Ruby Street

Writing comes from the body, out of the senses and rhythms of the body. The interstitial and the uncertainty in immanence is part of that process. Sense data arrives on moments. Bodily syntax isn’t smooth. The body has its digressions that the thinking body theorises. Memory is made up of fragment and trace. A heart has its arrhythmias. As do words, so hard consonants disrupt mellifluous vowels. Thus, a rhythm. For instance, whenever my writing starts en plein air, so to speak, I am not just employing an observational mode. And when I make poems with a broken or collaged narrative, that can emerge from acts of walking, changing trains, changing travel modes, the coming and going of bodies, voices, weathers. It is a continuing exploration of language and location. Fracture and discontinuity are real experiences of energy and movement. Poems are made with the materials of this world, its languages, its scratchings and surfaces, its keys and screens, as well as the poet’s body and lif...

Just a few ideas, well questions really, about energy or movement in a poem. Certainly that can be directed through syntactical choices - paratactic, discontinuous, or hypotactic, continuous. It may be how tense is used. Can simple present tense lead to a kind of flattening of the poem’s energy? Possibly, though I presume that may well be mitigated by other factors, including syntax. What place is there for speculation in the poem via tense (subjunctive?), or mood (not grammatical mood so much as atmospherics), or aspect? There is also the force of the prepositional, the way prepositions place and direct. Does the poem rely more on monosyllabic (or close to) words or prefer the polysyllabic and depending on which, how the stresses then operate. Do polysyllabics clutter, or do monosyllabics become boring rhythmically? Again, other factors, such as syntax, enjambment, stanza will change these effects. Then there is the way the poem might move between the cont...