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Old 09-09-2016, 08:26 AM   #1
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Exclamation ELITE EIGHT: Cimmerian vs. dead man - OPEN FOR VOTES!





Welcome back motherfuckers!

Huge props if you’ve made it this far first and foremost! That initial round of sixteen had some absolutely CRAZY matchups but nothing like what’s to come here in the Elite Eight! There’s never been a tournament quite like this one, not with a field so open as to who could eventually win. This is it fellas! Time to show and prove. Slip up, and you’re out. It really is that simple. No second chances. It’s go hard, or go home and cry about it because we aren’t trying to hear that shit. These writers remaining are some of the best in the world, the greatest to have ever done this, and only one can be crowned champion… but who will it be? We’ll get a more realistic view after this round as the competition has now been halved, and will again after this round. Do you have what it takes to become the STI champion?


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First to post may edit verse until opponent posts his verse. Second to post may edit their verse up until the first vote is cast.






TOPIC:


@Cimmerian @dead man
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Old 09-09-2016, 09:02 AM   #2
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Ok
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Old 09-09-2016, 03:16 PM   #3
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I can dig it.
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Old 09-15-2016, 09:05 AM   #4
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mirror pond.

Glassy eyes—mirror ponds reflecting the sky
Controlled breathing—breezing—billowing by
Her hand in his, soft whispered advice
A cry fills the room, life blooms from inside
Time spins ahead—a red Big Wheel to ride
There's ladders to climb, backwards down slides
Sidewalk chalked pieces, Matisse’s alive
Those firefly flickering Fourth of Julys
Sparks in the night: the chemicals inflame—
Basement cigarettes, the girl with the bangs
Boy becomes man, brain still the same
Rusted ruby Wrangler, Pollockian oil stains
Swore to never change . . . until he found the One
Stock market slides, corporate ladder rungs
Glass ceilings above the art of his son—
Reflect all the things he wished he had done
His hand in hers, words whispered at night
Labored breathing—ceasing—simple goodbye
Glassy eyes—mirror ponds reflecting the sky
All along the mirror pond reflecting the sky.

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Old 09-15-2016, 10:47 PM   #5
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i mean

what else can you say. our tongues touch to melt it away
what dies can only multiply but never decay
felt the thrill of abandonment and the terror remained
out of body on Halloween til the middle of May
mantras of our fathers kept him walking a line
bus to train to class to work to pause. then rewind.
start from the top. papers to write. thoughts to adopt
mathematics, shop, immanuel kant. carve me a box
dead to begin, let's set the scene: empty inside, seventeen
Oxford cap on his forehead. cigarettes in his jeans
marble archway mezzanine. Chandler notepad the routine
awake at 5:15 so he can live in a dream
before long, it's par for the week. alarmist asleep
counters to clean. markets to watch, hallways to sweep
carve a tree. hand him a rope. let it dissolve
a mystery that took a decade to solve, held in his hand
system advance. step outside of this conditioned romance
Zippo flash. let the smoke swirl. give it a chance
Percocet peyote and a paper to pass
Apocalypse now. Johnny Walker and a case of Mescal
dropped physics for a physical reaction he found
to make it okay. to make him a star. he made himself say
it was only a phase. pull a string and soak a vein. Órale
so they say. alleyways. crunching snow in his boots
Carhartt and a hoodie and a hole in his tooth
dope inside the lining. Miller Genuine, Kools
57th and Throop. living on the edge.. of a stoop
noose around his neck that pulls whenever he shoots
another dose, Geronimo, he's back in the loop
panic attacking his roots. blacking out and waking in sweat
somebody made his bed. his parents framed in the distance
Father. with his mantras and his rides to the clinic
he found god inside that Civic. no figurative phrase
could thank him enough for loving such incompetent failure
into somebody's son. symptomatic, simple disaster
who took breakfast lunch and dinner for granted. hungry for nothing
but a way to escape. breaking down and sobbing for days
he thought it was the end until Apocalypse faded
and left him in silence. no buzzing in the back of his head
took off his number 3 and went to practice instead
fell back into his calendar. culture-shock is the term
for leaving one reality for years, then returning
blood is thicker than water. heart is thicker than hope
dead men swim in a river we traverse in a boat
soaking in the clarity. how lucky he was
to be somebody's son, squander it with boredom and drugs
manage still to resurrect, mostly intact
save the one thing that we're never getting back.





- black
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Old 09-17-2016, 12:39 PM   #6
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My AC is on the fritz. Ryan Adams' "Come Pick Me Up" is a good song.

CIMMERIAN-

Boy meets girl. They have a kid, the piece transitions to the perspective of the kid, kid meets girl, has his own kid, then dies. Ending recalls the beginning, with other in piece allusions ("there's ladders to climb"/"corporate ladder rungs"). All written tightly. Ellipses, dashes, commas, rhymes. All well and good. The wording wasn't spotless, but the wording strove to be spotless.

"Basement cigarettes, the girl with the bangs"

This is the best line in the piece. Because of the CIGARETZ. No, but it was nostalgia tinted and told a whole story with precise wording. The reader knows the significance.

"Brain still the same" and "...until he found the One" were the only bad wording choices. Too utilitarian for the piece, for how the rest of the language in the piece was used.

I don't think this is the greatest topic. It's screaming "WRITE ABOUT DEATH!", and writing about death is so trite for these sites. No one has anything interesting to say on the subject, as far as I've seen. So you filled in as many life touchstones as possible, to give heartfelt context to the fleeting nature of life, instead. Death wasn't mentioned or alluded to until the end with "simple goodbye", which was a great way to couch it. This wasn't overtly emotional, or solemn, or sentimental, but the reader could fill in the emotion through the simple timeline and effective use of language. It was generally broad (pronouns instead of names, shared life events) but in a way that lets the reader color within the lines, and every line had this momentum of dread (probably because we know the topic, but still). Not overt, Hollywood dread, but the kind we all have in our baser selves when we hear clock ticking. A tightly wound (in form) piece that accomplished its point well. Thanks for the read.

DEAD MAN -

Boy is on the normal, right, track, then becomes a dead man character; shoots drugs, prefers Mescal, and smokes. Comes to a moment of clarity, ostensibly through thoughts of his family (father in particular), and generally gets his life together. We assume it works out well for him, through the tone of the piece/ending. But there's no regaining the time lost, no matter how happy the ending can be. So many little flourishes in this piece, yet nothing was out of place. The only line I could quibble with would be

"culture-shock is the term
for leaving one reality for years, then returning"

That was a bit expository in relation to everything else in the piece. Just didn't have the momentum (new buzzword), or tone of basically every line. Because I will say that almost every other line in this was either perfectly worded, had a cool little trick/flourish, or hit you in the feels. Peak Dead Man level stuff. The Orale/Geronimo combo, the ellipses before "stoop", book-ending the protagonists' time out of mind between apocalypse now/faded, the reference to Kant (in the middle of a great rhyme phrase), etc. So much to look at. This was a bell curve story. Quick exposition at the beginning and end, a huge stomach in the middle. You like to write about difficult/troubled characters (everyone does) so its no surprise that portion of the narrative gets the full focus here. But it works narratively as well. You focused on the clock aspect of the picture, very little to do with death, generally. And how your choices vs. time define everything, can't be taken back. Not some earth shattering concept, but the point of this is the execution. Back pedaling a bit, after re-reading, I do think the section after "apocalypse faded", as a whole, is a bit looser and less refined. But not drastically so. Just a powder keg of a verse. Thanks for the read. Maybe your next verse is about a 35 year old white man in Minneapolis who's never even heard of Kant, works at corporate Best Buy, has a happy family, and fishes on the weekend.




Both writers attacked the topic with a similarish idea. Cimmerian attempted the "less is more" strategy (as always), trying to fold the piece of paper eight times, so that every possible extraneous idea someone could have on the topic is on top of another, forming just one necessary sentence. I think he basically succeeded. Dead man did his dead man thing, this time in a more clearly narrative type of verse. In the dead man canon this verse was in the top 30 percentile. Both verses were worthy of this so illustrious tournament, and for that both deserve commendation. I just enjoyed dead man's aforementioned creativity in exploring his story. A short verse can beat him, definitely, but I think Cimmerian's verse last week was a better example of the form. Just a pip below his opponent in this one, a battle I could see coming down to preference, instead of clear knockout consensus. Well worth the read!

Thanks fellas.

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Old 09-21-2016, 01:26 AM   #7
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Cimmerian: One of my favorite elements to your writing is that you execute meter and cadence with such grace that your simplistic rhyming seems of no consequence. It’s nice and rare to be able to look straight past the caliber of rhyme scheme as an element of critique, allowing me to focus on the verse itself. This verse was a wonderful take on the circle of life. The focus on light sources and shimmering colors carried a thematic resonance throughout the verse. The cradle-to-the-grave concept has been done to death, though, and even though this was a particularly deft version of it, the verse simply lacked much in the way of substance and even attempting to say something new. The other element that fell short was that while the theme of the painting was the ticking clock until death, it did not match up with your choice of imagery very well. I look for verses that conjure the topic, so that I could immediately pick the topic out of a wide grouping of options. I’m not sure you hit the tone of the topic, even if you hit the purpose. However, it was a beautifully written verse with enough subtle twists and turns to create a full picture.

dead man: First, before I forget, I loved the Allen Iverson line. OK, with that said, I thought this verse was a nice change of pace that stayed within your normal writing style. You told a story pretty clearly and cleanly. You lingered too long on the drug references, to the point that you referred to pulling a string/rope twice. We get it. You mentioned seemingly every drug you could think of in some form, and it added a nice bit of atmosphere but also made the story more ambiguous. Throw away a few lines in that middle section, and you’ve got a crisper telling. The development of the father as hero was really the heart of this piece, and it perhaps was a bit simplified. We didn’t get a very complex view of dad, to understand his past and his frustrations. Much like Cimmerian, a lot of the content here was cliché, but the writing was great and carried it. The difference is that I think you captured the vibe and the theme of the topic better. The idea that time, not a person, was the thing that dies, was a pretty clever twist on things.

Vote: dead man
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Old 09-22-2016, 09:59 PM   #8
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cimm - this was a pretty impressive, self-contained verse which did well to form something of a character arc and in the same instance chew its own tail like a doomed world serpent. you carry a poetic cadence, bolstered by the type of soft phrasings that want to dance throughout your synapses rather than jab you in the nerve endings in a bid for attention. the verse, and the character's life, washes over the reader as if it's the undulation of the sea's current rocking back and forth -- which is fitting, given what you're trying to do. 'glass ceilings (...) reflect all the things' was a brilliant pair of lines for me with its layered meanings. 'brain still the same' was appropriately terse. i appreciated the slide/ladder paralleling itself, and the circular close to the piece. i would say it didn't drive home the topic for me: the dig, the grind, the shovel of Time, but i can discern the path you took. beyond solid showing. word.

black - there's more of a palpable progression here for your protagonist (who is basically the same guy, inspired loosely by you, spanning infinitesimally different multiverses) than i am used to seeing from you but maybe i'm a bit out of the loop, remembering when i used to read you more. this was another quality offering that took a cue from the topic and ran with it. the sprint, more long-distance lap, was true. as mentioned, 'percocet peyote' et al was indulgent, self-insistent really. it would have been enough to allude briefly, i think. what impressed me most was the almost-reprise 'mantra of our fathers' and 'Father. with his mantras' because, by the time you recalled them, they held gravity. 'somebody's son' worked similarly, as did the callback of Apocalypse -- that's stellar stitching, not unlike your opponent. reminding a lost character of himself, and us of the title. his initial dogma descending to fugue only to eventually find light, and solid ground, through the disillusion based on similar principles should stir empathy in a reader even if a touch trite at this point. you embodied the weight of Time well here, as per the topic.

this is a close one, and i'm leaning toward black for a more full-bodied work.

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Old 09-23-2016, 12:18 AM   #9
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I'm going to keep this quick because I'm not too sure I am acclimated enough to fully understand the nuance of a lot of these pieces because I haven't been apart of the community and don't really know the writers. All I can go off of is my initial, gut reactions: What I like and what I don't.

For some that may seem unfair, but there's an unbiased nature to that that I hope is appreciated.

So, with that in mind, Cimm has always impressed me. His simplicity and poetic approach speaks to a type of maturity that I don't think a lot of writers online have. The succinct exploration, using alliteration and metaphor, was thought provoking and didn't allow the reader a moment of relaxation. Every line was packed with a reference or an idea that takes examination to understand.

Dead's story was about an addict finding salvation through his family, while a backdrop of his life's most important moments scroll, from beginning, middle and end, in the background.

Both pieces left me awed, but if I'm going to be honest, Cimm had the better verse in my opinion; I just enjoyed his overall control over his style.

Even with his lack of real estate, he was able to get an idea, mood and story behind

I enjoy deadman's piece, but I'm going to vote for Cimmerian.
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Old 09-25-2016, 02:46 PM   #10
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DEADMAN WINS

SORRY ABOUT THE LACK OF VOTES FELLAS
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