No Ordinary Night

Hi, Eyes!

I can empathize with formatting problems; I find if you use google chrome instead of windows explorer, it'll let you put in the line breaks, and to differentiate between line breaks and stanza breaks, just press shift enter for single-spaced line breaks in the YWS text box and just a normal enter for double-spaced line breaks.

Onto the poem!

First, you never say what is shooting across the narrator's sky like a meteor. Later in the poem, it's implied that it's the person the narrator is talking/thinking about, but I'd make that clear right away to avoid confusion.

I enjoy the extended metaphor, but it feels like something is missing. It's not just because it's short; I love short poems. (Any poem, really), but it just doesn't feel complete.

Overall, it's a nice metaphor and I think, with a few edits, it could be a great a great poem

Hope this review helped and happy Review Day
-tgirly (of Team Black)

Ok, lets start off with this: "My life a moonless night Very dark But stars Points of light and reason Shoot across my sky like a meteor Setting everything ablaze"

It sounds great and flows nicely, it just fails on the end of logic. You're sorta contradicting yourself, yes, I understand that it's dark because the moon is gone, but you then go on to say that the sky is set ablaze by these stars. Being set ablaze would imply that there was light coming from the sky.

That's really all I had a minor problem with. I believe it's beautiful. Keep writing.

First off, did you mean that you originally wrote it as a paragraph because you weren't sure about the structure? Or did you mean that you had it broken up, but when you submitted it it, became a paragraph? If it's the latter, just edit it and break it up, checking Preview before you submit it. If you're legitimately unsure about line breaks, I would go with the rhythm of the piece. Read it out loud and see where natural pauses occur. The lines don't have to rhyme or be the same length, but they do flow together. When ideas change, make a new stanza.

As for punctuation, I just punctuate as I would with non-poetry. You don't have to capitalize the beginning of every line, although you can if you want to. As Inked said, there's help with both grammar and poetry structure in the forums.

Now, overall I'd say this piece has some good imagery, although it is difficult to see in the current structure. I like the progression from darkness to blinding meteors and the final line "Will my eyes adjust?". I do think you could add more emotion throughout. How does the speaker feel about going from darkness to blazing lights back to darkness?

If you add more emotion and fix the structure, you have a lovely poem here! Keep writing!

Greetings, janika! I've noticed your worry over the general presentation of your poem. Fear not, my fellow writer! I am here! (I mean, better than nothing, right?) Just next time, don't keep your cry for help in an actual posted work, there're forums for that hon! A waste of points, I have to say. But I shall try to help nevertheless.

Okay, seeing as you're having trouble with how you want to present it, I'm not going to touch on that. Rather, I'm going to tell you how you can fix it. (As you've requested.) Firstly, I would advise that you consider reediting and working with your words first. The flow is very awkward and doesn't follow any sort of beat or rhythm of the sorts that most would try to fit to a poem. With the run on sentences that it seemed to be on right now (and the lack of periods and semicolons in places where it desperately needed it), I don't think that presentation and structure is what you should be completely concerned with. Just needed to get that down and something to allow you to keep in mind.

So you've had some sort of idea going on, seeing as you capitalized several. I wouldn't go so far as to say that you've written a paragraph, really. Just some lines. Like I had mentioned earlier, you had no beat, just lines. I'm following the poem as you had capitalized, and it's hard to really get a good impression. It followed a sort.. typical opening and an very rough ending. See, you open it with our slight interest, but you lose it as you lead us through awkwardly placed lines following after. You need to first work with your wording first. Reading it out loud, I found some difficulty in how it should sound. Change some words, move around some lines, add in the punctuation as it deserves. I can't find a lot of emotion or a story to work with from this poem.

As a writer to another, I would suggest that next time, take this issue to the forums. I'm giving you my honest feedback and what I think of it, and my advice to you as best that I could. Overall, I could kind of get what you were trying to aim for, but it wasn't clearly placed or written so I can't really give my opinion on how the poem was.

Hope that this comment/review (I'm not very sure right now) helps.

~IRI