SOLSC 8: A Workday Poem

Tied to her laptop

The copy editor addresses language.

How to gracefully ID a writer

Whose first book has the same title

As his blog.

How to spell Uyghurs (or Uighurs).

Should she leave that list of names

In all caps,

Or normal upper and lower case?

Which version of the story she was sent

Is the one she should work on?

After an hour of work,

She takes a break,

Goes for a walk,

Stops for a Covid test,

Just in case.

 

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 8 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

 

May Golden Shovel #21

source: Summer Is Coming. Let the Words Flow

 

Words line up neatly in dictionaries, until summer

Heats the pages. Pages curl restlessly until one is

Tempted to fling itself from the binding, coming

To dance in sunlight. Sunlight rinses words loose to let

Them alchemize in any order: meaning the

Existence burnt into is new. New sentences of words

Revolutionize my mind as language takes on original flow.

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I’m continuing to use Terrance Hayes’s Golden Shovel poem format, as proposed by the Sunday New York Times "At Home" section, for 30 Poems in 30 Days during National Poetry Month.

 

Take a newspaper headline that attracts you.

Use each word in the line as the end word for each line in your poem.

Keep the end words in order.

Describe the story that the headline is for.

The poem does not have to be about the same subject as the headline that creates the end words.

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30/30: Golden Shovel #9

Source: Breaking the Bonds of Mere Language

Suppressed words invade my dreams to the breaking

Point. I drown in mystery, obscurity, the

Enigmatic, cryptic, garbled, murky, until ripped bonds

Of intention, of significance, of

Meaning reduce rationality to mere

Surface, questioning the existence of language.

Here is how I am using Terrance Hayes’s Golden Shovel poem format, as proposed by the Sunday New York Times "At Home" section, for 30 Poems in 30 Days during National Poetry Month.

Take a newspaper headline that attracts you.

Use each word in the line as the end word for each line in your poem.

Keep the end words in order.

Describe the story that the headline is for.

The poem does not have to be about the same subject as the headline that creates the end words.

 

Another "iconic" Sighting

When even the notable Francine Prose -- novelist, short story writer, essayist, visiting professor at Bard and former president of the PEN American Center -- can fall into the "iconic" black hole, what hope is there. From tomorrow's NYT Travel section, the lead sentence: "For many people, especially those who don't live in and around Los Angeles, the idea of Sunset Boulevard conjures up the iconic Billy Wilder film of that name...." What does "iconic" add to that description? What does it even mean?

Pronouns and Their Antecedents

Time for grammar. Pronouns refer to nouns, and for them to make sense, they have to follow the noun (the antecedent) they refer to. If a pronoun precedes its antecedent, it can make the sentence more or less confusing. Here's an example:

"In 1976, the radical left was about as powerful as it would ever be in postwar Britain, and, much like their counterparts in the United States, British New Left intellectuals were increasingly focused on cultural questions, including questions about representation and language." (The Nation magazine, June 2015)

The problematic pronoun here is their, in the transition from first to second clause. In the first clause, the pronoun it refers to the radical left (collective nouns in American English are generally considered singular). But when readesr come to that their, they are left to wonder, what's its antecedent? The radical left? That noun phrase has already been replaced by it, so why switch to a plural pronoun here? In the second clause, however, we see that their really refers to British New Left intellectuals -- but with the pronoun preceding its antecedent, readers have to stop and do some mental untangling, distracting them from following the writer's argument. A little shifting around of phrases can solve the problem easily.

"In 1976, the radical left was about as powerful as it would ever be in postwar Britain, and British New Left intellectuals, much like their counterparts in the United States, were increasingly focused on cultural questions, including questions about representation and language."

Any questions?