Week 8 Championship: Rakontur vs. Innovator (Innovator wins)
 

LGPA Season 1: Week 8

@Rakontur @Innovator

This is the championship match.

Check ins: Tuesday (Midnight Eastern time)
Poems Due: Friday (Midnight Eastern time)
Votes due: Sunday (Midnight Eastern time)


Topic:

Choose your topic from the topic thread.

Good luck.

Fuck yeah good luck bro

http://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/...ary/120892.jpg





I can recall it as if it occurred
Eternal darkness, breathing yet inert
Infinite blackness deemed implausible
A massive coverage albeit illogical
Such a tragic obstacle
A world star struck – Paradoxical
Such a site to behold
Hues folding right through it's pores
Bending light; fuzed and then stored
Silence captured and reduced to it's core
Beaming stars bursting in joy
Exploding yet... Usurping it's noise
Eroding all, birthing a void
Berating and breaking the worthless remains
Some prayed... Rapture means saved
Others accept just being matter that's ate
Absorbing anything that shines near
Night's close, but the distance, light years
Shocking prisms, nothing crystalline
Blotchy skies epitomized
A kissing bye of sun soaked eyes
Inching near the civilized

T minus – Eight minutes twenty seconds

A clocks tick never sounded sublime
Each stroke is a dagger mounting a spine
The strange thing is there's no sound of this crime
No resounding gasps of the dumbfounded and blind
No shrieks or shrills confounded and crying
No FML's or OMG's pounded and whined!!!!

~Just Nothing ~

Finally, moments are treasured trinkets
Bigots realize love just delinquent
Prejudice doesn't exist in death
Life ends no matter how you resist it's net
Loved ones hug tightly, afraid
It's so close you feel fear snatching the brave
On the other side lights been replaced
Everything ceases.
Peace ripped to pieces
Along with evil governing egregious

Vibrant darkness, engulfed pupils
Radiant emptiness to the cuticles
Crowded freedom in abundance
The walls distant with redundancy
Consitant hypocracy
The ceilings full of comedy,
Laughter riddled paint chips
Smearing colorless hues
Windows covered in rainbows
Still i soak in the rain poured
Life on repeat. Groundhog symptoms
Waking up to the same old darkness
Wishing for a shade to rest my eyes on
But the soot billows beneath my iris
An eternal blink, sinking between eyelashes
Pupils drenched in black
Hope drowning in the undertow
Countless mirrors holding my relfection
Though i forget who i am
Lost in the translation

But...

With finger tips for a nose
I touch the aromas of the day
The breeze dancing along my hair line
Tingling the roots until my brain waltz'
As i collapse within the rhythm
Tasting the trees
I get tongue tied within the leafs
I know the grass is green
Between the shadows
I know the flowers seed
The subtle whisp of the crowds reverberate
Along the walls of the sky walkers
The city comes alive
And my darkness dances with the sun
And my eyes flutter in the dark
Staring at the sounds...

...wishing i could see it all.








"In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember."
-Edgar Allen Poe

Rakontaur
I really like this piece, (LOL confession time) at 28 I'm finding myself researching into science/ space a whole more for whatever reason, so this was intriguing. It was well structured, fluent, no lines were dragged out, cleverly descriptive. "A kissing bye of sun soaked eyes" was one of the best lines of the battle. I did have to look up what 'egregious' meant so maybe I'm not as cut out for the lgpa as I thought. Nothing really bad to say about it.



Innovator
Same with your piece tbh, not a lot to critique. From poetic point of view, the concept was great. To take that title n make it into the perspective of a blind person is tragic yet brilliant, it sounds simple now I think of it but the fact is I/we didn't. Maybe a little more subtly might of helped, a previous career/ trade in which 'feel' alone reignited previous moments or something by that really is nit picking.

With very little to between both, it comes to what captured me more, the creative twist of the concept behind innovators grabbed me that little bit more.

Pleasure to read lads!

You guys faced not that long ago, and last time Rakantour blew away Innovator, including others who have tried to take away the championship title away from him, including myself.

Rak: I took this as a depiction of destruction, in which those who were being destroyed became aware of their own ideologically derived emotional states are fallacies in the grand scheme of things, in which silence is the prevailing theme that subjugates the stream of consciousness and the rest of the contents of our hard drives are wiped clean through oblivion, which you corresponded with peace. Some nice lines such as, sun soaked eyes and many more particularly in the first stanza. One line I did not like is matter got ate, sounded strange, also the FML and OMG's was too amateurishish. But, aside from that I have no qualm.

Innovator: Dang, this is my favorite thing I've read from you. Enjoyed the sensory deprivation, which is not hard to do from a writing standpoint, however when you added all this beautiful imagery via using the other apertures to depict how a blind person sees through his other senses and how he sees was quite a joy to read. Although, not the most brilliant concept. it is nevertheless extremely well executed.

I liked Rak's take, but Innovator took the cake here.

Vote: Innovator

This was a dope battle, people are sleeping...

Rakontur: I loved the idea, it's one i've mulled over and used myself in the past, plus you had a very natural cadence to your flow that you sustained throughout.

You're by far more suited to this format than I've seen previously in other leagues like the AOWL where "mechanics" are more heralded and whatnot. Here, those things aren't held in the same esteem, and I think your style excels because of this. This is def. your strongest field of play and you were at full strength withn this drop. Great descriptive visuals. This was a dope couplet to me:

Absorbing anything that shines near
Night's close, but the distance, light years

Almost breaking something so seemingly complex down to something so simple, you know?

Personally I wasn't AS keen on your middle stanza if you can call it that. The 'FML or OMG' thing seemed to dumb down the quality of the first part of your verse somewhat. It wasn't to the same standard, though I see why you did it.

Innovator: your style is actually very similar to Rakontur's here, maybe there's something in that and I'm missing a poetry reference to describe it? I'm not sure, but both are very rich in cadence and shorter lines and visual imagery.

"Pupils drenched in black" was a great descriptive usage here. Really stood out (for me, at least). Fingertips for a nose was another very cleverly done. It reminded me of Daredevil somewhat and i'm a huge Marvel geek. Admittedly, I haven't read many of these poetry battles and i've taken part in even fewer so i almost feel a bit of a fraud to be breaking them down on anything other than pure personal preference, but the 'twist' here is actually what tipped my hat in your favour. I'm not usually a great fan of them in topicals unless they're done exceptionally well, and I feel that this one truly was. Awesome battle. Best i've read in my short stint here.

I'm edging this one to Innovator.

I think that Innovator’s wording is much more refined than Rakontur's.

INNOVATOR.

Initially, I thought that he wrote about someone with Alzheimers or memory loss who is very much awake, coherent, alive, and able to connect with the world in intricate ways. His developed poetic delivery here emphasizes this neatly. The strength in his strategy is that he can merely describe the world, the instant, as perfectly as he can-- and this serves as evidence to the shocking and dreadful realization that the narrator cannot exist beyond this very moment. This is cleverly expounded on in the first stanza-- a soulless hospital room that seems to be laughing at him for no reason. Strong feelings reminiscent of the detachment and anxiety that you get by being alone in a strange place.

Then the peace of mind of being outside in the second stanza ["with fingertips for a nose" is a sweet descriptor that emphasizes the keenness of the narrator's senses, as well as how he's contradictorily feeling things out] is a strong transition, brought to resolution by a swift and strong ending line that puts his inability to identify with himself out in the open in one final offering.

Lol but YO. Then I realized he was saying the dude was blind, this was off-putting, because it was almost poorly alluded to. There was quite a few "color" descriptions that point to the narrator having some degree of eyesight, conflicting with statements insinuating total blindness. This is okay whatever it's not a literary review journal-- but then the main character looses a degree of dimesnionality.

When did he lose his eyesight? What happened? What about sight does he miss and why does it matter? The tie to the Poe quote loses some of its resonance when you remove your character from his own time, place, and mindstate. I'm not really able to fill in these blanks with context. I think this weakens the transition from verse 1 to verse 2.

ok.




RAKONTUR.

This was okay man. Started out strong, but you got slightly carried away. I assume you were trying to illustrate how a planet reacts to impending death when they realize a supernova is about to consume them. Okay. Exploration of additional themes was on par. Connection to topic was strong but not satisfying.


Eh, I had INNOVATOR.