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I lit a fire today.
Not of coal or wood, but of
words, no longer of use, so ceremoniously or
spitefully discarded into stinging smoke and dully unrepresentative ash.
These words, a combination
of excerpts from Armitage and
Owen, Byron and Brooke, and the
added scrawls of helpless interpretation,
now faced their expedited, however
inevitable fate, snuffing out the
opportunity for nostalgic
reminisce.
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Looks like written source code, nice added touch.
I'm confused why those 1 and 2 links are included below, but I guess I'll ignore that * cracks knuckles * Well this is very good; above beginner quality, and you've got this staggered format that gets an authentically intended 'you do you' with all things considered. For example, dropping 'words' down to the next line has a mildly good impact on cadence.
To put my grammar police hat on for a moment, I think "so ceremoniously or spitefully" could use an I after the word 'so'. Regarding your theme, it's like 'willful abandon', and that's pretty dang rare. I'm sure I've seen it done before, but usually I'm looking to see if people eventually generate an element of transcendence, whereas you're leaping right into context that shows us it's transcendence time overtly.
Again with the grammar, "now faced their expedited" should be 'face' instead, because you're using present tense. The word 'reminisce' is correct as a noun though, as you apparently already know. This is almost a 'lamentation' theme when it's all wrapped up together with a bow, but of course you're intending the outcome, so it could be 'coming of age'; it's a little hard to say. Maybe above intermediate as a poem sketch, but it could use a lot more content, because as it stands these are mostly wonderful glimpses of a few thoughts
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here (probably my fault heh). please enlighten?
Also yeah this wasn't intended as "Final Poem", since I also feel like I didn't capture all the thoughts I wanted to convey.
Awesome, I'm glad it was a draft. Well, to use an example, the most common theme among contemporary beginners in the Western world is 'resentment', unfortunately. So many people just bang on about their hateful emotion and then end the poem, it's mind boggling. Lots of venting. Doesn't work as poetry. If they aren't just venting, the theme often progresses to 'sorrow', perhaps 'longing', and the theme 'longing' implies an element of transcendence because there's a juxtaposition between the writer's point of view and a potential remedy being sought. If they continue progressing the theme, often they'll have a break through into 'beauty' if not 'reverie', and that's the absolute best kind of poetry in my opinion. Single theme pieces, or those contrasting themes can also work, but they can be harder than progressing an inspiration to see how it evolves.
In your case, you opened with "I lit a fire today. Not of coal or wood, but of words, no longer of use, so ceremoniously or spitefully discarded". I just realized maybe I was wrong about a grammar correction in there, so it's a bit of a run on sentence that works... Anyway, my point is burning words that are no longer of use is thematically transcendence, quite overtly. You're not taking a position there, you're describing the act of moving on from some stuff. I guess it's largely "helpless interpretation" of research projects there, and we can think of a phoenix, rising from the ashes. All thematically transcendent
the words in question, "excerpts from Armitage and Owen, Byron and Brooke" are from the poetry anthology I was required to study, but as of "today", I no longer had to, with the "scrawls of helpless interpretation" are the annotations added, helplessly trying to improve understanding of the poems, so I could talk about them in the standardised test. Thinking of that, I could more directly explore the idea of the standardised testing format being inappropriate for discussions of poetry, especially when the exam is mandated, and the poetry chosen can at times quite inaccessible to the 13-16 year old teenagers studying it (see As 'Imperceptibly As Grief', 'Living Space')
You're much older than 13-16 though, right? Just a curiosity