cdnsurfer's profile 
AGE:
44
LOC: Canada
GEN: Male
LAST LOGIN: September 04
LOC: Canada
GEN: Male
LAST LOGIN: September 04
Well, I’ve been back at it for about 1 1/2 years now, after a very long hiatus (15-16 years). Twenty-nine poems and five short stories (not including reprints) published in 25 different venues since I started submitting work to editors a year ago. I appear in lit mags, ezines, and anthologies, both print and online. I also read for CBC Radio during National Poetry Month (April, 2008). Many, many people to thank for the help – here and elsewhere. I am now working on a novel, a novelette, and a whole bunch of shorter works. I am paying back the system, doing what I do best – help out other writers.
This is one of my many “etch-a-sketches”.
Stuff is posted here to workshop, so feel free to rip it apart. Since I’m here anyways doing ot…
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Items
Version 3
6 Reviews
3 Comments
I nuzzle small, metered lines, gnaw slippered poetic feet my head laid low to the Persian rug where skirt folds end in hardwood, engrained with year after year of failure. Her voice full with love and disappointment she runs fingers along the back of my ears, soothing me until I sleep from the unbearable weight of words. At night we dream the same things: bones, dug up or buried while she twists her bed sheets, cries for freedom I desire no escape from my mistress, bound and tied to strings o...
Ratings & Rankings
Version 1
6 Reviews
3 Comments
Her green eyes mirror the lime and olive of the Pyrennes brown curls loosened, tease the dip in her shoulders and her thin-smile tattoos wordless thoughts, indelible roja. We met on the Ruta del Ferro in the cool of the abandoned rail station where lavender breezes carry ghost trains east. Beneath grey monastery walls that call out the dead and the hot clay rooftops of this medieval town, she rises from a clam-shell basin, afloat on a sea of poppies. Made up with her best hopes and dreams she...
Ratings & Rankings
Version 1
8 Reviews
5 Comments
If you strain your ear hard enough to the heavens and wait for that moment when the wind dies down and traffic stops, you can hear the sound of the universe dying. Not a moan like a dog's whimper or a groan like a man sucking out his last breath, the sound of the dying universe is a perfect b-flat note. Playing for twenty billion years, I often imagine that celestial note hanging like the reverberations of a piano gasping out Chopin's Sonata No. 2 in b-flat minor, Op. 35. Though it brings me ...
Ratings & Rankings
Version 1
13 Reviews
13 Comments
Guernica Herman writes a letter from an open-air café in the Basque town that bears her name. Her parents, both art students, met at a Picasso exhibition in New York City in 1981. Two years later, they christened baby G. in a small Lutheran chapel on Dundas Street, where she wailed out her staccato protests and managed to hit every high note of "Oh Holy Spirit, enter in." Since childhood she'd identified herself only by the letter G., as a way to deny her infamous name. From the café, smoke ...
Ratings & Rankings
Version 1
22 Reviews
27 Comments
Here, background sun washes out the right corner next to old wrinkled tape holding the faded family photo to crinkled black matt paper. My brother fills the scene somehow larger with time and my sisters stand close framing my smiling parents within a perfect triangle. I hide there, a mere shadow indistinct at eight next to the mortar seawall and the twisted cedar branches lost within the family fold. I am shirtless, tanned brown from a red Pacific sun but my white shorts glow bleached as dry ...
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Reviews
POV: I like the experiment with 2nd person POV. I would avoid the editorializing approach, where the narrator speaks to "you". For example, "Hey, its better than crying." Is editorializing. It draws the reader out of the story. CHARACTER: The main character needs fleshing out, so that we get more of an impression of his motive and his history with Janna. As a result, we can only guess why he would go to such extremes to get the "itch" out. Or even why the itch arose in the first place. The re...
Excellent tongue-in-cheek piece, DC. Only _suggestion_ is the use of the preposition "for" over "on", as "for" is more suggestive of purpose than "on" and thus more active. Although they are interchangeable, IMHO the use of the preposition "on" suggests a more neutral relationship. "For" can be purposive as a proposition, as here. "On" implies covering, dealing, or concerning in relation to. Merely a suggestion. Cheers.
Very good use of the three points (triology) for ironic effect. A, B, C. I thought the last, "C", might be set in a participle, non-finite "starting", which gives it immediacy, given "A" and "B" are in the definite past.
Generally flows as an anapestic tetrameter (3 x 4), evident in S1, but S2 and S3 vary: S1: 12, 12, 12, 12 S2: 12, 11, 13, 10 S3: 13, 13, 12, 12 Consider some reorganization to move each line to an anapestic tetrameter. Suggest reducing some of personal pronouns like “he”, since it gives each line the feel of a full sentence halting the flow, and connect the lines with participles. For example, S1 subject is “he” in L1, then using participles, the rest flows as: “tearing.../hurling the...towar...
You are adept at turning phrases and flowing lines. I found some of your playful lines interesting like “self untrue” and L20. It is clear this piece reflects deception and self-deception, loathing and self-loathing well, but in a vague, abstract way. I would’ve like the poem to shift to a concrete narrative of who and where, in a form that exposes the personal. As a result we never get to know who ego is or the circumstances that produced this rant. I enjoyed the early alliteration with “d”....
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