Reading Response
Dawn-
That exercise, is awesome! I'm most certainly doing this next week I only wish I had a purse to randomly grab from. I feel like you most certainly made the poem your own while also getting good practice out of it. I can't wait to start playing with that technique. I definitely agree with Chris in regards to the 1 fl oz, something so simple yet so descriptive in nature. It's great because by the end you didn't have to change anything, you made the poem work for you with the changes you already made.
David-
First off, I have extreme 'writer's envy' of your blog in general. Next week once I have oriented myself further I can only aspire to detail as cleanly as you have thus far. Secondly I chose to respond to your calisthenics exercise about peanut butter, mostly because I was interested in the progression of that lion and his home canyon.
Kaptain Kalisthenics! Calisthenics for the first week--AND BEYOND
That said, I found things that I did like and things that I thought you could improve or change. The second half of the poem was the better half for me. I liked the line, "It slopes gently against the nose." Great use of the verb in relation to nose, as a nose itself seems to slope. Then the last two lines are a great use of the 'ladder of specificity.' I can identify with that scene, its 'filmable' as Dr. Davidson would say. I liked your word Earth-meat, very accurate and strange way to portray it. I feel like the word smells/smell/scent was overused and perhaps could have been left out altogether. In fact when I re-read it without those words, it still seems to work. The use of dashes was interesting and I may try to implement that technique in my own writing when I find the right way to use them. Perhaps a pointer or two is in order?
I appreciate your praise. It's always flattering to have someone envy something I do--on the rare occasion someone DOES actually envy something I do.
ReplyDeleteI believe that a reason I left the smell part at the beginning was actually because originally they were completely separate. As in, they were not supposed to form one body of text, so I had to say that the scent was like the description I gave. I suppose my fault was presenting them as an actual singular body, even binding it with a name. As it stands now, I completely agree with your suggestions--I should cut the first word off certainly.
As for the dashes, it's not too hard to learn placement. It also depends on if you often use semicolons. Mostly because depending on how you use them, sometimes dashes can replace semicolons. Otherwise, the rule is that they signal an aside. Any information that is relevant, but not necessarily part of the sentence. They work really well in speech because there are so many asides in actual speech. They can really make dialogue pop. Use dashes instead of parenthesis--people will read what's inside a box of dashes where they will ignore parenthesis.