[Certain]

UnbornBuddha: The problems here began at conception. Your topic was a painting, so you decided to approach it as an opportunity for a tangential, digressing art history survey. You had the painter of the painting explain why he loves paintings, while barely mentioning the one you were supposed to write about. Therefore, with maybe three lines edited, this verse could have been used with the topic being literally any painting.

“I finally begin a painting and finish.” There is the root of the problem. The entire action or movement of your verse is contained in one sentence. Mostly, you spent a lot of time telling us why art is important without showing us anything to prove the case. The mix of allusions was largely surface-level, the types of examples people who may not genuinely be enthralled in the art world would use to impress someone. I had a particular distaste for this couplet: “My own Avant-garde stylistic preference/ Places Claude Monet’s work as unparalleled.” Monet was avant-garde in his era, but an artist with an “avant-garde stylistic preference” would not be likely to idolize someone who died 90 years ago, nor does this painting that is the topic reflect much of an avante-garde taste set or a Monet debt.

There were good things about this verse. Several turns of phrase were creative: “Listen to the voice of this planet, disappointment and solace” and “This is when pointillism becomes pointless” in particular stood out. The rhyming was sound, though the cadence felt herky-jerky at times because of the abundant use of big words. But the piece was overwhelmingly flat. You attempted to convince an audience of writers in the value of painting, and you avoided humanization or clearly delineated purpose. Art can be tricky that way; the purpose of art often is art, which is fine. But I don’t feel as though you earned the end note about art’s importance. Instead, it felt more like a cynical attempt to prove intelligence with big words and mostly obvious references. The topic barely related, and the verse was boring.

Frank: Two elements compose your storytelling style that each serves as a gift and a curse. The first is your ability drop the reader into a new world or setting without warning and to simply begin. You are not beholden to any introductory redundancies, which allows your work to feel imminent. However, this element also leaves your stories unmoored at times, difficult to contextualize beyond that immediacy. The second is your strict adherence to atmosphere above all else. It’s almost a requirement to continue that immediacy. But it comes with a tendency to misuse and make up words and to force your heavy rhyming because those elements build the mood of your work. You place almost every writing value over clarity, which further alienates the reader, and the abundance of adjectives and adverbs too frequently bogs down the story.

That is to say, this verse was distinctly yours. There were so many elements teased here. The story was impressive and immersive, and the final scene in particular worked so well with the topic. There were a dozen slices of social commentary layered on top of a story that largely felt like a pornographic dream —the sexy alien abducts the good man and forces him to have sex with her. The twisting emotions are a product of the atmosphere you built gave this verse several temporarily relatable characters and a complex view of the morality of the events in the verse.

The bizarre part was that this all happened with almost no explanation of the stakes. Most of the descriptions of space were vague and even nonsensical. Why would Keplar-452b (sic.) be spiraling into a spacious galaxy? I take it we’re supposed to assume that the black hole is the star Kepler, around which the planet was revolving previously, and that the star dissolved to leave its quasi-human inhabitants on a spaceship looking to protect their species by mating with humans from Earth. The pieces were there to gather that story line, but they should have been laid out in a much cleaner format with just a few tweaks. The repeated misuse (or, more euphemistically, recasting) of words definitely did not help in forming a fuller view of the world outside the spaceship. Why wasn’t the alien boyfriend able to mate? What was the advantage to reproducing with a human?

Either way, your strengths here shone bright enough to take this battle. Your approach was creative as hell, and you held my attention and pushed my thinking, while UnbornBuddha seemed to be insulting his readers in parts of his verse. The humanity (and non-humanity) of your verse won over the academic, dry stylings of your opponent.

Vote: Frank