mojave,
In for a penny, in for a pound. So, I'm going to pound you. If you're going to use punctuation to govern syntax and grammar, then you deserve to know how to use it properly.
1. It is spelled, "Ezzard" Charles.
2. Commas in compound sentences are used to set up an attendant circumstance. The author has the right to determine which is the more important feature of that sentence. He does this by establishing the circumstancial aspect through the use of a participle which leads the circumstantial clause. In addition, key aspects of a given idea need to remain close to that idea. Consider, "Boxing at the Garden before a standing room only audience, / Ezzard Charles splattered blood on your green sundress, with a left hook worth fifty grand." If it were me, I'd break after "sundress," and let the left hook own its own line.
3. Consider that setting up the second set in a similar fashion gives it a bit more life. Rather than two sentences, work for the circumstantial clause effect. Consider, "As she pulled her husband from the deep freeze, / the morgue clerk thought, / "Funny, how all mob guys look alike / (no space between 'a' and 'like') lying naked on a slap." Certainly, you are describing past experience, but you are allowed to make it live in the present. Oh, and, as with the above set, that space between does absolutely nothing to enhance the presentation.
3. The third set demonstrates why punctuation marks are our friends. Read as it is currently presented, the set raises this question. Are the typewriters in the hallway? If the offices are obscure, why is it that they lack clarity? How is a door able to reflect an image? Are the red lips also crooked on her coiled hair? Is there a second party noticing the crying woman? Consider, "With typewriters clicking behind the walls, / she stood in the office hallway, / observing her reflection in the glass of the double doors. / Red lips pouting back at her, / a telephone-girl hat crooked on her coiled hair, / crying, she thought, / "Funny, / how mob girls over forty (never used the ordinal - it tempts the reader to read, "four-zero," not forty) all look the same."
4. Rain doesn't turn to dirty snow. It turns to sleet, or to white snow. Once it falls, it is the carbon blown off by cars or the asphalt racked into it by ploughs that make the snow dirty. In addition, you don't tell the reader what is as close to Christmas as the unidentified he is going to get. Certainly, one can assume the presence of dirty snow. However, you haven't connected the "he" to the snow. You have not shown us that he is noting it. Less is not more in setting a scene. Consider, "Staring out the window of / his unheated walk-up, / watching the fallen snow turning dirty from auto exhaust / he thought, / "This is as close to Christmas as I'll get this year." Consider that by offsetting the thoughts in quotes, you tie the short stories together.
5. For my money, you can drop this set, "Cold water, walk-up flats are well known in New York, like single men moving across Amsterdam Ave. toward package stores of the lower Village," altogether. It is a distraction, and an expansion on the flat, rather than the man occupying it. But if you leave it in, spell out "avenue", because, as with numbers, people read what they see, not what you want them to say. If you keep it in, you have to give it a character who is thinking of something, or, as in the last set, about to do something.
6. Here, again, linking up key phrases and repositioning them, sets up that which is circumstantial to that which is primary. That is where commas come in handy. Consider, "Under the pizzaria's rice paper moon, he reads the New York Times, (Cover to cover is a distraction; all we need to know is that he is reading it.) A beer sign's glow gives his skin a ghostly tint. / Waiting for the mark, he pushes his hat far back on his head, his gat hidden under the sport's section." If you're going for a noir impact, oversize revolver won't cut it. If you are trying to keep it a bit more up to date, use "Glock", instead of gat.
If you want to take your reader back to the past, the best idea is to set that image in present tense.
Got to run.
Good ideas. Keep writing.
Bill
