Young Writers Society

Behind the cloud of dreams.
There’s a smiling face.
And on her moon like face, are
streams of black silk flowing down
her rosy cheeks.

Behind the cloud of dreams.
A meeting.
An exquisite moment.
The still water of the lake.
A bird chirruping on the tree.
Blooming buds in the garden.
Soft words off her beautiful lips.

Behind the cloud of dreams.
A yellowish afternoon.
In the accent of the coolness of iron.
A broken mirror; flying pieces of papers.
Blurring of a bewitching sight.
Tears shining like a pearl on her eyelids.
Deep silence; noisy wind.
Behind the cloud of dreams.

Hi! Just a quick review!
I loved this poem. You use some beautiful adjectives and compelling images. Lovely! No gramatical or spelling errors to speak of. Pretty perfect!
I have one critisism:

ehte92 wrote:Behind the cloud of dreams.
There’s a smiling face.
And on her moon like face, arestreams of black silk flowing down
her rosy cheeks.

Don't use 'Face' twice. It interrupts the flow of the stanza. Simply cut out the bit in red.

That's all! Keep up the great work,
~Amelia

Behind the cloud of dreams.
There’s a smiling face.
And on her moon like face, are
streams of black silk flowing down
her rosy cheeks.

Behind the cloud of dreams.
A meeting.
An exquisite moment.
The still water of the lake.
A bird chirruping on the tree.
Blooming buds in the garden.
Soft words off her beautiful lips.

Behind the cloud of dreams.
A yellowish afternoon.
In the accent of the coolness of iron.
A broken mirror; flying pieces of papers.
Blurring of a bewitching sight.
Tears shining like a pearl on her eyelids.
Deep silence; noisy wind.
Behind the cloud of dreams.

Very, very nice. It was extremely beautiful. A few nice metaphors. The whole thing set me in a calm, relaxing mood.

I liked it a lot!

Keep it up!

Hello FREAK./Mr six-times-hugger. xD

Expect a review soonish, I'm on my iPod.

~Tinkem

Amelia already made some good suggestions for the first stanza, but I think you could also take it in a more fanciful direction, namely by combining the ideas in several lines and cutting down on the verbosity. Right now, everything is so literal throughout the entire poem, and that isn't as interesting to read. Compare the effect of:

Behind the cloud of dreams,
upon her smiling moon-face,
streams of silk flow black down rosy cheeks.

Rearranging the wording and ideas a little leaves a bit more room for interpretation since we can tell that everything is not literal, and so shouldn't automatically be taken at face-value.

You'll also notice that I changed the punctuation and capitalization; the one thing that really bugged me about this poem was how you had a period at the end of almost every line. Periods signal a complete stop. End of thought. Go no. Further with. This. Idea.

As you can see, having so many periods so close together really mucks up the flow of the sentence and its main idea. Now if excessive periods can mess up a single sentence so badly, imagine what it does to your poem. It basically breaks the flow of the entire piece and jerks your reader out every time they encounter one. Add on top of it the capitalization of every line, and it's quite visually distracting.

Try punctuating and capitalizing your poem as if you were writing regular prose, line breaks aside. It will read much more smoothly, and you can save the choppiness for areas that need the impact gained only through a jerky flow.

Basically, this poem lacked a really coherent flow in both the sound and idea sense. Cutting down on the periods would definitely help, and combining ideas into more cohesive (yet not as literal) forms would also help in addition to making things more interesting.

Hi, Ehte! Here's the review you asked for.


This poem was like still waters after the rapids that were the hectic day I had today. It created such a peaceful atmosphere with pretty phrases and words, and it was lovely to read something like it.

I agree with the others about the repetition in the first stanza; it's completely unnecessary. Only use repetition as an effect, as you have done with the lines that repeat the title. Avoiding other-than-for-effect repetition is particularly important in poems, since there's less space than in stories, and because in poetry, everything counts. Of course, pretty much everything should count in stories, too, but in poems everything should be there for a reason.

My favourite stanza was the second one. Maybe it was the "still water of the lake" that created absolute serenity and nearly silence -- which almost contradicts with the image of the bird singing in the tree. Despite that, the stanza was like a polaroid picture of a here-and-now moment, and I liked it very much.

I think you could bring out your ideas and thoughts even better if you fixed the formatting a little. As Kyllorac also pointed out, having each line end in a period is like a guillotine to your poem. You want your poetry to flow smoothly, especially if it's about something as peaceful and beautiful as this one.

I hope this helped!


Demeter
x

Hello!

I'm sorry for the wait, and it seems that you've gotten some pretty good reviews already, so I hope to be of some sort of help.

Overall, I think I did understand what the poem was about. What I found odd was it's lack of structure and I'm sure you probably did this intentionally. Was this a free verse poem? I think this poem used really good words and there was a lot of lovely imagery. In terms of originality, it's a bit cliche, but I think you've added your own twist on it to make it yours.

Okay, so firstly, the layout. I think it was interesting, and now I'm gonig to assume that this poem is free-verse. You added some really good stops in some points, however I think there were a bit too many and it sort of ruined the flow. The repeititon that you used, I agree isn't really need. I think my favourite verse is the last one, because the first one doesn't seem to fit in with the others and with the second verse, you've used some cliche lines to put in.

I think the best part about your poem, as said before, is the imagery created. You've used some lovely language.

Behind the cloud of dreams.
There’s a smiling face.
And on her moon like face, are
streams of black silk flowing down
her rosy cheeks.

Okay, so like said before, don't use face twice, it ruins the flow.

Behind the cloud of dreams.
A meeting.
An exquisite moment.
The still water of the lake.
A bird chirruping on the tree.
Blooming buds in the garden.
Soft words off her beautiful lips.

I think the lines which I've highlighted (aaak, spelling xD) are a bit cliche and I've heard them before many a time. I think maybe you could've phrased it a bit differently. it's up to you though, because this is YOUR poem.

I don't have any problems with your last verse, I think it's really imaginative and beautiful.

Okay, so, I'm not THAT good at poetry reviews. And I hope I helped!
~Tamara

pretty good poem

Hey Ehte! I would repeat 'here as requested' but. You know.

So, first of all - I didn't really like the wording in the first stanza. Kyll explained that pretty well already, so I don't think I'll say too much about it - but it just didn't have that much appeal. The flow just seemed a little messy and it was, overall, distracting me from what you were trying to say and the imagery in the poem. I also agree about the repetition - I didn't like it. It seemed pointless, and again, distracting.

The beginning of the second stanza was my favorite part of the poem - the first four lines. The others were good, but they weren't as strong as the rest. Not to mention that - as Kyll mentioned, you used a period after pretty much every line there, which was distracting. I say take the advice that was given to you on that. (This was also repeated in the third stanza - too many periods.)

I honestly don't have much more to say about this - everything that I would have said has already been said, so I suppose that I'll cut this short. Sorry for the shortness, and keep writing.

As always,
~~Ish.

Hey there, ehte! Here as requested.

So, I’m not going to focus too much on nitpicks. If I did, I’d be stabbing at your punctuation all day because from what I can see, I think that’s your big downfall here.

You’re ending nearly every line with a period which makes the reader want to stop thinking. And this dramatically disrupts the flow of the poem. And flow is important. There are very few instances I’ve found where a poem can have dramatic stop and goes and you definitely don’t want to do this in a descriptive piece like this.

Really consider going through and nixing the periods. The flow is what your poem lacks because your word choice is patterned and clean but without an equally distinct and smooth flow, you just have a very jerky poem. (The poem isn’t a jerk of course, but…oh…you know what I mean.)

I do, however, really like your abstract imagery in this so spend some time focusing your punctuation and your word choice and you’ll be on your way.

If you have any questions, ehte, feel free to PM me or drop a post by my wall.

woah ehte, you have so many review already *asks self if she should even be here* okay, I'm gonna review anyway (I should of been faster, I guess I'm just super lazy xD)

First off, I really loved this poem, it gave a mysterious/magical air, and the descriptions were vivid, but at the same time, I didn't really know what you meant, like I said, magical

Now, I had a few problems with the flow and formatting,

ehte92 wrote:Behind the cloud of dreams,
there’s a smiling face.
And on her moon like face, are
streams of black silk flowing down
her rosy cheeks.
Gah, for me the last four lines, I don't know, I really want to reword them, maybe like this?

ehte92 wrote:Behind the cloud of dreams,
there’s a smiling, moon like face.
Ribbons of black silk flow,
down her rosy cheeks.

As you can see, you said face twice, so I moved moon like to the first face line. I changed stream to ribbion, because it sounds better, stream is more of an alternative to 'flow', and you wouldn't say 'flows of black silk' xD. I also changed the formatting and punctuation a little.

Behind the cloud of dreams,
a meeting.
An exquisite moment.
The still water of the lake.
A bird chirruping on the tree.
Blooming buds in the garden.
Soft words off from her beautiful lips.

Behind the cloud of dreams,
a yellowish afternoon.
In the accent of the coolness of iron.
A broken mirror; flying pieces of papers. Im sure if you say 'pieces, it gives the impression that there's more than one...
Blurring of a bewitching sight.
Tears shining like a pearls on her eyelids. one pearl fit on both her eyelids? Maybe, 'like pearls on her eyelids'? ho hum, I put it in anyway
Deep silence; noisy wind.
Behind the cloud of dreams.

ahh, I <3 this stanza

As you could probably tell, on every stanza, on the first line I replaced the full stop with a comma, to improve the flow, and make sure people realised the things that followed were actually 'behind the cloud of dreams'.

Anyway, I hoped this helped you FREAK.

~Tinkem

Hi ehte, I'm sorry I didn't get to this sooner! I totally forgot about my WRFF thread

What this lacks is well the imagery. It's lacking in the sense of feeling, vocabulary and general purposefulness. It fails to paint anything to the read, poetically at least. For example:

And on her moon like face, are
streams of black silk flowing down
her rosy cheeks.

This belongs in prose, not poetry.
not only that, that fails to paint anything aside colours of her face.
I see splotches of the colours you describe, but it's not contributing in stringing the poem together.

Next:

Behind the cloud of dreams.
A meeting.
An exquisite moment.
The still water of the lake.
A bird chirruping on the tree.
Blooming buds in the garden.
Soft words off her beautiful lips.

This tells me nothing. You're spewing out facts here, that birds chirp, water is still, there are flowers and she speaks.
What does this sound like, smell like, feel like etc etc. Not only that, what's beautiful about her lips, what's exquisite about this meeting?
Poetry isn't to explain the facts of something, rather the meaning and feeling behind it yes? I'm sure you've heard of the concept of showing not telling, well it's the same, show me the scene, show me what to see, what to hear what to feel. Don't tell me what the scene looks like and leave it at that. It does nothing for your reader, for you, or your poem. It's 2D, words on paper, and will never stand on it's own two feet because it doesn't have an emotional investment in it, from you or the reader.

You have good ideas for imagery here Ehte, you just need more practice stepping away from cliches, and embracing more vivid vocabulary, more original comparisons and connections. Saying red, isn't going to help us see a red flower any better. The reader's mind can go to any red flower from there. Not necessarily the flower YOU want them to see. Think of it as harnessing their train of thought and directing it where you want it to go. It takes practice! Try it out.

Good luck.

Kamas

charming poem, I love it.

Hullo! Kafka here!

...I'm late.

Really late.

Oh, well. Here goes.

ehte92 wrote:Behind the cloud of dreams. Don't think you want a period here. Isn't really grammatically correct, and kills the flow a bit, too.
There’s a smiling face. It could just be me, but all I can think of after reading this line is a giant, hovering emoticon.
And on her moon like face, are Put a dash between "moon" and "like," and it should be "there are," not just "are." Also, the repetition of "face" is a bit annoying.
streams of black silk flowing down I would get rid of "black." This would cut down somewhat on the amount of adjectives you're using.
her rosy cheeks. A bit of a cliché...go for something a bit more original. I think a metaphor would fit nicely here.

Behind the cloud of dreams. Once again, the period is extremely disruptive. A colon, a dash, a semicolon - really, anything besides a period would work.
A meeting. I like this. I'm not entirely sure how a meeting fits into the grand scheme of things, but enjoy how pointed you made this line.
An exquisite moment. Again, this was well-placed. Nice job following up on the last line.
The still water of the lake. Okay, now it's just starting to sound clunky. I'd try to resume the flowing quality you had established earlier at this point.
[A bird chirruping on the tree.
Blooming buds in the garden.
Soft words off her beautiful lips.] Punctuation, punctuation. The content of these lines is commendable, but your repeated use of periods kills any sense of rhythm you might be trying to develop. It's not too hard of a problem to fix, but it's worth pointing out.

I'm not going to nitpick the rest of the poem, because I'd just end up repeating myself. Really, you have a recurring issue throughout this piece: the fact that you are purposelessly limiting yourself, flow-wise. You need to lay off the periods at the end of lines! There are times when they can be used to emphasize a line, or are grammatically necessary, but many of the instances in which you used them do not fit into either category; hence, the period must be thrown out. Besides that, I liked this. I can see some major improvements in comparison with the last I read of you. Good job. And...keep writing.

-Kafka

I had an eerie sensation reading this poem. Your thought process seems to be very similar to mine it seems. It was an awesome feeling, and I like the poem.

Behind the cloud of dreams.
There’s a smiling face.
And on her moon like face, are The repetition of "face" here seems off.
streams of black silk flowing down I love this description.
her rosy cheeks.

Behind the cloud of dreams.
A meeting.
An exquisite moment.
The still water of the lake.
A bird chirruping on the tree.
Blooming buds in the garden.
Soft words off her beautiful lips.

Behind the cloud of dreams.
A yellowish afternoon.
In the accent of the coolness of iron. This line confused me.
A broken mirror; flying pieces of papers.
Blurring of a bewitching sight.
Tears shining like a pearl on her eyelids.
Deep silence; noisy wind.
Behind the cloud of dreams.

The biggest thing that I don't like about the poem has more to do with the punctuation than anything else. There are too many periods were you don't even have a sentence, other than that the poem was great. Keep writing.