After reading Timothy Liu's Of Thee I Sing, I began to think of lists again. I've always admired Liu's work, and at the same time I know I tend to space out half way through a lot of his poems. After reading this latest book of his once, I got to go back in a more relaxed way to look more closely at some of the individual poems. I noticed that I generally spaced out when a poem didn't use complete sentences, even though it used capital letters and periods. I think since it was more difficult for me to follow, my brain just said--Too hard--and checked out. I know--sad, but true. It's a wonder why I can read and love to read some poetry at all sometimes.
So, I've started to write lists with incomplete sentences. There are a lot of subject matters I've wanted to talk about in my poetry, but haven't been able to do it in a way that I would call successful. I've been wanting to write about American politics these days, about my relationship to my body, about a number of things that I just haven't been able to sink into. I think the lists are helping.
I have my teleconference writing group with Amber and Sharon this week. My blog readers seemed to enjoy my mention of the "tanka" poetry form that Amber, Sharon, and I tried a few weeks ago, so maybe I'll post another exercise that we do sometime this week.
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3 comments:
I like your prose. It seems good to me since it's easy to read. I don't know if it's my mind or what, but I can't seem to put together good sentences. I think I need to go back to elementary school grammar or something.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks! Writing takes a lot of practice and time. Even if your grammar is great, it sometimes just feels awkward and scary to write down your thoughts. I think that's the primary obstacle for most people. But it really seems like the more you do it, the easier it gets.
...though at the same time, I don't think writing is ever easy.
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