I was very happy to find this piece of flash fiction.
It is fun and totally unexpected. In my opinion, you could easily develop it into something larger with a little bit more detail.
Your dialogue flows naturally and your vocabulary is believable. I'm glad to be able to note that you avoided the "he said," "she said" tags so prevalent in dialogue.
I was hooked all the way until the last line. The question begs "what was the squirrel's meal?"
Perhaps, in an effort to gain a few words to explain your ending, "Squirrelly invective poured forth" and "tongue-lashing" express the same idea and both are not necessary in a 55-word flash fiction.
The random read found this poem for me to read this evening.
I adore the opening image. I would hyphenate "dream-tinted."
As you start with "they walked together" and then explain who they are, I would start the second and third stanzas respectively with "He" and "She." The understood subject/verb relationship in the second stanza is "He... [is] trying hard not to get carried away" and in the third stanza "She... [is] trying hard..."
In the poem, you use dream-tinted and dream-colored. I would find another way to express the second of these phrases. The entire stanza doesn't make too much sense grammatically, as your opening verb "painted" has no subject. It appears to be "their shadows" in the third line, but that's a big jump to follow.
There are also some stray commas that need to be removed.
I believe there is a lot of potential here, once you find time to revise a bit more.
The random read found this unusual poem for my eyes tonight.
There is a lot to like here, your dedication to the subject and some of your more original lines: "the humble demeanor of an elderly woman"; "I do not wish to fall in love with, nor find the real you."
These last words seem to be the crux of the poem and the point that bothers me the most. After three reads I can't figure out the relationship between the narrator and the woman being described.
Two things bother me greatly: "A cute smile if nothing more you flash // setting ease to a sharp boy's struggling mind." Even with proper punctuation, "A cute smile, if nothing more, you flash..." I still wonder why you chose this antiquated style of writing when "You flash a cute smile, even if nothing else, // setting ease to a sharp boy's..." is so much easier to understand and even read aloud.
Secondly: "There is so much to see in an otherwise unnotable person." I strongly dislike "unnotable" because you have spent an entire poem noticing her. "There is so much to see that so many do not notice" would convey the same idea but is not pejorative in any sense.
Hi, Ken.
The random read found this lovely poem for my eyes.
Your work is always tight and this poem is no exception. I'm glad you reminded readers of the Dorsimbra form, for I had forgotten its restrictions and wondered why the rhyme disappeared from the first stanza!
If I may, one word does not have its place in your poem that successfully shows instead of tells: insubstantial. Perhaps something like flickering or billowing that give off the idea of something not solid or reliable.
Thank you for penning this and for being the type of poet who goes back years later and makes even the slightest change.
This reads like a poetry assignment poem. There is nothing wrong with the idea. But I feel like there were certain words that had to be used and that they found their ways into the text because of necessity.
In my poetic eye, there is much too much detail in this poem. Take for example "We'll glide across the universe on gilded gossamer wings..." Glide/gilded/gossamer are traditional combinations that add consonance to your words. That in itself is good. But these three words are all cliché and their usage predictable. Even if you were to substitute "shiny soft" for "gilded gossamer", my suggestion is cliché also, but using these words lightens the effect of the three hard G words, themselves frequently overused in romantic poetry. It is at this point in revising my own poetry that I look for synonyms. That I ask myself "what do these words add to the unfolding of this poem?"
I want poetry to surprise me, for poets to dare unusual combinations of words.
You've successfully painted a bleak picture. I particularly love the phrase "Prayers slip past her silent lips." It is brilliantly written with the S, P and ip sounds. I want more of this kind of writing when I discover new poems.
But in my opinion, having read the instructions for creating this poem, you didn't go beyond the daily life of every one of us: we look out the windows, we go shopping, we empty our mailboxes, etc. etc.
Surprize us: She parks her out of date car two streets away. // Someone else was in her spot. Find your own synonym for"aging" because it's too predictable.
I don't like the mailbox stanza because you tell the reader in two different ways that the mailbox was full. Add a simple "no letter from her children." That tells us immediately one reason she is alone.
As always, these are my suggestions for improvement. If they ring a bell, go with them.
This is obviously the first part of a poem. My first question is why place it in public viewing when it's not a finished product?
We all have notepads at our disposal for jotting down ideas that aren't yet part of formal works.
I have pages filled with lines that I have written down in the middle of the night or trimmed from poems because they were not in their proper place, but didn't want to discard completely. Most writers have this kind of notebook.
If I look at your two lines, my first red light is that tears are warm. So if you are up to your knees in someone's tears, why write "but I feel the cold"? This phrase does not mean the same thing as "I feel cold" so, in further investigations of where these lines could lead you, you might want to take this into account.
Also, "the tides of your tears" seems like a recurring incident. Will the rest of the poem help the reader understand why there are so many tears?
The beginning is never the end when writing. And we all have to accept that words finally place on paper are not permanent. They can be modified, scratched completely or completed by other words.
Good luck finishing these lines. Perhaps they will become something more important than a poem.
I found your flash fiction story with the Random word review tool.
When a writer only has 55 words to put forth a story, they all have to count. I believe this could be honed down a bit in order to give you the opportunity to tell the reader more about why this is occurring.
"The night revealed little" isn't essential. What is necessary, perhaps, is the time of day and "the small gasps of her lungs straining for a bit more air." If you hone this to its briefest expression, you can easily obtain "The night revealed her lungs gasping, straining for even more air." Although I do not like the verb "revealed." I've taken your sentence of 17 words and pared it down to 11. You have six more words to add other important details to draw the reader into a even more detailed story.
When you write about the pursuer, that its howl is "achingly sharp and poignant", I want to feel sorry for this beast because of the words achingly and poignant." But you don't have enough words to tell us why you choose these adjectives.
It takes a very clear picture in the writer's head to have an idea of what is essential to his/her story and then to find a way to include the most important details in only 55 words.
What a lovely "limerick." Didn't know this variation.
Your rhythm is good, although I stumble over "she lay prone, which I say she LAY, PRONE" because it didn't want to fit quickly, like the other phrases into the da da DA rhythm.
Perhaps a small change:
"Lying nude on her own,
she lay prone, broken foot
and a hand. With a groan...."
The advantage of this is that you place the verb "prone" at the beginning of the sentence and not at the end."
This new collection of poetry contains lots of original poems from a poet who is up and rising here on WDC.
I have followed these poems for the last thirty days of National Poetry Writing Month's Poem A Day marathon. With pleasure. And often times very surprised.
It's a cute poem, but you regularly mix up the present and past tenses, and often one or the other is improperly spelled.
The tale can be told in the present or past, but good writing, be it fiction or poetry, does not mix the two without setting up a flash forward scene or a flashback to justify the change of verb tense.
Of course this is good. I know so well the author.
I must admit after 30 minutes or so searching for excellent writing, I found it.
Naturally, the pianist in me was intrigued by your title. Perhaps there was not enough resemblance between that particular Nocturne and your incredibly sensitive and vibrant poem. But that is just a tiny observation. The way you worked sense from the title into the poem was what I call excellent writing. Didn't see it coming and had no way to anticipate its place in the poem. Yet you made it work just the way the sun comes up every morning.
This is the only poem I will review today. I can't imagine finding something of this stature and excellence.
You have set up a rather gory image in guise of a haiku. Why not? If it remains true to the nature of this type of poem.
"Icy sigh" is good. "Moving" is unnecessary because the image of "twisted" is repeated in the second line. Both words imply motion. Twisted skeleton limbs is not enough to set this poem in a graveyard. It implies that the tomb has been desecrated. And this sets the poem into the gore category, where the implication does not need to be further developed.
In a haiku, each word must play on the preceding and following ones to create a single image in the NOW.
"Scattering moonlight" is a lovely phrase, worthy of a romantic poem of many lines where the cliché effect of this phrase can be lost in other beautiful and original phrases.
Your haiku here is sweet, conveys a very typical image, but the ending of "teeth chatter" is very cliché and offers no new insight to the image set up in the first two lines.
It does put the narrator in the middle of the scene, which is only a description in the opening lines, but it also tends to personify the scene.
Something unexpected like "a grizzly roars" would take the reader where you have the poem now and convey only what is happening right now.
I have never heard of a sonnet form that has thirteen lines. Nor one that is written in iambic tetrameter.
Perhaps there are a few corrections you need to make in this How To document. You might also have mentioned the variations on the rhyming scheme in the sestet.
There are many things I like in this first draft. The emotional content is raw and that's good. I relate well to your feeling of gray.
I don't understand the line "putting on my hand painted mask to block the color I kept inside." This seems to contradict the idea that your world is only gray and that the unwanted splashes of color come from the person trying to get close to you. Perhaps this needs reworking.
I always try to avoid inactive verbs and passive voice. In your first line, writing "The gray slate of the world veils my thin vision" would start off the poem with a bigger bang than the way you phrased this idea yourself.
"The dull monochrome (this is a redundant adjective, adding nothing new to your text and should be eliminated) life I lived (this phrase is redundant also and life/lived in the same phrase needs better writing skills) was morbid." My first reaction is to write something like "I felt like an undertaker living this dullness." This would get rid of your double redundancy and show the reader morbid instead of telling us.
There are many lines in this poem which could benefit from this type of re-writing.
Why on earth do you label this Gay/Lesbian when your article is so offensive to gay people like myself? The title did nothing to avert my eyes.
All of your arguments prove the contrary to your closing paragraph "Coming from a gay-friendly Asian country..." You don't sound gay friendly to me, so why bother writing this kind of dribble if your point is not to belittle those of us who believe differently than you?
I do not believe this kind of article has its place here at WDC.
Your three-line poem is lovely, poignant and well describes the scene you evoke.
I would not title it as you have done, but rather "silent fields." Your title lets the reader know immediately what you write about and gives them the opportunity to avoid this piece if they do not like the subject matter.
With a title like I have suggested, you draw in more people and let them discover which aspect of the subject you are describing.
Your three lines are perfectly combined.
And if you are wondering whether this is haiku, it is not. It belongs in the senryu genre, as you are talking about the foibles of human nature.
Your text opens in the past tense, and then you switch to the present.
"I miss you" is a standard part of sad love poetry, and it leans on the cliché side. For me, your opening and the two following lines don't match in intensity.
This first line has a lot of potential if you were to go back and finish exploring the reasons you wrote it.
I love your names, Mr. Snoresalot and Mrs. Grizzles. They are great for children's books/poetry.
I'm not sure that in today's age of politically correct vocabulary children should be learning to call people "fat" even if that is a correct adjective for them.
Perhaps a tale using words less sure to offend would be more appropriate.
I found this poem featured in today's Poetry Newsletter. Congratulations on being chosen.
I'm confused about the people in the poem and the change of point of view. Your timeline of four in the morning, classes in two hours (I've never heard of a campus with 6 a.m. classes, but perhaps in certain corners of the world this is the case) and the blinding brilliance of the not yet risen sun, all make for a haphazardly composed poem. I can't follow its unfolding smoothly.
Most experiences have students crunching numbers before becoming half drunk and dewy eyed. In this latter state, all one thinks about is sleep.
I do like your couplet "you press a kiss to my forehead // and the spot burns."
In my opinion this poem still needs a lot of revision.
This is a short and sweet poem. You begin it with a metaphor which you do not fulfill. "Like a leaf blowing in autumn's wind, I floated against the wall, fearing he would ask me to dance."
Here you only describe the leaf, you make no parallel between it and something else. That is the essence of metaphor and using a word like "Like" to begin your poem. The reader expects something else.
That being said, you have not found any new ways to describe a leaf in its four seasons. Your words could better seek the originality that poets frequently try to find in order to avoid cliché expressions.
Your one line "plummeting ever so gently" is original. The opposition of plummet and gently is interesting.
I found this title while reading poems from the New Static Item Page.
It's an interesting word for a title, but in my opinion you could easily have chosen "stalwart" or "steadfast" from your text.
Before reading a poet I have not yet discovered, I usually read the author's introduction. You bait the reader with "life's (you need an apostrophe in this word because you mean Life Is) trivial events, but you do not describe these events. Not even one of them.
The "emotional reaction" part is there, with too many cliché phrases for my personal taste, but I was expecting something else from the power of the poem's title and your explanation.
This poem reads as though you went through the S section of a dictionary and chose 13 diverse (and interesting) words and tried your best to connect them in a single poem. For me, this does not work. Unusual words stick out like sore thumbs unless they are used with the utmost care. The reader needs to be able to say to himself "Yes, this was indeed THE word for the line." All of your S words seem thrown in for effect and not affect.
There are poems which have unnecessary information in them. Your text is by far too short and needs much more meat on it for the average reader to be able to follow your serendipitous girl.
Write on!
alfred
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