This is a critique of poems previously published by Todd Heldt at Thirty West Publishing. They were removed from that website when they discovered Todd stole money from a 12-year-old girl.
We are printing the critiques to keep his spirit alive.
Treatise
In which Todd cosplays as a National Geographic poet who once saw a postcard. By the time he’s waxing about “how longing traverses all distance and time” and “light playing games with the eye,” we’re already exhausted.
The cold “asks a question of the arms you wrap around yourself”? The sky “built of small things, no bigger than pinpricks, far away and lying”? These are scribbles in a notebook during a stoned epiphany in a planetarium. “Stillness trespassed by breath” is the poetic equivalent of staring at your own exhale on a frosty day. Todd is submitting Facebook status messages to poetry websites like an eager 6th grader.
Performance
Ah yes, the “we broke into condemned buildings and made art out of junk” joint.
“we stared at ourselves in the wreckage but did not recognize each other yet.” Todd is describing his entire creative output. He builds these little art projects in condemned emotional spaces and stands expectantly in the rubble waiting for someone to clap.
Questions about the Modified Woman
Todd’s creepiest hit yet. A whole poem of him interrogating a tattooed/pierced woman like she’s a museum exhibit he’s too horny stop staring at.
“Is it seen like the sun where metal is inserted?” “Did she do it to feel something more?” “Is it kept like a key in a pocket forgotten but always found when she needs?”
You’re out here asking if her scars were “drawn by bones that were broken, bad loves, and the father she lost in his drip of morphine” like you’re Freud with a rhyming dictionary. He turned a woman’s body modifications into a TED Talk on trauma, appropriating her so he can look sensitive to other women who you want to bone more than his wife.
The problem with Todd’s work is that it wheezes. He’s so busy trying to be profound that he forgets to be interesting.