres and a pile of
• 22:09
  scrap metal a bike, you know? I can't decide that I want to
• 22:13
  make a film, decide it's too hard and then take the roughly
• 22:16
  sketched dodgy storyboard that I threw together in 5 minutes and
• 22:20
  claim it's a series of drawings I'm going to hang in an art
• 22:22
  gallery, you know? However, if I wanted to, for
• 22:26
  example, take a series of photos, but then I realised,
• 22:28
  hang on, this might be better as a series of paintings, it is
• 22:31
  more than OK to take those initial ideas you had and start
• 22:34
  translating them for a new medium.
• 22:37
  So instead of thinking about, well, I'm going to use this
• 22:39
  lighting and these lenses and that sort of thing, I might
• 22:40
  start thinking, well, I'm going to use these kinds of paints.
• 22:43
  I'm going to work on my composition like this.
• 22:46
  I'm going to block out my lighting and shadow here on the
• 22:48
  page like this. And so on.
• 22:50
  Changing medium part way through an idea or a project is fine as
• 22:54
  long as you respect the new medium, understand it, adapt to
• 22:59
  it, and still take the rules and theory and the skills you need
• 23:03
  for it into account. Poetry isn't an easier or lesser
• 23:07
  form of songwriting, and I find the implication that it is a
• 23:11
  little disrespectful to the art form and it shows a bit of a
• 23:14
  misunderstanding of it overall. It's like she tried to write
• 23:18
  songs and couldn't, so-called them poems.
• 23:20
  Instead of saying these aren't working as songs, let me work on
• 23:23
  them as poems. It's kind of more like she'd
• 23:25
  left them as is, if that makes sense, because they're so
• 23:29
  underdeveloped. That said, there's a lot in this
• 23:32
  introduction that I do really like and I do really respect.
• 23:35
  And it does make me feel like at least she was trying to do
• 23:40
  something good with this book, and I do respect that.
• 23:42
  So a couple of it she writes include writing is a way to
• 23:48
  remember and also a way to forget, to let go, to explore
• 23:52
  wounds so that I can heal them, to understand them intimately,
• 23:54
  so I can let them go. It's an invisible thread that
• 23:57
  connects me back to my true self.
• 23:59
  Writing poetry has helped me uncover and integrate the parts
• 24:02
  of myself that I try to hide. You might say it's a little bit
• 24:05
  cliche, but honestly, I like it. I appreciate it.
• 24:08
  I respect it, you know? And she also ends the intro, and
• 24:11
  she also ends the intro with this little bit that I like.
• 24:14
  I hope this book brings solace to those who need it.
• 24:17
  Sometimes it can feel like no one in the world feels the same
• 24:19
  way you do. But the truth is, many of us
• 24:21
  experience the same challenges, just at different times in life.
• 24:24
  And again, I appreciate that. And I think what I really liked
• 24:29
  about reading that before going into the book was that to me it
• 24:33
  means that even if some of her work isn't developed enough or
• 24:37
  technically good, she is at least at times thinking about
• 24:42
  her audience and she cares about the reader and what they get out
• 24:45
  of this. It's not just a completely self
• 24:48
  indulgent project. I do think she has thought,
• 24:50
  well, what are other people taking away from this?
• 24:53
  And that's a really important thing in poetry.
• 24:55
  I do believe that even if these aren't the best pieces of
• 24:58
  poetry, they at least work as, like, little vignettes into her
• 25:01
  experience. And I think other people will be
• 25:04
  able to relate to them and take a lot away and be like, yeah, I
• 25:08
  felt like that at some point. Yeah, that's what I've been
• 25:10
  through. And for that reason, I can't be
• 25:12
  too mad at it, you know? And that's, that's kind of
• 25:16
  partly why I do think some of the reviews of this book are too
• 25:18
  harsh. While the quality of writing may
• 25:22
  be comparable to some less favourable poets, I think at
• 25:25
  least Marina actually wrote was an audience in mind and managed
• 25:30
  to write in a way that at least other women will be able to
• 25:34
  relate to and get something out of.
• 25:37
  Overall, in summary, she had a lot of good and really important
• 25:40
  things to say, and I love the subject matter of a lot of her
• 25:43
  poems. I just wish she'd maybe taken
• 25:46
  some poetry writing classes or worked alongside some of the
• 25:48
  poets or even just worked as an editor a bit, you know?
• 25:53
  So now we've got all that up. Wait.
• 25:55
  Let's finally read some poems and talk about them.
• 25:58
  Yeah. Now, I initially had notes to
• 26:01
  talk about probably twice as many poems as I've ended up
• 26:04
  writing about in this script, but I didn't want to be sat here
• 26:07
  filming for four hours because I would be exhausted.
• 26:10
  You'd be exhausted. I'm trying to keep this as
• 26:13
  concise as possible, which is not an easy thing for me.
• 26:15
  It's a skill I'm working on. So the first point we're going
• 26:18
  to look at is called Starlight Water, Space, Fresh Air.
• 26:21
  And I want to start talking about this because not only is
• 26:24
  it the first point I'm in the book, but I think it's a really
• 26:26
  good example of some of the best and worst parts of Marina's
• 26:28
  writing. There is a nude woman in this
• 26:33
  photo that I think I'm going to have to censor for YouTube.
• 26:36
  So if there's a box on the screen, that's why I can't live
• 26:39
  where I'm from. It hurts too much, so I put my
• 26:42
  hand up and volunteer to be an eternal sapling, ready to be
• 26:47
  transplanted at a moment's notice into a pot of warm soil,
• 26:50
  hoping that this time my roots will grow, that I'll be
• 26:55
  nourished by Starlight, water, space, fresh air that wasn't
• 27:00
  polluted at the source. Now I have a lot to say about
• 27:04
  this, so let's try and go through it slowly.
• 27:09
  I'll be honest, the entire like writing the whole thing in
• 27:11
  lowercase thing is a little bit of a pet peeve of mine because
• 27:14
  most of the time it's done without purpose.
• 27:17
  And Marina flips back and forth in this book between writing
• 27:21
  entirely in lowercase and sometimes using regular sentence
• 27:24
  case. And there seems to be no logical
• 27:26
  reason as to why she picks one sometimes and the other other
• 27:31
  times I would quite like to just kind of like sit down with her
• 27:36
  and be like, can you talk? I, I think that's one of the
• 27:38
  things actually, I would really like to sit down with her and
• 27:41
  just talk and be like, can you talk me through some of your
• 27:42
  choices here? Because I'm not sure how many
• 27:45
  were intentional and, and how many were just lucky or unlucky
• 27:51
  in that they didn't really translate a message.
• 27:55
  I, I don't know anyway, so the use of capitalisation in
• 28:02
  writing, especially in poetry, it is a part of grammar and I
• 28:06
  wish that people would use it creatively in poetry more often
• 28:10
  instead of just stylistically choosing.
• 28:12
  Oh, all lowercase because that's what Instagram poetry does, you
• 28:15
  know, maybe you want to use all caps in a place to show that
• 28:18
  you're angry or shouting. Maybe you want to use all
• 28:20
  lowercase in another place to show that you're whispering.
• 28:23
  Maybe you want to capitalise certain words to give them extra
• 28:25
  meaning. I do that a lot in my own poetry
• 28:27
  because there's a big thing in like religious where you always
• 28:30
  have to capitalise God to show like reverence for him and like
• 28:33
  respect and that sort of thing. So I often find it's really nice
• 28:37
  in poetry to play around with capitalising words that have a
• 28:39
  lot of meaning and you want to place an almost like God like
• 28:42
  quality on. That's the thing I do quite a
• 28:44
  lot in my own work. And some of you might have
• 28:45
  noticed maybe in another poem you want to use or lowercase, or
• 28:51
  you want to use inconsistent capital letters to show that
• 28:53
  you're writing as a child or maybe an adult with literacy
• 28:56
  issues or something like that. You know, show your writing in a
• 28:59
  certain voice of a certain person who only knows certain
• 29:03
  grammar rules or you know, whatever.
• 29:06
  There's a lot of really fun, creative things you can do, but
• 29:09
  I feel like here I'm not sure what her purpose is for it very
• 29:14
  often. Sometimes it feels like she's
• 29:17
  stalled about it, and other times it just feels like she's
• 29:20
  like, yeah, do whatever, and it's a bit of an afterthought.
• 29:22
  And yeah, I don't know. As for the poem itself, I do
• 29:28
  like that she's using this extended metaphor throughout.
• 29:31
  You'll see that one of my issues with this book is there's a lack
• 29:34
  of consistent imagery throughout a lot the poems, at least this
• 29:37
  one has consistent imagery. So that's a that's a good thing.
• 29:40
  You know, she compares herself to an eternal sapling.
• 29:43
  She hates where she grew up. She doesn't wind up stuck there
• 29:45
  forever. So she stays an eternal sapling,
• 29:48
  constantly staying small, immature, never putting down
• 29:51
  real roots that tie her to a place forever.
• 29:53
  She wants to move, but she won't take personal responsibility for
• 29:56
  it. Move herself.
• 29:58
  Instead, she says she waits, ready to be transplanted,
• 30:01
  wanting someone else to do that work for her.
• 30:04
  This all works really well in the poem.
• 30:05
  Her meaning is clear. It's interesting.
• 30:08
  But then the second page is where it kind of all starts to
• 30:10
  fall apart a little bit. So really good setup.
• 30:13
  Poor pay off. So she hopes that once someone
• 30:16
  moves her in the new place, she'll be able to put down roots
• 30:18
  and grow in a space where she'll be nourished by Starlight,
• 30:21
  water, space and fresh air that, in her words, wasn't polluted at
• 30:26
  the source. So I kind of wish that pollution
• 30:28
  imagery had been kind of planted in the beginning of the poem,
• 30:31
  like talking about how, like, you know, she volunteers to stay
• 30:34
  internal something, and she doesn't say that word because of
• 30:36
  the pollution. I wish there was like, a little
• 30:38
  more imagery of it up there in the beginning.
• 30:40
  So we kind of, you know it. And it doesn't even need to be
• 30:42
  that literally. It could have just been
• 30:44
  something about the toxicity, that there's the poise.
• 30:45
  I don't know anything really. As for the things she wishes to
• 30:50
  be nourished by in the new place, a lot of them make sense
• 30:52
  for a planet net for, you know, water, fresh air, whatever.
• 30:55
  The Starlight one is one that kind of threw me off a bit.
• 30:57
  I was like, that's a bit like, was sunlight not romantic enough
• 31:01
  for you? Why'd you go to Starlight?
• 31:04
  But then I start thinking, well, like, maybe she's saying
• 31:07
  Starlight instead of sunlight because I mean, like, the sun is
• 31:09
  the type of star, but also she wants to be surrounded by like
• 31:12
  stars, meaning celebrities who can like, help her career.
• 31:16
  So it's maybe like the whole double meaning thing there.
• 31:18
  She's like got the sunlight with the plant and the Starlight with
• 31:21
  the celebrity thing that she wants.
• 31:23
  I don't know, that was maybe a thought.
• 31:26
  The space line I think is more about like physical space and
• 31:29
  literally needing space to grow, to stretch herself to like, you
• 31:33
  know, give herself a bit of independence, a bit of freedom,
• 31:37
  that sort of thing. It's good.
• 31:40
  It all makes sense. I just wish there was a little
• 31:42
  bit more, you know, it's a little basic.
• 31:46
  It's, it's good. It's a really good start.
• 31:49
  There's a hell of a lot of meaning there.
• 31:51
  I just want more. As it stands, it's just didn't
• 31:56
  like my home. Someone moved me.
• 31:58
  Basic plant metaphor, which is fine.
• 32:01
  And the whole meaning behind it and that whole like you're
• 32:04
  feeling stifled by your hometown, you know, wanting to
• 32:06
  move somewhere and have other people around you who can help
• 32:09
  you grow. And that's like, that is
• 32:10
  relatable. That is a really good subject.
• 32:13
  The metaphor works for it. I just want more that that's
• 32:17
  that's it. I just, I want a little bit
• 32:19
  more. I want, I want more emotion.
• 32:23
  I want more imagery. I want to dive deep into that
• 32:27
  metaphor and find even more layers.
• 32:29
  I want to dig into it. I want to really sink my teeth
• 32:31
  into a poem. I don't just want, oh, here's
• 32:34
  the surface layer and and that's it.
• 32:37
  OK, you know, it. It was a subject that I should
• 32:43
  have felt really to, to wait the words on.
• 32:47
  Yeah, there we go. It's a subject that I should
• 32:49
  have related to. And I I do relate to it a lot
• 32:51
  actually, but it didn't make me feel anything and it should
• 32:56
  have. And so that's what I was
• 32:57
  missing, just that deeper layer that really connected with me.
• 33:01
  Like in the beginning she talks about like the whole plant
• 33:03
  metaphor thing. And obviously plants can't.
• 33:05
  Well, actually plants can move a little bit, but in the general
• 33:09
  sense, like they can't get up and walk away, so they can't
• 33:11
  move like that. And I wish she'd maybe like dug
• 33:14
  into that a little bit more on this idea that she felt not
• 33:17
  mobile, she felt restricted. She felt like she couldn't
• 33:20
  physically move herself. She felt a reliance on others
• 33:24
  and and how that makes her feel powerless.
• 33:26
  You know, even if she's put into a healthier environment, then
• 33:28
  she didn't choose to be there herself.
• 33:30
  She waited for someone to move her.
• 33:32
  I wish there'd been a bit more of an exploration around that
• 33:35
  and those feelings. I think that could have been
• 33:37
  really interested. There was just a lot of
• 33:40
  potential in this poem that wasn't fully explored.
• 33:44
  That said, I like what she did with the layout.
• 33:45
  I appreciate this. She played the space on the
• 33:48
  page. She tried to show that need for
• 33:50
  space in a physical way on the page, and I really appreciate
• 33:52
  that. That was a nice little creative
• 33:54
  thing that I don't really see many poets doing these days.
• 34:01
  So I I appreciate that. I liked that.
• 34:03
  Again, it felt like maybe a little too little compared to
• 34:06
  what she could have done, but a good start nonetheless.
• 34:10
  And so overall, good poem with a lot of potential, but just not
• 34:15
  an excellent poem. And there were just a few.
• 34:18
  Well, there was a lot that I just wanted more from, you know?
• 34:26
  Yeah. OK.
• 34:27
  So the next one in the book and the next one that I'm looking at
• 34:29
  in this video is called aspartame.
• 34:31
  And for those of you who don't know, it's an artificial
• 34:33
  sweetener, which is lower in calories than regular sugar, but
• 34:36
  it's not very good for you, especially when you have it in
• 34:39
  high amounts. And it's often found in like
• 34:42
  diet soft drinks and stuff like that.
• 34:43
  So. So this is a poem that is partly
• 34:45
  about diet culture, body image, food issues, but also about how
• 34:49
  she leaned too much on a crappy man.
• 34:51
  She was trying to get him to like, provide her with all the
• 34:54
  love and self esteem she needed and couldn't give herself.
• 34:56
  Obviously this didn't work out. It feels like it could be an
• 34:59
  important poem with a really important subject matter.
• 35:01
  But it feels very much like an early draft.
• 35:04
  There's a lot going on in here, but it's not well structured.
• 35:07
  It's inconsistent. It feels like a first draft
• 35:10
  streamed consciousness, not a finished poem.
• 35:12
  This is one of the ones that had a lot potential, but just
• 35:15
  doesn't work for me on many levels.
• 35:18
  I arrived here at 20, rail thin and a polka dot dress, tooth
• 35:21
  enamel dissolved by stomach acid as banking on my high school
• 35:24
  sweetheart to be a source of love.
• 35:26
  An injection for a supply I'd been mercilessly cut off from.
• 35:30
  It didn't work. In the time we'd spent a part,
• 35:32
  he'd become a surfer up in San Luis Obispo and had developed a
• 35:37
  ponchon for getting high at 5:00 in the morning.
• 35:40
  I spent my time with him mainly A not eating, B checking the
• 35:42
  status of my hip bones and C hiding from his alpha roommates.
• 35:46
  I'd wander around town cause playing as a girl next door,
• 35:48
  hitting up TJ Maxx like a normal American girl in a normal
• 35:53
  American world. Far from a singing career, close
• 35:56
  to failure, I was a bulimic college dropout with no family.
• 36:00
  Except there was family, my mum, who I called in desperation to
• 36:03
  book my plane ticket home. Things went sour fast in my high
• 36:06
  school sweetheart turned to a Spartame dust.
• 36:09
  I took the train to Hollywood like a cliche and rode the
• 36:12
  Amtrak like I was in the lap of luxury, relieved to have escaped
• 36:15
  the tension of a reunion gone bad.
• 36:17
  Hollywood Blvd smelled like the apocalypse in the pale winter
• 36:20
  light added to my feeling of dissociation.
• 36:23
  If not being real anymore, of life being a numb game, I could
• 36:26
  have died and not fell anything. I spent my days visiting emo
• 36:29
  stores on Melrose, dodging drug addicts on trains and shopping
• 36:32
  at Forever 21. On my last night I got my
• 36:35
  reflection, a silver light bouncing off ribs protruding
• 36:37
  crudely from my back. It was then I realised the jig
• 36:40
  was up. My plan to be thin hadn't
• 36:43
  worked. I didn't make him love me.
• 36:46
  Years later we meet again at the Roosevelt H2, old friends
• 36:49
  sharing the same soul connection we'd we'd had in high school.
• 36:53
  He told me when he'd seen the Hollywood video he'd felt sick
• 36:56
  because I'd achieved my dreams, because I wasn't a lunatic, and
• 36:59
  somehow it healed a forgotten part of me.
• 37:01
  He was the only one I'd ever told about my dreams.
• 37:04
  I was no longer a victim. I'd been redeemed, no longer a
• 37:06
  drop out. He'd see me succeed.
• 37:08
  And finally, I wasn't who I was at 17 anymore.
• 37:12
  So there's a lot of nice little imagery in here, but I just feel
• 37:17
  like as a piece, it doesn't quite work as well as I wanted
• 37:21
  it to. The first thing I noticed was
• 37:22
  like, I love that image of like the decayed tooth enamel, but
• 37:25
  it's just so literal, right? You know?
• 37:27
  So instead of just being literal and being like tooth enamel
• 37:30
  dissolved by stomach acid and just being like, hey, I puke a
• 37:33
  lot, to put it bluntly, sorry. Instead of being so literal,
• 37:37
  maybe if she'd done something like a, my confidence as eroded
• 37:40
  as my tooth enamel, something like that.
• 37:42
  Like it's a subtle change, but then it's kind of like the
• 37:45
  vomiting is implied. It's linking to her mental
• 37:48
  health issues and her confidence and that's why she's trying to
• 37:50
  control her weight and everything.
• 37:52
  I, I don't know, something like that.
• 37:53
  Like there's, there's better ways to do it.
• 37:56
  It's good as an image, but I just again, I want it more
• 38:00
  developed. I want more from it.
• 38:02
  And Marina's big problem throughout this poem and this
• 38:05
  book in general is that she's tries so hard to make the poems
• 38:08
  as accurately autobiographic as possible at the expense of
• 38:11
  artistic merit. She's very much a this happened
• 38:14
  and then this happened and then this many years this happened,
• 38:17
  and then there was this point in my career and then this thing
• 38:19
  happened. And she's very literal in just
• 38:21
  like spelling it out like that and telling you exactly what
• 38:23
  happened when, which is absolutely fine if you're
• 38:25
  writing a memoir or a personal essay, but in a poem, you can be
• 38:29
  a little more creative with it. You don't need to be as like,
• 38:32
  fact, fact, fact, fact if it's at the expense of the art, you
• 38:37
  know? Though she'll use lines like I
• 38:39
  arrive here at 20 rail scene in a polka dot dress.
• 38:42
  Years later, we meet at the Roosevelt Hotel.
• 38:44
  He told me he'd seen, he told me when he'd seen the Hollywood
• 38:47
  video. And these ones, like they're not
• 38:49
  bad on their own. They just feel a little stilted
• 38:51
  and awkward and like she's trying so hard to get the
• 38:53
  timeline and the chronology right.
• 38:55
  When in a good poem, you can afford to be a little flexible
• 38:58
  on the facts in order to create a better structured narrative or
• 39:01
  spend more time showing the emotions or the meaning of
• 39:04
  something like I guess I just wish she'd shown the passing of
• 39:07
  time in a more creative and meaningful way.
• 39:10
  There are a few lines in this I really love, like the the one
• 39:13
  that, you know, the whole poem is kind of based around is
• 39:16
  things went sour fast. My high school sweetheart turned
• 39:18
  to aspartame dust. I like that a lot.
• 39:20
  And I think that's a really, really fantastic couple of
• 39:23
  lines. You've got that juxtaposition of
• 39:25
  the sour, the sweet, the aspartame to be the fake sweet.
• 39:28
  You know, you've got the whole meaning there of how you think
• 39:30
  he's going to be a really sweet guy.
• 39:31
  He's going to fulfil your needs. He's going to provide sustenance
• 39:34
  and nourishment. But it turns out that all that
• 39:36
  sweetness is just like hollow and surface level, and he's not
• 39:39
  actually providing any calories or sustenance or actually
• 39:42
  supporting you. Instead, he's probably just very
• 39:45
  unhealthy for you, especially long term.
• 39:47
  You know, a few of the bits I have mixed feelings about.
• 39:50
  So the lines Hollywood Blvd smelled like the apocalypse and
• 39:54
  the pale went to light added to my feeling of dissociation, of
• 39:57
  not being real anymore, of life not being a dumb, of life not
• 40:01
  being a numb game. I could have died and not felt
• 40:03
  anything. I love her use of playing with
• 40:05
  space here, that big space before the dissociation love
• 40:09
  that really drives that feeling of separation.
• 40:11
  I like it. However, that image of the
• 40:14
  street smelled like the apocalypse.
• 40:16
  It's a little on the nose, but again, I don't hate it.
• 40:19
  I think it has a hell of a lot of potential.
• 40:22
  You know it's there. But I do feel like in this every
• 40:25
  line after that dissociation bit is unnecessary.
• 40:28
  If she just left it at like my feeling of dissociation it would
• 40:33
  have been fine. After that you're kind of over
• 40:34
  explaining. You repeat in without meaning.
• 40:38
  It's a bit redundant. I wish she'd shown these
• 40:43
  feelings in another way. Other examples of like a mix of
• 40:47
  good and bad bits. On my last night I caught my
• 40:49
  reflection, A silver light bouncing up, ribs protruding
• 40:52
  crudely from my back. It was then I realised the jig
• 40:55
  was up. My plan to be thin hadn't
• 40:56
  worked. I didn't make him love me.
• 40:59
  I love, love, love, love, love. That imagery of silver light
• 41:02
  bouncing off my ribs that is so damn emotive.
• 41:05
  It's raw, you can picture it. It's both kind of hauntingly
• 41:09
  beautiful and terrifying at the same time.
• 41:12
  I love that. Brilliant.
• 41:14
  But again, those last three lines, they just don't work.
• 41:18
  I don't like it. I wish we'd just had a bigger,
• 41:21
  more emotive moment of her realisation, you know?
• 41:24
  I didn't want to just my plan to be thin and the work so didn't
• 41:27
  make him love me. It just falls a bit flat.
• 41:30
  I want to know her feelings. I, I don't, I don't want to be
• 41:33
  told that this is what she's realised.
• 41:35
  I want to be shown her realising it.
• 41:38
  I want to feel as she feels, you know, and it kind of like
• 41:44
  telling us that this was her motivation.
• 41:46
  One, it's very little. We're just told it, which is a
• 41:49
  bit of a shame. And two, I wish we'd had the
• 41:51
  hints to it dropped earlier, so we'd learnt it in other ways.
• 41:55
  Again, show us, don't tell us. And it should have been kind of
• 41:58
  woven a little more throughout the poem.
• 42:01
  Oh, this is just, This is why this book is so damn frustrating
• 42:04
  because there's some little hidden gems here and there.
• 42:07
  And other times I just want to throw the whole book on the
• 42:09
  floor because I'm like, why did you do that when you could have
• 42:12
  done so much more? The end of the poem, like that
• 42:16
  whole little last page. I hate the ending because it
• 42:19
  just ends up being really boring.
• 42:21
  Literal statements of her, just listing her feelings.
• 42:24
  And again, I want to be shown these things, not just told
• 42:27
  them. Because I'd achieved my dreams.
• 42:29
  Because I wasn't a lunatic. I was no longer a victim.
• 42:32
  I had been redeemed. No longer a drop out.
• 42:34
  He'd seen me succeed. They're big statements, big
• 42:38
  emotions, big moments. Show them to me.
• 42:41
  Don't just tell me you're feeling them, because then I
• 42:43
  don't feel anything with you. I'm just like, OK, cool, right.
• 42:47
  And I want, I want you to show me.
• 42:50
  I just, I just want more, you know, I want to compare this
• 42:57
  poem to another poem, which is different subject matter.
• 43:02
  I'll give you that. But it's another poem about
• 43:04
  recovery and growth. And this is called The Lilies by
• 43:08
  Karen Wood. Now this poem is different
• 43:11
  because it is about recovering from cancer rather than any of
• 43:14
  the mental health problems, the eating issues, the self esteem
• 43:17
  issues, the feeling loss that Marina was writing about.
• 43:20
  But both share a similar narrative structure in a very
• 43:23
  vague sense, in the sense that both start with women who are
• 43:26
  ill and unsure about their future.
• 43:28
  The journey is difficult, then they feel scared and lost, and
• 43:31
  then both recover in the end and succeed in one way or another.
• 43:35
  Right. So this is Karen's poem.
• 43:38
  When I learned I might have cancer, I bought 50 in white
• 43:41
  lilies. Easter was gone.
• 43:43
  The trumpets were wilted plants, crooked with roots bound in
• 43:46
  pots. I dug them into the garden,
• 43:48
  knowing they would not bloom for another year.
• 43:51
  All some of the stalks stood like ramshackle pots while they
• 43:53
  waited for results. By autumn, the stalks had
• 43:56
  flopped down. More biopsies, laser incisions,
• 43:59
  the cancer in my tongue. A sprawling mass outside the
• 44:03
  earth remained bare, rhizome shrunken below the frost line.
• 44:07
  Spring shoots appeared in bright green skins and lilies bloomed
• 44:10
  in July, their wax trumpets pure white, dusting gold pollen to
• 44:14
  the ground. This year, tripled in number.
• 44:17
  They are popping up again, my weight.
• 44:19
  A ceremony for the lilies to open, for the Serpentine length
• 44:22
  of the garden to bloom in the shape of my tongue's scar.
• 44:26
  A white path with one end leading into brilliant air, the
• 44:29
  other down the throat's Canyon, black and unforgiving.
• 44:32
  I try to imagine what could grow in such darkness.
• 44:36
  I'm waiting for the lilies to open.
• 44:40
  And so while Marina's poem had her just straight up telling us
• 44:43
  I'm no longer a victim, I've been redeemed literally in those
• 44:47
  words and hers. Like literally telling us years
• 44:51
  past. Whatever.
• 44:52
  Karen doesn't tell us. She shows us all of this with a
• 44:56
  diagnosis. She buys and plants lilies,
• 44:58
  which shows us that despite the bleak circumstances, she still
• 45:01
  has some hope. She still has the love inside
• 45:03
  her to nurture something. As things start to get more
• 45:05
  difficult and she has to go through biopsies and tests and
• 45:09
  also stuff like that, the flowers around her are dying and
• 45:12
  wilting, withering. The flowers in her health sort
• 45:15
  of mirror each other. You know, you have the winter,
• 45:18
  the withering, the cold, dark. And that's when her illness is
• 45:21
  the worst. And she's going through all
• 45:22
  these tests and treatment and everything.
• 45:24
  But as she begins to heal and, you know, the cancer is
• 45:28
  literally, literally cut out and she's just off with a scar and
• 45:30
  she begins to heal. And this is where winter turns
• 45:33
  into spring and eventually into summer, and the lilies begin to
• 45:36
  grow. And eventually, years later, as
• 45:39
  she too has grown stronger and more resilient and healed, the
• 45:42
  lilies are not only just growing anymore, but they've tripled in
• 45:45
  number. There's so many of them.
• 45:47
  She acknowledges that from the pain and suffering, beauty and
• 45:50
  strength can grow and develop. And she talks about how the
• 45:53
  lilies are growing in her garden in the same shape as the scar on
• 45:56
  her tongue from the cancer. And I think that's just a
• 45:58
  really, really beautiful image that's so damn powerful, that
• 46:02
  line of I try to imagine what could grow in such darkness.
• 46:06
  I'm waiting for the lilies to open.
• 46:08
  It's such a beautiful and meaningful end to the poem,
• 46:10
  which perhaps a far more emotive punch than just.
• 46:14
  I wasn't who I was at 17 anymore, unfortunately.
• 46:18
  There's also that really smart like double meaning and extra
• 46:21
  layer in Karen's poem that's not such a happy one.
• 46:24
  That's not about regrowth and healing.
• 46:26
  And because white lilies are traditionally associated with
• 46:29
  death and funerals. And so there's a slightly darker
• 46:32
  interpretation going on here. If you if you want to take that
• 46:35
  one where it's like on getting the diagnosis, she's shot.
• 46:38
  She'd sort of made peace with her death and was preparing for
• 46:41
  it by already buying and planting these white lilies for
• 46:44
  her funeral. Essentially, you know, the
• 46:47
  tripling lilies at the end are perhaps less about healing and
• 46:50
  regrowth and more about the inevitability of death, if you
• 46:53
  look at it in that way. Alternatively, white lilies are
• 46:57
  also a symbol of rebirth and regrowth.
• 46:59
  So it really is up to the reader how optimistically or
• 47:02
  pessimistically they want to read that poem.
• 47:04
  There's a real duality there. And I think, again, that
• 47:07
  reflects her experience because she probably had a lot of
• 47:10
  conflicting feelings of, you know, you get that diagnosis and
• 47:13
  you're like, well, am I going to die?
• 47:15
  Or am I going to fight this and come out of this stronger?
• 47:18
  Like, what's what's going to happen?
• 47:19
  And you kind of, I guess, have to make peace with both and
• 47:23
  figure out like, what the hell is going on?
• 47:27
  Like, how do I cope with whatever outcome here?
• 47:30
  And I kind of feel like that's reflected in Karen's poem.
• 47:34
  And I think that's damn powerful.
• 47:36
  It's really, really clever. Marinas just doesn't quite have
• 47:41
  that emotive punch. It's just there's nothing really
• 47:44
  deeper or laid into it. There's a few good moments.
• 47:48
  But yeah, I do feel like with this poem and a couple of others
• 47:52
  that Marina's written here, there's a few nods to some of
• 47:56
  her song titles and stuff like that.
• 47:58
  And I mean, this one just straight up references her song
• 48:00
  Hollywood, like as the song. It's not even just the soul.
• 48:03
  It's like she's just talking about that song, which I guess
• 48:06
  is like a nice little. I don't, I don't want to call an
• 48:09
  Easter egg, but it's like a nice old nod in there for fans.
• 48:12
  But again, it feels like maybe she's done it all at the expense
• 48:16
  of actually creating a good stand alone poem.
• 48:18
  So it's a bit like, yeah, it's fine.
• 48:21
  I guess. One of the worst poems in this
• 48:25
  book is the next one that I want to talk about.
• 48:27
  And this is called Pain Eraser. I do not get why it's here.
• 48:30
  It is undeveloped. It is basic and it is lazy and I
• 48:33
  really don't like it. The things I need to write about
• 48:36
  are the things I'm scared to write about, lest they blow up
• 48:38
  my life and everything I tried so hard to save, mend, bury,
• 48:43
  heal. My original note on this poem
• 48:46
  said very, and sorry to say the name again, very Gabby Hannah
• 48:50
  and her acne poem. It just, it just reminded me of
• 48:54
  that. I feel like this is the kind of
• 48:55
  note you make in a Google Doc when you're like, oh, here's an
• 48:58
  idea for the subject of a poem. I will come back and try and
• 49:01
  write this later. And then you go back and you
• 49:03
  write an actual poem around that line.
• 49:05
  But instead she's just taken that that little subject line
• 49:08
  and thrown in some line breaks and hit publish.
• 49:12
  Yeah, I don't like it. Yeah, it bothers me.
• 49:16
  I said before and I'll I'll always say it, short poems, not
• 49:19
  a bad thing. I love a good short poem.
• 49:21
  A well crafted short poem can just like, oh, we hit you so
• 49:23
  hard. I love that.
• 49:25
  And they can be beautiful and meaningful.
• 49:26
  But this just misses every mark for me, I'm afraid.
• 49:31
  Smoothness of money. If we skip forward a bit, this
• 49:34
  is another poem that I felt quite let down by.
• 49:36
  It's a point about basically like having a rich boyfriend
• 49:39
  when you're from a bit of a working class background and you
• 49:41
  feel you're in a whole world with him that you don't really
• 49:44
  understand and you can't connect to.
• 49:45
  And there's this whole like, you know, class issue going on
• 49:49
  there. And then years later when you
• 49:51
  still managed to become, and then years later when you
• 49:53
  managed to become successful yourself and you've moved on
• 49:55
  from him and everything like that and you can kind of afford
• 49:57
  the kind of lifestyle that he grew up with.
• 49:59
  He looks down on you because you're new money and he's
• 50:01
  resentful and he's never had to work for it.
• 50:03
  So he doesn't really understand. And it's a whole thing.
• 50:06
  It should be a good subject, but it just falls flat.
• 50:12
  You remind me of British summertime.
• 50:14
  Lush lawns, green countryside, M&S sandwiches, eating lunch
• 50:18
  outside with your glossy, perfect family, so kind they
• 50:21
  made me nervous. Golden retrievers, A farmhouse,
• 50:25
  a pool. The security money could bring a
• 50:28
  life that could have been mine, lies that could have been yours.
• 50:31
  I was 21, an amateur and lacking the self worth to choose better.
• 50:36
  We were cartoon versions of an atomic bomb button pressing up
• 50:38
  against each other until one of his blew.
• 50:40
  You hid your weakness behind haircuts and emo music, Myspace
• 50:44
  profiles and webcams. You spoke to girls called Jamie
• 50:47
  Hart on. I hid behind thrift clothes,
• 50:51
  binge purge cycles and bad haired eyes.
• 50:53
  I picked up a microwave meal for you on our second day and
• 50:56
  thought it was love. These are the best years of your
• 50:59
  life. You had a world I wasn't allowed
• 51:01
  into. I was rough around the edges yet
• 51:03
  to be popular, and you were embarrassed of me.
• 51:06
  I didn't have the smoothness of money like you did, but one day
• 51:10
  I would and you would hate that I'd earned it.
• 51:13
  So like I say, I like the subject matter.
• 51:14
  It's a good thing to write about.
• 51:16
  But she's just so damn literal. It's it starts quite strong and
• 51:20
  then just devolves into like basic literal statements that
• 51:23
  feel more like she's just telling a story to a friend
• 51:25
  about like, so this thing happened and then this thing
• 51:27
  happened. Then you won't believe what this
• 51:29
  guy did. Wow, you know it.
• 51:32
  There's it feels like that rather than a poem.
• 51:36
  As harsh as it sounds, there's nothing poetic about it.
• 51:41
  There's no rhyme, no rhythm, no purposeful structure, no
• 51:44
  interesting imagery or metaphors or analogies, nothing really
• 51:48
  interesting. There's no playing with
• 51:50
  language. There's nothing creative or fun
• 51:54
  or emotive. This feels like, and again, this
• 51:58
  is going to sound so harsh. This feels like the tick tock
• 52:00
  equivalent of poetry. Like you get a bit of juicy
• 52:02
  gossip that entertains you for 30 seconds, but there's no
• 52:05
  actual substance there. There's nothing deeper.
• 52:07
  That's to pick your own baby. All right.
• 52:10
  Good girl. Sorry, Kyra, sleeping next to me
• 52:13
  over here, Aren't you, you know, grumble, pig.
• 52:14
  You OK? Love you.
• 52:17
  I feel like the whole like class struggle difference and the kind
• 52:21
  of popular kid, not popular. Like they're things that could
• 52:24
  have been so interesting. This whole idea of like him
• 52:27
  being ashamed of her because she's more working class and not
• 52:30
  feeling into his world. That's something that would be
• 52:32
  so interesting and that I want to see discussed in more poems
• 52:35
  and art. But she just, she just doesn't.
• 52:39
  The message is just this boy was bad and then mad.
• 52:42
  Can you believe him? And I'm like, just give me some
• 52:45
  more please. That's what I want.
• 52:47
  Just it's the same with this poem called School of Life.
• 52:51
  I respect that she played around with a different structure here
• 52:53
  and she tried to prose poem. Love them.
• 52:55
  Love her prose poem brilliant. But I just feel like she was
• 52:58
  vaguely retelling a basic story to a friend instead of doing
• 53:01
  anything more interesting with it.
• 53:02
  There's nothing beyond surface level.
• 53:05
  Well, there's some kind of slightly interesting like I
• 53:08
  wouldn't even call it playing with colours.
• 53:11
  There's a mention of colours which could be interesting but
• 53:15
  it's just not. Remember when I talked at the
• 53:18
  School of Life and in the car home how you made me cry right
• 53:21
  before I flew to New York on a red eye gumball?
• 53:24
  Red eyes Can't count how many times fresh pink swollen face
• 53:28
  tear ducts salinate. What a waste.
• 53:31
  You couldn't appreciate my mind. But then again, they say the
• 53:33
  connections we create are mirrors of our ways snapshot our
• 53:37
  internal state and I've been on enough dates to to know this to
• 53:40
  be true. You need to 1st be the right
• 53:42
  person to bring the right person to you.
• 53:45
  So there is, this is what I mean, there's like little bits,
• 53:47
  there's some potentially good little rhymes and half rhymes in
• 53:51
  there slightly. You have that slight colour
• 53:54
  thing, the red eye, the gumball red eyes.
• 53:56
  Like there's potential. It's just I want more 2 poems
• 54:04
  that I want to talk about together are Out of production
• 54:07
  and Marry Kondo. I have a lot to say about these.
• 54:11
  They're both about similar themes, like getting over break
• 54:14
  UPS essentially, and both suffer from the same problem.
• 54:17
  And that is that is that they jumble the metaphors like crazy.
• 54:21
  So she can't keep it consistent throughout a poem.
• 54:23
  She jumps from image to image in a way that makes no sense and
• 54:26
  it's frustrating to read. It doesn't create a cohesive
• 54:30
  poem. Both feel very much like a kids
• 54:32
  been given like a class assignment to be like write a 12
• 54:35
  line poem with three metaphors and five images and this amount
• 54:39
  of alliteration or something. And she just like kind of
• 54:41
  checking them off as she goes. But it's not a cohesive piece.
• 54:45
  Do you know what I mean? So let's how you do.
• 54:50
  Yeah. Let's read out of production
• 54:52
  first. Two years after the split I
• 54:56
  realised there will be no new memories.
• 54:58
  Now that pain has faded I find myself protecting the good ones,
• 55:01
  taking them out of their boxes and polishing them like well
• 55:04
  loved shoes no longer in production.
• 55:06
  Your favourites will be different from mine.
• 55:08
  Different holidays, different special nights that are solely
• 55:11
  ours and will only ever be. Not even the home surveillance
• 55:14
  on your street can touch these. Sometimes I think morbid little
• 55:17
  thoughts, like one day one of us will wait to the news that the
• 55:20
  other has died and we might feel shock or total surprise.
• 55:24
  We might tell a spouse or conceal our sadness with a
• 55:26
  casual tone for tales of bluntness.
• 55:29
  I wish our end were different. All of us wish the same.
• 55:32
  But as I departed pain, you entered it like a train and
• 55:36
  encountered a station you'd avoided your whole life.
• 55:39
  In the end, we found our ways. We both built something new.
• 55:43
  Am I allowed to still think of you?
• 55:44
  Or should I ask you to depart my heart so it can be reclaimed and
• 55:48
  new memories can be made? OK, my first annoyance in this
• 55:56
  was with the grammar, but there may be a purpose to it.
• 56:00
  So I don't know if I can be entirely more like I kind of am
• 56:03
  still a little bit mad, but OK. So in a lot of poems, line
• 56:07
  breaks can be used to add emphasis to maybe certain words
• 56:11
  or phrases, put in pauses where there might not naturally be 1
• 56:15
  and and and so on. In this poem, marinas opt to
• 56:18
  choose minimal line breaks in the first half, which is fine.
• 56:21
  But instead she's just added added in random false stops
• 56:26
  where maybe instead there should be commas or just spaces or, or
• 56:30
  a line break or like she uses sentences that aren't sentences.
• 56:38
  And it makes it all really jarring to read.
• 56:41
  Like that's all solely ours and will only ever be is not a
• 56:46
  complete sentence. Why are you making it a complete
• 56:48
  sentence? The grammar here is a mess and
• 56:51
  it makes it really jarring to read.
• 56:54
  And if she wants to add pauses with a purpose, there are ways
• 56:57
  to do that without just blatantly ignoring basic grammar
• 57:00
  rules when it doesn't make sense to.
• 57:04
  That said, there is a reason why maybe she's done it, and that is
• 57:10
  that this is a poem about breakups, right?
• 57:12
  And endings. So maybe she's trying to use a
• 57:14
  lot of full stops in the first half of it to emphasise the end
• 57:17
  of things and, and keep going about like endings, endings,
• 57:19
  endings with like full stop, full stop, full stop.
• 57:22
  You know, I just think there's a way she could have conveyed this
• 57:28
  without making it so jarring and grammatically incorrect.
• 57:33
  And just like it, it kind of ruins the flow of the poem.
• 57:36
  And it just it, it throws me off.
• 57:38
  I don't like it. I don't like it.
• 57:40
  And that said, there's still some things I do like that she
• 57:43
  did, like how she ended the poem without any punctuation.
• 57:45
  There's no full stop at the end of its poem, even though she's
• 57:48
  been using them so much in the first half.
• 57:50
  There's nothing at the end. And I do think that is with
• 57:52
  purpose. And I like that because by the
• 57:56
  end of the poem, she's talking about a new beginning, opening
• 57:58
  herself up again, opening a new door, the start of something.
• 58:02
  So she's not going to add a full stop there.
• 58:03
  She's just going to open the door and let it be.
• 58:06
  It's very it's literally an open-ended poem.
• 58:09
  And that I think is clever and I like that.
• 58:12
  That is a good use. That is a good example of
• 58:17
  understanding the use of grammar and subverting how it's normally
• 58:20
  used for a purpose. Just the many full stops in the
• 58:23
  beginning of the poem don't quite convey the meaning.
• 58:26
  I think she wanted to because it messes the kind of rhythm and
• 58:31
  the flow and the way it doesn't make sense.
• 58:34
  Do you know what I mean It? So I want to be like, yes, good
• 58:37
  effort, but I just don't think you pulled it off.
• 58:41
  Anyway, so this is poem about looking back at the memories of
• 58:46
  a past relationship. There's this whole metaphor in
• 58:48
  the beginning about taking memories out of boxes, polishing
• 58:50
  them and so on. It is a little cliched, but it
• 58:53
  works, and I quite like it. I think that's a good start.
• 58:55
  But then the metaphor just shifts so suddenly to suddenly
• 58:57
  be talking about like home security and surveillance.
• 59:01
  And then it shifts again to be about trains, and there's no
• 59:03
  real link between them. And it's just like.
• 59:06
  And then she ends with the train metaphor and it's like, how do
• 59:11
  we go from memories in boxes to trains at a station?
• 59:14
  Like there's too big of a jump, it's too jarring.
• 59:17
  It doesn't make for a cohesive poem.
• 59:19
  There's no real consistency to it.
• 59:22
  Again, it's like rough draughts of ideas.
• 59:23
  It's like, here's an idea, here's an idea, here's an idea.
• 59:26
  Sham them all together without any big overarching message
• 59:30
  properly. And also I'm I'm sorry, I did
• 59:32
  kind of laugh when I was reading it.
• 59:33
  But I have to say, and again, this might be harsh, but I think
• 59:36
  as I departed pain, you entered it like a train and encountered
• 59:41
  a station you'd avoided your whole life.
• 59:42
  It may be the cringiest line in this whole book.
• 59:45
  And I I physically recoiled the first time I read it, and I
• 59:49
  really, really, really hate that line.
• 59:51
  As I departed pain, you entered it like a train.
• 59:54
  I just, I can't. I can't.
• 59:57
  The jumping around imagery, though, and the lack of cohesion
• 1:00:00
  is a problem. In a similar poem, Marry Kondo,
• 1:00:05
  so this one says I found your old letters while Marry Kondo in
• 1:00:08
  my house, and a veil of doom descended over me.
• 1:00:11
  They did not spark joy. Paperweights lowered themselves
• 1:00:14
  carefully into my heart. Opening Pandora's box seemed
• 1:00:16
  pointless, but I did it anyway and read the story of us.
• 1:00:20
  What I learned is that you are neither devil nor Angel, hell
• 1:00:23
  nor heaven, careless nor careful.
• 1:00:25
  Poisoned arrows, short years ago now seemed comedic, as if they
• 1:00:28
  were thrown by tiny laughing cupids.
• 1:00:30
  I still look for ways to fill up the old wound.
• 1:00:33
  Too deep to heal fully, too small for ICU.
• 1:00:36
  I guess I always thought you didn't love me enough.
• 1:00:38
  I never considered you might love me too much.
• 1:00:41
  So in this poem she's going through old letters, deciding
• 1:00:43
  what to keep, what to throw out, doing the whole Maricondo rule
• 1:00:45
  of if it doesn't spark joy, you get rid of it, that sort of
• 1:00:48
  thing. And you know it's, it's sorting
• 1:00:51
  through the literal letters is an analogy for sorting through
• 1:00:54
  all your feelings about a past relationship and realising you
• 1:00:57
  need to let go of certain bits. And this leads to her reflecting
• 1:01:00
  on the relationship in different ways, obviously.
• 1:01:02
  So the imagery in this starts fairly consistent, consistently.
• 1:01:07
  You have letters and paperweight.
• 1:01:08
  It's cool, that all makes sense. And then she starts to bring in
• 1:01:12
  mythology and starts talking about Pandora's Box and OK, I
• 1:01:15
  guess maybe that kind of falls on because sometimes you keep
• 1:01:17
  letters in boxes and she's trying to claim maybe these
• 1:01:20
  letters or their feelings are evil.
• 1:01:22
  There's a lot of evil. Or, OK, still vaguely on track,
• 1:01:28
  I guess. Then there's more mythology
• 1:01:30
  references to devils and poison, arrows and Cupid, which have
• 1:01:33
  nothing to do with the original Mari Kondo theme, but here we
• 1:01:36
  are. And then suddenly out of
• 1:01:37
  nowhere, because she mentioned arrows, now there are wounds,
• 1:01:39
  and now she's in an ICU. And it's like, how did we go
• 1:01:42
  from Mary Kondo to the ICU? Where is the consistency?
• 1:01:45
  In the whole poem, you can see where her train of thought went
• 1:01:48
  when writing it and how she jumped from each image to the
• 1:01:51
  next. But as a whole piece, as a
• 1:01:53
  reader, there's no consistency, there's no cohesion and it it's
• 1:01:58
  really frustrating. I want you to compare these two
• 1:02:01
  pieces to another kind of breakup poem reflecting about a
• 1:02:04
  breakup by one of my all time favourite poets, Edna Saint
• 1:02:07
  Vincent Millay. In this poem, she is talking
• 1:02:10
  about a breakup and she chooses to focus primarily on natural
• 1:02:13
  imagery throughout, which creates a really consistent
• 1:02:16
  theme. There's no jumping from Marie
• 1:02:19
  Kondo to poison arrows to the ICU.
• 1:02:22
  It's it's all one big theme of natural imagery that all fits
• 1:02:27
  together. It's cohesive, it works.
• 1:02:29
  Time does not bring relief. You all have lied.
• 1:02:32
  Who told me time would ease me of my pain?
• 1:02:35
  And miss him in the weeping of the rain?
• 1:02:37
  I want him in the shrinking of the tide.
• 1:02:39
  The old snows melt from every mountainside, And last year's
• 1:02:42
  leaves are smoke in every lane. But last year's bitter loving
• 1:02:46
  must remain heaped on my heart, And my old thoughts abide.
• 1:02:49
  There are 100 places where I fear to go.
• 1:02:51
  So with his memory they brim And entering with relief some quiet
• 1:02:55
  place when never fell his foot or shone his face.
• 1:02:58
  I say there is no memory of him here, and so stands stricken so
• 1:03:02
  remembering him. This poem does a hell of a lot
• 1:03:04
  of good things that Marinas just doesn't.
• 1:03:06
  It's it engages your senses in a way that Marina's poem doesn't.
• 1:03:11
  But there's also this consistency here that makes it
• 1:03:13
  easier for us to compare the feelings that she's trying to
• 1:03:15
  convey throughout the poem. Yeah.
• 1:03:17
  So it's really easy to picture, you know, the shrinking of the
• 1:03:19
  tide, the old snows melt from every mountainside.
• 1:03:22
  And you draw comparisons about what these mean for her emotions
• 1:03:25
  in comparison with one another. You know, and each of these
• 1:03:28
  images is of something slowly, gradually breaking down in an
• 1:03:32
  irreparable way often. Well, OK, I mean, maybe snow
• 1:03:34
  melting isn't irreparable, but like, you know, the burning of
• 1:03:36
  leaves, that's irreparable. Shrinking of tides because they,
• 1:03:40
  they start with like, you know, weeping of the rain.
• 1:03:42
  OK, that could happen over and over again.
• 1:03:44
  Shrinking of the tide, OK, that's fine.
• 1:03:46
  Tide goes out, but it comes in again, fine, all snow melting.
• 1:03:49
  OK, that's fine. And then that's, that's a little
• 1:03:52
  more, more permanent now, I guess.
• 1:03:54
  And then last year's leaves are smoke in every lane.
• 1:03:57
  And that's like, oh crap, wait, no, that's irreparable.
• 1:04:00
  Like you can't get the leaves back from that.
• 1:04:02
  And yeah, new leaves might grow, but they're not going to be the
• 1:04:04
  same ones. And it's, it's the same, you
• 1:04:06
  know, the same rain never falls in one place, the same tide
• 1:04:10
  never touches a beach, and the same snow doesn't fall again,
• 1:04:14
  you know, So all these things are about, you know, you'll,
• 1:04:16
  you'll find something new, it will move on and you'll
• 1:04:19
  experience things again, but it won't be the same.
• 1:04:22
  So throughout all this consistent natural imagery, we
• 1:04:25
  get this meaning of her feeling like this is all very final.
• 1:04:28
  You know, something's ended. It's you know what I'm trying to
• 1:04:31
  say, right? And The thing is, with all this
• 1:04:33
  natural imagery, it's nice and easy to be able to compare them
• 1:04:37
  and compare the feelings and you picture it all and it creates A
• 1:04:39
  cohesive message and narrative. And you know, like I say, you
• 1:04:43
  can compare them like that. That's what I'm talking about,
• 1:04:45
  comparison. Try picturing and comparing the
• 1:04:48
  feelings associated with a, Marry Kondo in my house and B,
• 1:04:52
  poisoned arrow shot years ago and C being in the ICU.
• 1:04:56
  You're like, wait, OK, there's, there's a lot of stuff going on
• 1:04:58
  there. And while you can pitch them all
• 1:05:00
  individually and I guess start to compare what they mean, it's
• 1:05:03
  not so easy, see, because there's no real consistency
• 1:05:06
  there. It's like being told to assess
• 1:05:07
  what's better, a sports car or a bag of eggs.
• 1:05:10
  It's like, by what metric? How do I compare?
• 1:05:13
  You know, it's easy to compare, say, a sports car on a rusty old
• 1:05:16
  bicycle. You can easily do that.
• 1:05:18
  And like, know this is better than this.
• 1:05:20
  And whatever you can compare a bag of eggs to, I don't know, a
• 1:05:24
  bag of apples if you want, but compare a sports car to a bag of
• 1:05:27
  eggs, that's complicated. And This is why you need the
• 1:05:30
  consistency in your imagery because it makes it easier to
• 1:05:33
  compare, easier to create a cohesive narrative.
• 1:05:36
  It just makes sense and it shows that you've actually thought out
• 1:05:40
  your poem and you have a solid message that you're trying to
• 1:05:42
  get across. Now, sometimes using jarring
• 1:05:46
  imagery works when it's done with intention.
• 1:05:48
  It absolutely does. Sometimes you want to show just
• 1:05:51
  how vast a difference is by like juxtaposing these entirely
• 1:05:55
  different images next to each other or, you know, you want to
• 1:05:57
  shock the reader, confuse someone.
• 1:05:58
  But I don't think that's the intention here.
• 1:06:00
  I think she just came up with the random images and just
• 1:06:02
  shoved them all in one after the other.
• 1:06:04
  So funnily enough, I as researched this video, I went
• 1:06:07
  and listened to Marina's latest music and there's a whole bunch
• 1:06:10
  of stuff. Her latest album I think was
• 1:06:12
  from 2021 called Ancient Dreams in Modern Land.
• 1:06:15
  There's another called Love and Fear from 2019 that I hadn't
• 1:06:17
  heard and I think that's another one that I don't remember now it
• 1:06:20
  they all start to blow into one. The new albums weren't really to
• 1:06:23
  my taste. There were a couple of songs I
• 1:06:25
  did like, I'll say that, but mostly I I just wasn't really a
• 1:06:29
  fan. Her voice stunning on all of
• 1:06:31
  them. I'll say that beautiful singer.
• 1:06:32
  Still, she has got a voice of an Angel like love it and but for
• 1:06:39
  me, just a lot of the songs just blurred into one and they were a
• 1:06:41
  bit generic. Nothing really stood out to me
• 1:06:43
  as being catchy. But that said, I can acknowledge
• 1:06:47
  that a lot of her lyrics were really good.
• 1:06:49
  I will say that. But when I'm listening to a
• 1:06:51
  song, I need more than good lyrics.
• 1:06:52
  Like I want it to actually sound good.
• 1:06:54
  So, you know, a lot of people like, oh, why don't you like
• 1:06:57
  this music? It's got good lyrics.
• 1:06:58
  I'm like, because lyrics aren't enough.
• 1:07:00
  If I want good lyrics alone, I'll read a poem.
• 1:07:03
  You know, do you know what I'm trying to say?
• 1:07:04
  Like if I just want the words, I'll just read a poem.
• 1:07:07
  But with music I care about, like how it sounds and how the
• 1:07:10
  music makes me feel and the melodies and everything like
• 1:07:12
  that. And what I'm saying is nothing
• 1:07:14
  on those albums really stood out to me except 2 songs.
• 1:07:17
  One of them was on Ancient Dreams, and it was a goodbye at
• 1:07:22
  the very end of the album. Enjoyed that.
• 1:07:24
  That was fun. And there was a song about
• 1:07:27
  midway through that album called Pandora's Box, which is what
• 1:07:30
  this poem made me think of. I feel like she was going for
• 1:07:33
  some stuff in that song, which was trying to get across in this
• 1:07:35
  poem. But the song did it so much
• 1:07:37
  better and years before. So I was like, we didn't really
• 1:07:40
  need this poem, did we? And in general, Pandora's Box
• 1:07:43
  was just more consistent. Its imagery was consistent.
• 1:07:47
  It it made sense. It was a cohesive set of lyrics.
• 1:07:52
  So clearly she can do it. And I mean, I'm well, OK, that
• 1:07:54
  that song did have a slightly different subject, right?
• 1:07:56
  It's, you know, I'm very tired. Sorry.
• 1:07:59
  I feel like I'm not making sense anymore.
• 1:08:00
  And the point that I'm trying to say is she used similar images
• 1:08:04
  in that poem and that song, but the song was more consistent.
• 1:08:08
  So clearly she can do it. So why didn't she in this book?
• 1:08:14
  I think that's my point. Sorry.
• 1:08:16
  I'm stressed. Kyra's crying to go to bed.
• 1:08:18
  It's very late at night. I'm.
• 1:08:20
  I'm very overwhelmed. I'm Kyra.
• 1:08:22
  Baby, I love you, but can you just give me like 20 more
• 1:08:25
  minutes, please? Yeah, come on for mommy.
• 1:08:28
  OK. The very last poem that I want
• 1:08:30
  to talk about is one of Marina's better poems.
• 1:08:33
  Love this. It's called factory settings.
• 1:08:35
  I'd like this one. It's simple, but it's
• 1:08:37
  consistent. I feel like she genuinely
• 1:08:39
  thought it out. The ending I don't like as much
• 1:08:41
  as the beginning, but I feel like this is one that had a lot
• 1:08:44
  of potential. My relationships hang like
• 1:08:46
  broken spider webs in the sun. Blue silver holes gape like
• 1:08:49
  spotlights when the wind blows. Do I try to mend the old web or
• 1:08:53
  build a brand new one? I'm tired of spinning though,
• 1:08:56
  Tired of keeping afloat. No life, boys left on the inside
• 1:08:59
  of my boat. Why do I make myself start over?
• 1:09:01
  How is this my life? How do I override my factory
• 1:09:04
  settings? So I mean about kind of falling
• 1:09:06
  apart at the end there. But I love to start.
• 1:09:08
  I think the first bit is fantastic.
• 1:09:10
  I like the focus on, you know, fixing broken things, kind of
• 1:09:15
  having a safety net and not kind of breaking and repairing and
• 1:09:19
  that sort of thing. And I kind of wish there was a
• 1:09:22
  slightly stronger link between the spider web imagery during
• 1:09:25
  the boat imagery. But I see what she was going for
• 1:09:27
  and I can kind of forgive it in this poem because I it's not as
• 1:09:30
  bad as some for other examples. And I, I just thought the
• 1:09:34
  initial imagery in the specialist first two stanzas was
• 1:09:37
  really, really well done. And I want to commend that.
• 1:09:41
  I have to admit I may be a little bit biassed here because
• 1:09:43
  her first stanza reminds me of the start of all my own poems.
• 1:09:47
  So there is bias here that may be at play.
• 1:09:52
  If you don't mind me going on a little tangent, I'll just talk
• 1:09:54
  about my poem for a second. If you don't want to hear this
• 1:09:56
  and you want to go back to the Marina stuff, skip to the end of
• 1:09:58
  this chapter. That's absolutely fine.
• 1:09:59
  But in my first book, I wrote a poem called Matches, which was
• 1:10:05
  about relationships always going wrong and me like giving away
• 1:10:08
  too much of myself and getting hurt in the process.
• 1:10:12
  And I usually got some quite funny feedback on that poem
• 1:10:15
  because, well, it was 1 review in particular from quite a young
• 1:10:20
  woman. I think she was a teenager who,
• 1:10:24
  well, I'm not sure if it was a problem of them just completely
• 1:10:29
  missing the point or if I didn't do a good enough job of
• 1:10:31
  conveying my point in the poem, but her feedback did make me
• 1:10:35
  laugh a little bit, I have to admit.
• 1:10:37
  So my poem's called matches. I'll just read to you.
• 1:10:41
  I collect men like matches, holding each a little too long,
• 1:10:45
  failing to catch fleeting sparks.
• 1:10:47
  Like the night we danced in the crowded ruse with all eyes on
• 1:10:51
  you and yours on me that lit that match.
• 1:10:54
  And now I gift you my heart in a timepiece loosely wrapped in
• 1:10:59
  floral fabrics and give you all away to the wind and the ways to
• 1:11:03
  sail through cerulean seas and magenta dreams while I sit with
• 1:11:07
  burnt fingertips and cling to another broken, burnt out match.
• 1:11:13
  So basically just to over explain to you, it's a poem
• 1:11:17
  about how I always fall for the wrong men and how when I feel
• 1:11:20
  like what I think is a special spark with someone, I tend to
• 1:11:24
  jump in with my whole heart and think it's definitely going to
• 1:11:27
  turn into this. You know, it's it's like a match
• 1:11:31
  catches on fire. And I think, oh, this is going
• 1:11:33
  to be a big, massive warm log fire that's going to heat my
• 1:11:36
  home. And basically, like, I think a
• 1:11:38
  little little connection with someone is going to turn into
• 1:11:41
  this beautiful home warming, home, making safe, secure,
• 1:11:49
  keeping me warm and protected, beautiful thing.
• 1:11:52
  When in reality, it's literally just a lit match that I hold on
• 1:11:56
  to for too long until I literally get my fingers burnt.
• 1:11:59
  You know, it's a whole metaphor for that.
• 1:12:00
  And this one in particular was about one person who I felt
• 1:12:05
  particularly hard for. And he couldn't stay in the
• 1:12:08
  country because he had to go off and work overseas.
• 1:12:11
  And it's about realising that like I had to let him go for him
• 1:12:15
  to be happy and find his people and follow all these big,
• 1:12:18
  wonderful, exciting dreams he had.
• 1:12:21
  And, and I was all about, you know, supporting him in that and
• 1:12:24
  caring for him as he went away and giving him all these
• 1:12:26
  presents that meant things. And, you know, meanwhile, I was
• 1:12:29
  still stuck here heartbroken with my little burnt out match
• 1:12:34
  and my burnt fingertips. And, you know, so the whole, the
• 1:12:37
  whole match thing, I can say it's a metaphor of like short
• 1:12:39
  term relationships that I thought were going to be long
• 1:12:42
  term, but they were literally no more than little match burning.
• 1:12:47
  And how I'm the one who ends up getting hurt over and over
• 1:12:50
  again, even if it's just little bits, they all build up and lead
• 1:12:54
  to burns and blisters and, you know, damaged fingertips and all
• 1:12:59
  this sort of thing. And you know, I, I just end up
• 1:13:01
  with this little pile of burnt out matches and burnt fingertips
• 1:13:04
  over and over again. And, and sorry, I shouldn't
• 1:13:10
  laugh. The review that this, this young
• 1:13:14
  woman gave said, well, basically she, she read the first line and
• 1:13:19
  said something along the lines of, Oh my God, she collects men
• 1:13:22
  like matches. That's so objectifying, That's
• 1:13:25
  so sexist. I'm not reading anymore.
• 1:13:27
  And I couldn't help but have a giggle to myself because that
• 1:13:30
  was literally like the opposite of what the poem is about.
• 1:13:33
  Which, you know, obviously, like, in a lot of ways, it's
• 1:13:37
  about placing more importance on certain men and relationships
• 1:13:42
  than I probably should and giving away too much of my heart
• 1:13:46
  to them that they probably don't deserve.
• 1:13:48
  Because I thought they were, I want to say, better for me than
• 1:13:52
  they were, but like, I thought they had more to offer me than
• 1:13:55
  they did. Does that make sense?
• 1:13:58
  Anyway, that was just a tangent about a review I found quite
• 1:14:02
  funny. And like I say, I'm normally I'd
• 1:14:06
  be like, OK, well, maybe I didn't express myself clearly
• 1:14:08
  enough in the poem and that's something I need to work on and
• 1:14:10
  improve. But at the same time, she just
• 1:14:12
  read a line and was like, Oh my God, that's sexist.
• 1:14:15
  I've not read it anymore, so maybe that one wasn't a new
• 1:14:18
  problem. I don't know.
• 1:14:20
  Anyway, I just thought that was a funny little tangent to go on.
• 1:14:23
  And my point is, Marina's opening stanza reminded me of
• 1:14:26
  the opening line to my poem, and that's why I may be a bit
• 1:14:29
  biassed into liking this poem. But honestly, I think Marina did
• 1:14:32
  it better. I think my relationships hang
• 1:14:35
  like Broken Spider webs in the Sun is fantastic and I love that
• 1:14:38
  and I think it's better than anything I've written and I I
• 1:14:40
  like that a lot. And the second stands for
• 1:14:43
  especially the Blue silver holes Gape like spotlights when the
• 1:14:46
  Wind blows is such a beautiful, haunting image and it makes me
• 1:14:50
  feel so much. And it's lines like this that
• 1:14:52
  make me realise that she absolutely does have talent and
• 1:14:54
  potential and this is what I want to read more of.
• 1:14:57
  And I'm just a little sad that she didn't do more of this in
• 1:14:59
  the rest of the book, you know? So finally, to end this video
• 1:15:05
  before it gets too long and before the little grumpy one
• 1:15:08
  over there starts punching me with her paws and demanding I
• 1:15:11
  shut up so she can sleep, I thought I would end this video
• 1:15:14
  on a positive note by giving you a handful of recommendations of
• 1:15:17
  poetry of of of poems of hers from this book that I do really
• 1:15:21
  like. They're not perfect, but they're
• 1:15:23
  definitely worth a read at least once.
• 1:15:25
  And they are the sparkling Clam, which uses a space on the page
• 1:15:28
  really, really creatively. There's some really cool imagery
• 1:15:30
  in there. You can tell she had a lot of
• 1:15:32
  fun writing that one and I really appreciate that.
• 1:15:34
  I also recommend her poem Cocoon, which is a little too
• 1:15:37
  literal in places to be perfect, but once again, she clearly got
• 1:15:40
  creative with it. There's great consistency with
• 1:15:43
  the theme throughout it. She clearly planned it out and
• 1:15:45
  pulled it off, and I appreciate that.
• 1:15:47
  And finally, heavy metals, which has some of the strongest
• 1:15:51
  imagery in this entire book. It is raw, it is visceral.
• 1:15:54
  I love it. I think it may be my favourite
• 1:15:56
  in the whole book. And I just want to end this
• 1:15:58
  video by reading that poem to you, if I can find it.
• 1:16:01
  There it is. This is heavy metals.
• 1:16:04
  A crack in the back bleeds black.
• 1:16:07
  Heavy metals in my cells weigh me down.
• 1:16:09
  In order to change shape, I need to let go, detoxify my blood of
• 1:16:13
  her tart red anger that runs, ribbons, snakes, bows through
• 1:16:17
  every organ, vein, bone before nesting dormant in my heart.
• 1:16:21
  It sits densely, privately, uncontrollable.
• 1:16:24
  Black Bomb waits to explode out and spray frayed body parts
• 1:16:28
  across skies and stars until shards of my heart puncture the
• 1:16:32
  planets. Shame makes it cower and
• 1:16:35
  condense further inwards. Stay small, hard and static.
• 1:16:40
  But the less I move, the less I'm able to change.
• 1:16:42
  I remain locked in form, like a soldier in March, So obedient to
• 1:16:47
  the past. I'm scared of you.
• 1:16:49
  Anger and your bulletproof cast. What's it take to make you break
• 1:16:54
  Words, Words. A white flag at last.
• 1:17:00
  And that's so damn good. And that's what I wish there was
• 1:17:02
  more of in the rest of the book. And yeah, that's where I kind of
• 1:17:06
  want to. And this video, I think overall
• 1:17:09
  there's some really good stuff in here and there's some really
• 1:17:12
  bad stuff in here, but I don't think it quite deserves all the
• 1:17:15
  hate it's getting. I do think, and I know this
• 1:17:18
  doesn't sound like me, I think the reviews are a little bit too
• 1:17:21
  harsh. I think it's better than what
• 1:17:23
  some people think. And I do really appreciate a lot
• 1:17:26
  of what she was doing. A lot of it is a little bit of a
• 1:17:28
  let down, but a lot of it's really good.
• 1:17:30
  So again, I, I think I would really like to hear from her
• 1:17:34
  about like what her intentions were with certain things sounds
• 1:17:37
  like some of the grammar things and some of the layouts she's
• 1:17:40
  got. And I think with a little bit of
• 1:17:43
  time and effort and maybe just like a poetry class or
• 1:17:46
  something, she could be damn good.
• 1:17:48
  I really do believe that she's got a lot to say.
• 1:17:50
  She's got important things to say.
• 1:17:52
  She's got some damn beautiful imagery in there.
• 1:17:55
  I just think she needs to learn a little bit more about poetry
• 1:17:58
  and poetic techniques and then she could pull off something
• 1:18:01
  really, really good. And I genuinely think she should
• 1:18:04
  keep writing. So yeah, there you go.
• 1:18:10
  That's that's what I have to say about this.
• 1:18:12
  Maybe I'm getting more forgiving with bad poetry as I get older.
• 1:18:16
  I don't know. Or maybe it's just not bad at
• 1:18:18
  all. And maybe because her lyrics so
• 1:18:21
  good. Her lyrics are so good, at least
• 1:18:25
  in a lot of the songs I've listened to recently.
• 1:18:27
  Like, maybe people just expected more from her and that's why I
• 1:18:32
  don't know. But the people comparing her to
• 1:18:33
  like, Rupee Kaur, I don't see it because I actually think she's a
• 1:18:38
  lot better than that. She's not.
• 1:18:40
  She's not like a pro. She's, you know, I'm not.
• 1:18:42
  I'm not going to sit here and pretend she's like the next Maya
• 1:18:45
  Angelou or Carolyn Duffy or, you know, somewhat of like that
• 1:18:50
  standard. But for a first collection, I
• 1:18:53
  think it shows a lot of promise. I really genuinely do.
• 1:18:58
  And yeah, that's why I'm just gonna end this video.
• 1:19:00
  And if you like this, please leave a like leave a comment.
• 1:19:03
  Let me know what you think, especially if you've read the
• 1:19:05
  book for yourself or if you plan on going to reading it.
• 1:19:07
  Let me know that too. If you're new here, it would be
• 1:19:09
  great if you subscribe or if you've been around, if yeah, or
• 1:19:13
  if you've been around a while, if you just want to check and
• 1:19:15
  still subscribe, that be really helpful too.
• 1:19:17
  And but for now, thank you all so much for watching.
• 1:19:20
  Please go follow me over on Instagram if you want to keep up
• 1:19:22
  with me and my photos of my little Snorri could be there
• 1:19:25
  over there. I do nature photography, gig
• 1:19:28
  photography, all sorts of fun stuff like that.
• 1:19:30
  I'll sometimes post about fun makeup things, which I do enjoy
• 1:19:33
  even though I don't like it today.
• 1:19:35
  I personal things that books I'm reading over there and just fun
• 1:19:38
  silly stuff like that. So yeah, go follow me there if
• 1:19:42
  you like. I'm at Rachel Oates with a
• 1:19:43
  little zero and seven. Oh, I am going to go get my
• 1:19:46
  little girl settled and give her a snuggle, Anna babes.
• 1:19:49
  But now, thank you for watching. Thank you for being patient with
• 1:19:52
  the cubic crumbles and me in the microphone.
• 1:19:55
  And I'll see you guys again soon.
• 1:19:56
  Thank you so much. Oh, and thank you to Hungry
• 1:19:59
  Minds for sponsoring this video. And please go check out the
• 1:20:01
  book, it is fantastic.