Friday, January 16, 2015

Response to Wilson Chancey's Junkyard 3 Week 2

This is a response to Wilson Chancey's post Junkyard 3 Week 2.

Here is what I wrote:
Wilson,
Even though I don't know what’s happening in the narrative, I thoroughly enjoy the images you provide us, specifically “half-green strawberries,” “taste like melon shell, dipped in lime,” “dark pulp of an imperfect berry,” because they seem surprising in by themselves or in context with the rest of the line. The next step would be to work on the actual narrative, making them both work together to be surprising and make some kind of sense.
Although I like the line “gulp of discontent,” I’m not sure how I feel about that being so close to “disconcerted with me also.” Maybe it’s the word disconcerted, which is just so latinate, but I don’t think that line is as strong as the first. The first line seems more surprising, like the images. The other thing to think about—line breaks and end punctuation. Punctuation becomes highly important in poetry because it reflects some sort of control over syntax. It’s one of the things I struggle with most in writing. But in this piece, I think that the first line needs some sort of punctuation: a period seems most likely unless you decide to move “dipped in lime” up to the second line, then you could get away with a comma. The “dipped in lime” line seems a little out of place where it is right now, because I’m not sure why it’s important enough to merit it’s own line. It seems purely a description of the strawberries or the melon shell. Just some things to think about for the next draft or whatever you decide to do with this.

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