Feedback for Vlad

[Cyril Darkcloud]

Vlad,

 

As much as, if not more so than, anyone else at the Pen you really seem to have been pushing yourself to grow as a writer over these last several months. It’s been fun watching the way you’ve experimented with different verse forms in your writing. On a lot of levels, you’ve been a fine model of the process of refining and stretching one’s talent. The willingness to take chances in your work and to risk putting something together that doesn’t quite work for the sake of getting better is a real strength that I imagine will serve you well as you keep working at your writing. Frankly, I think it has already begun to bear some very good fruit in your recent work.

 

One of the hallmarks of your work is a fine sense of the visual form of a piece and how that form can enhance the thematic character of the words. A fine example of this is your piece Words. Lately, however, your work has also been marked by a stronger use of other structural features such as the well-placed repetition of key words one finds in Tears or the outstanding use of vivid and rhythmic imagery in the middle stanza of The Brood. You also seem to be more comfortable in the use of different rhythmic elements, both regular and irregular, in your writing lately, a growth your threads from last March in the Writers’ Workshop illustrate quite well. You’ve also developed a very fine sense of how to bring a work to strong and effective conclusion. Weak Love is an example of one of the ways you do this.

 

There seems to be a distinctive style coming together here and I’d like to encourage you to keep experimenting and allow it to take shape.

 

I’ll follow this post up as I get a chance with a couple more detailed observations about some of your recent pieces and a couple aspects of your style, but given the hard work you’ve put into your writing it seemed appropriate to begin this critical response thread with an acknowledgment of that work and its results.

 

Keep writing!