This is good, interesting writing and the est character is a silent one--a pervasive sense of place. You really bring me here. But the piece ought to belong to the characters who are animate, since these characters are what you depend upon to make the story move and work, and (for this reader at least), the characters appear too abruptly, as if they are drepped from the sky in a parachute with names as identity papers. About chararacters: I hope the following makes sense to you: They really n...

I really enjoy the spare, minimalist style.And you have a gift for dialogue (in my opinion). Although I don't think you need dialogue tags like "chuckled"--we can get the drift from the dialogue itself--and "said" often does the job. But I have a startling thought--that doesn't really address your questions because when I read the story I heard a different kernal. For this reader, the story really starts when Charlie gets the roses. This is when life impinges upon him, when it's more than "a ...

I was intrigued by the title, yet the line about Caesar salad didn't quite work for me. This poem is (for this reader) a poem about passion, and a poem about serious passion. _Vinaigrette_ is an interesting title---but Caesar salad, with all its croutons, etc., doesn't match it. "Vinaigrette" in the title promises something sharp and startling within the passion itself, something that might bright the writer of the love poem awake. If it were my poem, I would stay with the passionate feeling ...

You know, the "notes for the reviewer" is, to my mind, a prose poem. if you don't capitalize the "m" in "maybe," it reads like one of Ana Hatherly's Tisanas, and I love the way it reaches outside of the piece to talk to the reviewer. (Also like David Ignatow's "I'm a Depressed Poem." So if you haven't looked into the prose poem, you might do more of them. (In fact, when I read it, I thought that possibly it was the haiku.) About the haiku: I really love the first two lines. But the last line ...

A word from the less-is-more school of poetry: To be honest, I think the first stanza almost says it all. What about skipping the middle stanza which is quite abstract, and working with the image of the cold dark and dead stars and warm night? It's these sorts of dissonant images that are the stuff of poetry.

This works well at setting a scene. But, to my mind, the scene is most of the story, and the narrative arc--the arc of danger and peril--happens near the end. Is it possible that this is, in fact, closer to the beginning of th the story and that the story continues? It's easy to conflate an interesting setting for a narrative arc, but they're different, even though there are elements within the scene tha pull out the narrative arc. I would like a sense of Olgrid as a character---however, you ...

To my mind, this almost makes it as a haiku, but there are a couple of words that tlle me too much--and of course if you take them out, you'll have to find other words to make it seventeen syllables. But these were the words and prhases that told me more than I needed to know: Life subtle You must In general, haikus offer portraits of life, without steering the reader too far into knowing what the "attitude" about it is, until perhaps the very end; if you study Ryokan, for e.g., you'll see th...

This reads as a linear anecdote, so while the material is interesting, I'm not sure why it's in the form of a poem. What would happen if you didn't present it as a poem? Would you want to take as big a leap over time--summarizing so much so quickly? And would it be easier to make this take a leap from an anecdote to a story? You might want to take a look at my book, co-authored with Dorothy Wall, Finding Your Writers Voice. And also take a look at my piece on both Red Room and Wordswimmer, Wr...

Don't believe these ratings. They're an absurd part of this system. I don't think a child would say "depart"--but "go away" and you could get in some good imagery by telling us where she wanted to go to. I find the ending flat. Some others might not. The poem seems to wrap up in her rationalization. Remember "no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader." What is the surprise here? What transformation does the poem go through? But the poem is sad and does most of its job by moving t...