An email from a new friend:
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedCarllI appreciate your daily expressions. Your writing wends and winds with expressions wrought with peculiarity. If I were to write it is what I might like to emulate. I love the way words and expressions from somewhere old and deep just pop out, like hey, where did that come from. There is no “right” way to use language, especially when trending to the poetic.
Many of you encourage me with kind responses – thank you, they fuel my fire! This one tweaked my heart. This individual – an email address, disembodied, from somewhere in the English-speaking world – had understood my project: less to inform, instruct, admonish, bemoan, than to delight with words: to lighten your heart with a surprising lilt: no matter my matter, to have fun.
Painters and composers needn’t defend their dedication to delight. What they make is worthless if it does not please. Words are laborers, erecting structures of sense. A sentence, paragraph, must say something that might be conveyed in other words. This is truer for prose than poetry, but poems too must be decodable into notions. Words without sense, however mellifluous, are boring babble.
Word-workers, then, are judged both for what they say and how they say it. The first is emphasized because it’s easier to discuss. Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, the dominant guide to American prose style during my school days and still influential, emphasized clarity, brevity, concision, that words do their work efficiently. Their advice, while unimpeachable, may produce a prose as spare as a Shaker chair: sleek but severe: no fun.
The writing that most moves me is more playful, rambunctious, rebellious, outrageous than White’s quiet fluency. He was a fine writer, White, great at times, but I hanker for more mischief, antics, pzazz, puns, alliterations, tricks, tussle, parentheses, asides. My favorite authors I feel sporting with me, winking, to see if I’m in on the joke. Shakespeare is the master, of course: his verse or prose, at its best, sizzles with inventive energy. Dr. Johnson, Gibbon, Jane Austen, Thoreau are among his worthy descendants. What any of us have to say is old hat: when it comes to essential human truths, there’s little new under the sun. It’s the how that brings a writer to life – tone, analogies, joy – their music – which, if it’s good, is irreplicable and cannot be taught.
Music is what makes language memorable and durable. Jesus was a crackerjack wordsmith; likewise, Lincoln, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. What they said was wise, but their manner of saying whizzed their rhetoric to always. My heartening interlocutor invites me to his word playground with this sentence: “Your writing wends and winds with expressions wrought with peculiarity.” Cock your ear – writing/wrought, wends/winds, peculiarity… these are fanciful touches, oddities that pause. Unexpected resemblances between words – rhymes, alliterations, homonyms, etc. – insensibly invite us to contrast, contest. What is the difference between wend and wind? If wend and wind, how about wind (short i), wand, wound…?
I write by ear. Music bypasses reason. Ezra Pound made an important point pointedly when he quipped, “Poetry must be as well written as prose.” The reverse, for my money, is no less true: “Prose must be as well written as poetry.” Prose should employ poetry’s tools – timbre, rhythm, juxtaposition, repetition, surprise – to fizz. Meaning, if possible, should be experienced before it’s decoded. Sound before sense.
Ours is a grim hour. We cannot ignore the horror, we must say what we see. But let us sing our songs with a gusto that foresees tomorrow. Delight or delete.