Subjectify the object.” Concretize abstractions and intellectual- ize the tangible.
Between object and subject, between image and point lie thousands of elements. This we found out during those exhaus- tive writing workshops. So many factors. Diction, the selection of words and both their literal and auditory reverberations, and—my personal favorite—the element of tension, which is the balance between, nay, the tug-and-release of, words and sentences of either “discursive” and “metaphorical,” which is probably the single most difficult lesson to master because of But the killer part was when you finally began dissecting a poem to reveal its structural details and mechanisms. That was like the parting of the Red Sea. the demands of music on both the physical and intellectual levels. And by music, you just did not simply mean the basic element of rhyme, but also the recognition of each sentence, each word, each syllable and even the spaces in between, as individual musical notes, the skillful assemblage of which constitutes a significant degree of a poem’s power. It is know- ing when to deploy Germanic or Latinate registers (i.e., “hug” vs. “embrace”), knowing when to pull back and when to let go, when to sustain and when to cut, when to whisper and when to scream. Taste is all.
Six years under your employ as junior associate at the UST Center for Creative Writing and Studies were for me one long
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