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Review Requests: ON
1,084 Public Reviews Given
1,107 Total Reviews Given
Review Style
Unsentimental. I focus on the kinds of craft issues that will keep a writer from being taken seriously and prevent them from fully expressing their vision. For more information, see "Writing Hurts: Review Forum" 
I'm good at...
Analyzing the written word and determining where a piece is not accomplishing what it wants to accomplish.
Favorite Genres
Short stories and poetry are my forte. Novels, not so much. Usually I only need to read a chapter or two to determine if it's going to go off the rails. Sometimes I'll keep reading.
Least Favorite Genres
I'll read anything.
Favorite Item Types
Anything.
Least Favorite Item Types
Pieces from authors who have never considered that writing is a craft, who nonetheless think they're great simply because they have penned the words, and who take offense when I don't agree.
I will not review...
Useful things don't always occur to me with a given piece. If I don't think I can offer insight into how the writer might become better at the task, I won't say anything.
Public Reviews
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Review of Enkindle, Phoebus  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | N/A (Unratable.)
Let me acknowledge up front: you are no dilettante. Your language has the richness of purposeful words carefully selected, and while I might not immediately discerne the underlying energy driving the poem, I'm more than willing, even on first reading, to believe that it is there, and worth searching out.

I lead with that because while I'm going to complain about this and that and a couple of other things, I want my comments to be understood in their context.

The question I always want to see asked, primarily by the poet of themselves, is "Why did you write this?" It's something that I as the reader want to know, and since you're not sitting beside me proving commentary, I have to take all my cues from the text itself. If you set up specific expectations, you need to be aware of what they are. Letting me expect one thing, and giving me another can be a powerful technique, if intentional, if part of your design. But unrealized expectations that result from poor planning, or, worse, not realizing the expectations you have set up for your audience, merely diffuse the effect of the writing, leaving one to wonder if we're taking a guided tour or merely a random walk.

So. Upon first encountering this poem, before reading a word, I note that there are three stanzas each with four lines of similar length. I then note the title which lets me know that we will not be exploring the common vernacular, that we will be stepping back in time a bit, evoking images, structures and language intentionally archaic. Given this, and upon reading the first two lines of stanza one, I have every reason to expect a poem in blank verse. The clean iambic pentameter is certainly no accident. The problem is that you have many lines where the scansion is not clear, where, with awkward emphasis a line might be said to have five feet, but a clean logical reading of the words falls more naturally into a differently scanned line.

Line three could be scanned as pentameter like so:

GILD ed / ORB a loft / MYS tic / e LYS / ian FIELDS

but it reads more naturally as hexameter:

GILD ed / ORB a / LOFT / MYS tic / e LYS / ian FIELDS.

Elsewhere, it's equally unclear if you are abandoning pentameter, or simply forcing the scansion. The first two lines of stanza two each scan perfectly into four feet; awkwardly into five.

TIME / SAUN / ters ROUND/ SIDE / real DAY;
ON / AIR / y THRONE / you MIRTH / fully CHANT,

Each line can be said to have five strong beats, but it's forced. Much better

TIME SAUN / ters round / SIDE real / DAY
on AIR /y THRONE / you MIRTH / ful ly CHANT.

You don't really want that ambiguity, not when you have lines like

JOV i al / WAR bles / that ZEAL / ous ly / HOLD SWAY

that leave the reader with no doubt. The problem is that you have given me good reason to expect consistency. If you wish to run counter to my expectations, do it in a consistent manner, such as giving each third line four feet, or six feet, something that tells me there is a controling hand at work.

A couple points on language. The question again comes up, what is your intention? Is the archaic language simply meant to pay homage to an older form, or does it serve a purpose within the poem? Or, are you simply finding more obscure ways of saying something that would sound more believable in other formats? The two opening lines work well, even the archaic use of the word wither, and for the most part, I think the ornametal word choice works. The last line jumps out at me, however. Perhaps I need to consult the OED to find an archaic use of the word suffuse as a noun that would allow it to follow the possessive darkness', but the only use I can find currently is as a transitive verb. Don't gt me wrong, I'd never suggest that having a better dictionary that I myself own is a flaw, and I admire the bredth of your knowledge. The other word is in the title: kindle. It sounds as though it is mean to be the verb in an imperative command, as in "Shine, Sun," or "Glow, Sun," whereas kindle is something that one thing causes to happen in another as in "The essay kindled a renewed sense of purpose in me when I read it."

This is a challenging poem and I admire the effort.
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Review of Dying  
Review by edgework
Rated: ASR | (3.5)
You've done some interesting things in this poem, and while I'm not going to complain about a whole lot in it, I'm going to suggest that you reconsider you perspective on what poetry is, and why you want to write it. You have an obvious facility with language; I think in this case, my concern isn't so much that you've done specific things wrong, but that you haven't gone far enough with the things that you've done right. I'll acknowledge up front that such an approach commits me to discussing a poem that hasn't been written yet; but maybe it might yet.

While there's a lot of disagreement on what makes a poem, there's no disputing the fact that we have a category for both prose and poetry in our body of linguistic forms. As you recall from Outine 101, if there's an A., there has to be a B. No B., no need for an A. So perhaps we don't know what poetry is, but we do know that it's not prose. Prose is where we put our arguments, our discussions, our narratives, our stories, our essays, our letters to the editor, our memos; anything that requires an organized, front to back, beginning to end structure, where items are related to each other in both time and space, and it's easy to tell which comes first, which is most important, etc. All the elements of prose--paragraphs, sentences, clauses, phrases, commas, periods, elipses, question marks, exclamation marks, quote marks, exist to enable this structure, to make the content coherent. In prose, structure is the slave of content.

Consider the structures of poetry: lines, rhyme, metre, syllabic feet, sonatas, sestinas, haiku, couplets and a host of others you can think of. None of these has anything to do with content. In poetry, content is the playtoy of structure. Structure and form are the points, almost an invisible order coexisting in the same space with content, but serving their own ends, maybe enhancing, maybe undermining content.

I think your first three stanzas are essentially prose, broken into lines rather than sentences. They don't sound bad, and they don't sound wrong, certainly not clumsy. As I said, you write well. They just sound like prose. There is noting for us to note in them beyond their content, because they exist to deliver the content. Which is to say, they aspire to the function of prose. Compare those to
he wasn't the one/To fly through the thick windshield
And land in a crunching heap on the /Unforgiving asphalt, twenty feet away.

Time slowed like a top
At the end of its twirling whirl.

My memories dimmed like a
Candle at the bottom of its wax.

Consider the second sample. I'm not much interested in the fact that time slowed down. I mean, what else is there for time to do but slow down, speed up, or stand still? But it's not content that makes the lines stand out, it's the way you've chosen to present the content, the form. Both with an interesting image, and a steady repeating rhythm, the elements outside of content elevate it to something sharp, worth noticing.

Likewise with the third example. Yeah, yeah, memories dimmed, okay. That's what memories do to make it worth noting. Otherwise, they're just memories, right. But again, content is only part of the package. The language it's wrapped in makes it something far more than a cliche. You've made it something I can see, feel, touch... and you've provided an imagistic context that gives me access to the experience of memories dimming. The first example, while a bit more literal than the last two, contains such crisp, clear images that the lines stand out from those around them.

The difference for me between those lines and the first three stanzas, is that in your opening lines, you are being a journalist, reporting your content to me the audience. Nothing wrong with that, but the immediacy is missing. The lines I cited bring me much closer to the experience, they let me go inside, they give me access to a part of the vision in your head in a way that prose cannot. I don't think it's a case of tweaking a word or two. I think you need to think about what you did very well, and what shift is needed to create the entire experiece in the same way.


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Review of Ah, What Wishes!  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (4.0)
This is a fine piece of writing, an object lesson in the possibilities of rhyme and rhythmic structure to support and enhance content. You have accomplished the most difficult of tasks: you make it seem simple. It's the natural flow of your language that deceives us; none of your lines requires anything other than normal inflection and emphasis, the way everyone speaks... except that these lines just happen to have a consistent rhyme scheme and rhythm. One need only read a lesser efffort—lines with unnatural word sequence just to grasp at a clumsy rhyme, or cadences that would never be spokne in the real world, just to get those syllables to bounce along properly—to appreciate your deft touch.

As for content, it's a simple theme; but then, themes are always simple and banal when stated outright. But when they are allowed to filter through to us by way of images that bring them to life, that show us how they look in the process of reavealng themselves: then we remember them, and appreciate them.

It might be asked, "With no complaints and so much to praise, why only a 4.0? Why not a 5.0?" I'll assume you're as serious a writer as your technique suggests. As such, you know who your real competition is. Pound, Eliot, Williams, Whitman, Dickinson... they've already set the bar pretty high. I'd say they rate a 4.5, at least. And Shakespeare gets the 5.0. In that company, I'd settle for a 4.
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Review of Desire  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (4.0)
I'm giving this poem a 4, and then I'm going to complain about it, because it's close to a 4.5 or a 5, and chould be.

What appeals to me immediately is that there isn't a useless word in any of the lines. Every word is strong and sharp, every line moves with a driving rhythm and at least three of the lines, on first reading, jump out and simply demand to be noticed.

Meadows unchanged, shimmering with promised sky

Unchanged games rumor places alone and naked

Speak laughter; for those found will require nothing better

These are lines any poet can read and think "I would have been happy to have come up with those." There has been obvious care taken in the choice of words and images and the lines all scan, something woefully lacking in so much of what is written these days.

So. My complaint. The content is ambiguous and obscure, which, for my money, is a perfectly fine thing. If I want a direct relationship between content and structure, with structure and form existing only to convey the content, I'll read the New York Times. Poetry of necessity places less importance on what it's "about" and more on how it does what it does.

What this poem does is offer us a series of captivating images and lines that clearly don't aspire to a logical, prosaic connection with each other, but which could, nonetheless, add up to a cumulative subjective response. There's nothing that says these images couldn't be linked together, but the structure of the language conspires to keep them separate from each other. Note the rhythmic movement of the first four lines: disregarding images, content and all else, they are fairly similar in structure and virtually identical rhythmically. Each one reads as a self-contained unit, thwarting the natural instinct to create links and connections. We might very well string these images and verbal units together until the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but with each line standing alone, it becomes almost a series of haiku-like pictures, each one isolated from the rest.

This observation is purely subjective itself, and obviously draws as heavily on how I myself might write a poem as it does on how this author chose to write this poem. That's why I gave it a four. No fair penalizing someone because you might have written it differently. Still, I think it's worth looking at the possibilities that language structure offer, totally apart from content, to compliment, and even generate, meaning.
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Review of Wanton  
Review by edgework
Rated: 18+ | (3.5)
Nice images; clean, sparse. Haiku-like in the way they restrict themselves to crystalizing a moment, without interpretation. I felt mildly let down by the "certain humidity". I feel there is something far sharper and precise.

Perhaps you would look again at the last line. It is the only specific authorial intrusion and as it is such a break from the rest of the poem, it shouldn't be wasted on so obvious a declaration. Tell us something we don't know. Literally. Or give us something to complement the images we've just visited. Even poems need a good third act.
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