Re: Street Talkers (Amnesiac) by Fear of Garbage	18-Aug-03/6:13 PM
Jezus, you're 16? Fucking ay.
Re: Moon In My Blood by AtalantaPendragonne	18-Aug-03/6:01 PM
Bah--a 5? FoG is right--you nailed the image of Biblical times really well, and the way you tell it--clear, simple, no stupid archaisms-- is perfectly suited to the story. Have a 10.
Re: Thawed by Roisin	18-Aug-03/5:51 PM
The first stanza is great--the rest not quite up to it, but still really well done overall.
Re: Procession by Fear of Garbage	18-Aug-03/5:28 PM
This is great--amazing lines and flow; really lyrical and creative. Most excellent first line. Burial and ritual and dust and history--you just weave this incredibly. I think it'd be even better if you ended on "engines"--the last line is too "here's my point!" and it's almost generic in contrast to the rest of this. This is terrific.
Re: drought on talkin river by richa	14-Aug-03/8:00 PM
You have great sounds in this, long and slow, and good unobtrusive alliteration. Z's right, though; this is a river mouth--the meandering, the salt. Great images--really fresh and accessible.
Re: whilst the bells ring by richa	14-Aug-03/8:00 AM
Richa, this is lovely--very Emily Dickinson in its deceptive simplicity. Stalks spear the sun, maybe, to make it more active? Gallows, with the s, is the singular, btw. One of my absolute favorites.
Re: Molecular Parasitology Nerdcore Rap by Retaliate	13-Aug-03/8:16 AM
fucking hilarious
Re: Dialogism by Nicholas Jones	11-Aug-03/3:13 PM
Good sonnet--love how the rhymes are not obvious because you didn't make the mistake of end-stopping each line. You seem to gain an extra beat in lines 5 and 9 (9 is easily fixed if you make it deep instead of deeper). How come you didn't rhyme the couplet? Re: Arkansas, I was only there once, backpacking--it's a beautiful state (they call it the Natural State), so if you like hiking, there are some great trails (both for dayhiking and extended treks). Other than that, I'm not sure. I think you'll find that Southerners are generally pretty friendly--that's been my experience, at least.
Re: Portsmouth belle 3 by Garrett S Sexton	8-Aug-03/5:43 PM
Ha--Garrett, there's some funny shit here. Might be even more effective if you carried the meter from the first stanza into each stanza--some of the changes would be pretty easy (o flat chested Annie, she'd take anyone's money/and anyone's honey she'd be . . . and always worked best [in] a crowd, etc.), some would take a little more work, but it'd read more like the ballad it seems to want to be. "Her arse was her fanny"--meh. Liked this.
Re: blue lilac and I (edit) by richa	7-Aug-03/9:56 AM
Nice edit--I like how you pared it down to the essential image. Some nits? Pike are generally solitary (they're very aggressive) and they tend to hide, waiting for prey, so I don't think you would see a stream "silvered in pike." Maybe another freshwater fish--something that shoals?--would work better here. The trombone is disconnected from the rest of the poem now, without the band playing nearby [in our view]. Might something other than a trombone work here--something that works within the scene you've rendered? The devil's in the details! But that's not to take away from what is, at its core, really fine work.
Re: blue lilac and I (edit) by richa	7-Aug-03/6:33 AM
As it is written now, the blue lilac and berry plant (bush? ewww, even typing the word makes me cringe--but I digress) are, syntactically, sitting by the stream, so, yup, needs some work there. Maybe get rid of "hid" for starters, so it's sitting by the silvered stream of mackeral and pike (lotta fish in that thar stream--btw, it's mackerel, with an e, and I think they're salt water fish) [and]picking from the still air . . . . . . fields the blue lilac and berry (maybe make it a specific type of berry and lose plant altogether?) [lose "hid?" After all, you can see them, right?] under the trees could be seen to crane . . . Something like that? Or not. Not sure I get "put" their life and mine in this context--or, at least, not sure "put" delivers here.
Re: Eight thousand clay tiles by abecedarian	4-Aug-03/4:12 PM
There's a lot to like here, but your strong central image is overwhelmed. The gist of it seems to be (and if you're annoyed by editing, then disregard): We made eight thousand clay squares and triangles glazed black and white and fired each one, arranged a tesselation of perfect dimensions and proper proportions: an attempted Metamorphoses, an insect become a fish. But a week was not long enough. I returned to the task ten years later. Red paint obscures the image, but it is still intact. This weekend I will clean it with a wire brush and try to find a way to find you and let you know that it is safe.
Re: a comment on Feasting Ouroboros by <~>	24-Jul-03/6:57 PM
no, sorry. V4--shwing! Nice rewrite, dewd.
Re: Feasting Ouroboros by <~>	24-Jul-03/9:33 AM
So, I've been thinking on this, carrying it around with me and waiting for it to bite. Even with your usual alchemy, z, I think it's too abstruse--you're asking the reader to work to hard to connect title to text. The secret code's too impenetrable; you've hidden the keys. Some quick thoughts, and some of these are just stylistic differences, I'm sure. The usual YMMVs and Dowhatthouwiltsometeitbe's apply: What's unwhetted? The mountains? Nice pun, but carries no context. While the metaphors of sculpting and alchemy have parallels (creating something of beauty and value from a base material), having both weakens both, I think. Is the sculpting metaphor a distraction? Maybe that's it. What's with the blood and alchemy stanza? I don't know how it fits in (I mean structually/grammatically rather than metaphorically--I think the metaphor works here, particularly in light of the title and its alchemical context). Is the "blood and satisfaction" the niche? If it's unsmelted, where's the chemistry? I liked Bangladesh--it conveyed what you've rephrased, somehow, but more subtly. Like the ending a lot--you appropriately come full circle with it. This version gained weight but missed--what?--balance? A core? I'm not sure. There's great stuff embedded (that word may have been permanently ruined for me--ack), but it needs clarity and focus.
Re: a comment on A Delicate Poem by EAger to Offend	23-Jul-03/8:42 AM
t'aint necessarily so: "A poem should be palpable and mute as a globed fruit, dumb as old medallions to the thumb . . . " Ars Poetica, by Archibald MacLeish, here: http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/liu/english25/materials/macleish.html
Re: education by richa	23-Jul-03/8:34 AM
As usual, your images and language are striking and original, but this seems ambiguous to me. I don't get the ending.
Re: Middleman by INTRANSIT	23-Jul-03/7:59 AM
Wow, Intransit! Lots to like here! Love the dirty feet that tell tales of wandering; the fields of sage (connotations of purification) and the hills described as hips--love the yearning and the pained refusal to fall. Why "in triplicate?" Maybe "on my own" instead of "with my own?" Also, modifiers tend to dilute images--consider dropping "gently," "whispered," "ever blueing" (this last I'd replace with something stronger--heck, even plain old "blue" skies would work better here, I think. YMMV. ;) Terrific work.
Re: Truckin' by INTRANSIT	23-Jul-03/7:49 AM
Clean and sharp. "Three bullracks (?) [exchanging] lines over the two way" is great. Plural kings? Quibble, quibble, nit, pick (hey, it's what I do). I like the haiku-like approach you took here.
Re: Halves by impert&ent	23-Jul-03/7:41 AM
Some really nice lines and the overall idea is poignant and handled pretty well. I'm not sure who you're talking to in the first stanza--the daughter, I assume? yourself?--or how it ties into the rest--releasing words and "releasing" a child? Needs a clearer connection. I think your ending would be stronger if you lopped off the last line and ended on 'world'. Minor stuff--use what you can. Well done!
Re: a comment on Epistemology (2nd draft) by Ranger	10-Jan-03/4:48 PM
Oh--yes, now I see. You're omitting the subordinating conjuctions (that) to two restrictive clauses [i.e, "(that) the parsons nose [lubricated]" and "(that) the pirate procured"]. I can't tell from your example above whether you are using "which" to introduce a restrictive or nonrestrictive clause ("that was lubricated by the parson's nose (which the pirate procured)"--if the former, fine; if, however, it's a nonrestrictive clause (i.e., "that was lubricated by the parson's nose, which the pirate procured"), you can't arbitrarily omit both the comma that would indicate that it is a nonrestrictive clause and the "which." (Anyway, because of the ambiguity resulting from your sentence construction, your omission of the subordinating conjuctions, while acceptable in many cases, would be considered unacceptable usage by certain grammarians--see, for example, Theodore Bernstein's _The Careful Writer_). In order to omit the subordinating conjunctions ("that" or the restrictive usage of "which, which is still acceptable usage, particularly in Europe), I believe the clauses must be restrictive. To be considered restrictive, those clauses must be essential to the meaning of the sentence. If you mean "The shoehorn that the parsons nose that the pirate procured lubricated glistened," you seem to be implying that there is more than one parson's nose and you specifically mean the one that the pirate procured and that there was more than one shoehorn and you specifically mean the one that the parson's nose lubricated. Is that the case? I'd like it better if you changed it to "The shoehorn the parson's nose, the pirate, procured lubricated glistened" but then we'd be back to procuring a lubricated shoehorn, which is against the law in any number of locales.