Category: Craft

Beauty Through Words

afremov23I have always greatly enjoyed implementing effective sensory details into my poems, even though it has proven to be a pretty great challenge for me. I’ve found that if I don’t pay attention to what I’m doing, or if I get too wrapped up in the intent of the piece, I’ll completely leave out the details needed to actually show the story. Over the years I’ve gotten better about balancing my focus between images and other aspects of the poem, but still find myself with poems that lack the different details that would make it so much more powerful.

        I think that because I’ve had to be more cautious about the attention I pay to detail in my poems, I’ve learned to really appreciate it when I can create a powerful image. I also have a pretty deep admiration for poets who are able to write wonderful images without even paying too much attention to the sensory details they’re using; it’s just second nature to them.

        One poem I read a few years ago, Preludes by T.S. Eliot, has always stood out to me, as it’s compiled of so many beautiful and abstract images that really put the reader in the moment. In the second section, the lines “The morning comes to consciousness, Of faint stale smells of beer, From the sawdust-trampled street, With all its muddy feet that press, To early coffee-stands,” are so brilliant. Eliot obviously pays special attention to the close details of the poem, inviting the reader to smell the thick, smoky air, and walk along the streets as he says they are. You get to go into the homes and lay on the bed, feeling everything the writer describes. The images have a great impact on giving the intent to the reader that they work well for the poem.

        Whenever I find myself having trouble with my writing, I like to read over this poem, if not for inspiration then just to appreciate the writing. Most times, however, reading it gives me encouragement to work on my images and strengthen them, or gives me specific ideas for how to use sensory details for the betterment of my poetry. I’ve definitely noticed that the longer I take on a poem, the better outcome I’m going to come up with, but that pretty much goes for anything. I would like to think that as I’ve recognized this fault of mine I’ve been able to gather experience and allow myself to grow and learn more about sensory details, and how to successfully use them in my writing. Not only have I learned more about powerful sensory choice from reading other poetry, but I’ve also learned about them from classes and workshops, receiving feedback to help further images for the experience of the reader. While I may be learning to make my sensory details and images stronger in my poems, I’m also making the intention of the piece clearer and improving the experience of reading the poem as a whole.  

–Makinley Dozier, Co-Web Editor

On Saunders and Sentences

george-saundersI have a thing for deeply flawed voices in stories. Those characters who immediately rope you into a new way of seeing the world. Use of diction and sentence structure is crucial to sending the reader straight into a character’s head. There are many great examples, but no one author has influenced my way of composing sentences like George Saunders.

A creative writing teacher lent me his book Tenth of December because she thought I would enjoy the stories, but also look at his use of craft when forming my own writing. I read the book, with few breaks, over one weekend, sitting on my chilly porch, each gnawing breeze pushing me further and further into the work. His characters are gritty, realistic people in slightly unreal situations. The really incredible part is, he can put me into a way of thinking without so much as using first person. His word choice and forming of sentences is largely to thank.

Take, for example, this passage from the first story, “Victory Lap” of his recent Tenth of December: “Had he said, Let us go stand on the moon? If so, she would have to be like, {eyebrows up}. And if no wry acknowledgment was forthcoming, be like, Uh, I am not exactly dressed for standing on the moon, which, as I understand it, is super-cold?” What stuck me, what would change the way I write, is how a character’s’ thoughts become part of a stream, the way both dialogue and action are projected in his mind. He doesn’t think in clear patterns, the way people are expected to in stories. Instead, it’s much more real. When a person becomes jittery and nervous, they cram their thoughts and reactions together. This is what Saunders does in the anxious stream of possibilities, of a character with that “super-cold”, creating a condensed form of thinking, the way I have internally.

Reading this style of writing strikes me, because it’s unusual, but once I fall into the patterns of it, my thinking matches up with the character and suddenly, at least in my experience, the two of you are one. The story is immediate and palpable, not distanced and planned. This is what I wanted to create. A kind of writing so direct, so natural, that it becomes synonymous with a reader’s own mind. At the moment, I have many stories with the subtleties of Saunder’s style creeping up in them.

I wrote a story last year about the destroyed landscape of a Florida swamp swallowing its abusers in a storm, “Song”. The terror of the characters needed to be visible, but just as important was their way of interacting with the world from the beginning. Anyone can be scared. Only Johnny, a doomed Floridian, could arrive with his background of going to work each day to smother the land in concrete and wood, a life dripping with heat and humidity, the whole system of values instilled in him so, when the land finally did claim him, it was as a product of place being consumed by place. When I revised the story, the sentences were just as much a product of the place as Johnny himself. The words were carefully chosen in both vernacular and specificity. The land’s reaction isn’t the first violence; this is a setting fraught with battles over control. Word choice, whenever possible, held that history of conflict.

In the end, that story was published in the 2016 edition of Elan. And I plan to keep reading George Saunders, keep inventing characters that are so saturated with individual views, so honest through language, that a reader can’t help but delve into their world, headfirst.

–Ana Shaw, Junior Editor-in-Chief

A Poetry Lesson From Adrienne Rich

alexisIn the first half of my junior year in Creative Writing, I quickly cultivated the most intimate and intense relationship with poetry I’d had thus far. I became exposed to an enormous amount of poetry and poetic techniques that, through practice, I could eventually use meaningfully in my own work. After closely studying the choices of established poets in their writing, with each piece I felt a sense of enlightenment and awe, as if every new technique I hadn’t previously known existed was a key unlocking a door, and another door, and another. 

A particular poem that stuck with me from that semester was A Blessing by James Wright. The majority of the piece describes the speaker and his partner pulling over to the edge of the highway and getting out of the car to pet and marvel at two Indian ponies. Within this image, Wright uses descriptive implication to give the reader a sense of how she should feel in response to the brief experience with the horses, and also toward the relationship of the main characters in the poem. In the last two lines, the reader is struck with an extremely abstract bomb of language that floods everything we thought we knew about the moment with emotion and insight. It created the perfect balance between concrete detail and abstraction. Another piece that revolutionized my approach to poetry was The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop, which did most of its work with intense sensory detail and descriptive implication, as well.
However, the interaction with poetry that proved to be the most influential to my original understanding of the genre was the one I had with the work of Adrienne Rich, whom I deeply studied and analyzed for a huge project I will be forever grateful for. With an in-depth understanding of her life, specifically difficult times she experienced that played major roles in her writing throughout her career as a poet, I developed a close relationship with her individual style and became familiar enough with her signature techniques to attempt to execute them in my own writing.
This is when I discovered gaps. I noticed they showed up frequently in her poetry, and after doing some research, learned they are used to juxtapose two concepts either on the surface of the poem, or hidden inside the subtext of the word choice. Essentially line breaks within lines, gaps do the work that the language itself cannot. I’d had prior context for juxtaposition, but never knew how to properly go about it, and gaps allowed me to more constructively search for and utilize the complexity and dynamism in my work. I tried it out in an original poem entitled The Origin of Lost People, and its use proved successful. It significantly contributed to the progression of my work and myself as a writer. While not the only important thing I learned from Adrienne Rich, this particular technique helped expand and transform everything I thought I could do with poetry. I’m anxiously anticipating other secrets I’m bound to unlock in the future.

-Alexis Williams, Co-editor in chief