What are Milieu's hours of operation?

[William Shagspeare]

I respect Milieu as someone who knows a lot about poetry and who gives honest criticism. Whenever I post a poem for critique, I always hope that Milieu will answer and give advise, but s/he never does. How does one go about getting Milieu's attention?

If you don't know who Milieu is, then would you just comment/critique on this poem instead?


"Whoa, Man, That's Deep"
Stephen Rodriguez

A duck flew upside down across the sky
and swooped my way, down to the railroad tracks.
He landed, shook his feathers, then his eye
was caught by something shiny in the cracks
between the wooden panels, on the ground:
a golden necklace looped around a spike.
His stance uprightened, then he made a sound
like bikers' horns before a driver strikes.
He prodded at the necklace with his beak,
then got it noosed secure around his neck.
And then the railroad tracks began to creak,
the duck got up to fly, but he was stuck.
The whistle blew, the train's great engine rushed,
he flapped and flapped, then flew and wasn't crushed.

 

[SIN]

tee hee hee

I still like this poem

 

[H D]

The kitty cat has a good side?
I was afraid of what the last line would say. Thank God for wings.

 

[Fin]

Not having been a regular here I didn't know what to expect from that title, and I still only have a vague idea, but that's a fairly brilliant little piece of writing right there.

I might tweak a word here and a word there, but then again I tend to overengineer past the point of improvement.

But I'll say this: the wordplay was very clever and satisfying, and the message very skillfully interwoven within the stitch

 

[writer]

Excellent poem Stephen, and for several reasons. Let me start by complimenting you on the perfect rhythm of the poem; in L7 where you appear to deviate slightly with 'uprightened' you do so to convey, through the transient shift in rhythm, the duck altering his posture. The line break at the end of L3 is surprising, amusing after a fashion, and highly effective. In this modern Elizabethan sonnet, you tell a story, or more correctly capture a moment, that reveals a truth without specifically articulating it. The duck, and so many human readers of this poem, in pursuing those things that attract them because they are shiny and seem to have value, risk things that are less shiny -- 'life itself' -- but that have an inestimable value. The inversion of values that the poem portends is adumbrated from the very first line; the duck flying upside down. The appearance of 'noosed' makes his fate seem all but certain, and also implies that he has committed some sort of crime and is about to be punished. Justice is to be meted out. The fact that he escapes, rights himself for the second time in the poem, is once again an inversion of the poem's directives. Your poem seems to be saying that when we stand where fate and folly meet, we are there for a reason; we escape because it was meant to be a lesson and we cannot profit from that lesson if we do not survive. Like gravity, irony is one of the fundamental laws of nature... Should you ever decide to rename this piece, I think I might consider something like "All that Glitters."

Now, I'm sorry I can't provide the information you desire about Milieu, and frankly whether she shows up to answer your question concerns me not one bit. She can't teach you much in this instance that you do not already know.