Last login: 4 months agoCheryl is a married woman from Maryland, USA.
I am a writer, author of four poetry collections: FLOWER HALF BLOWN (Finishing Line Press), EPITHALAMION (Little Poem Press) SAMSARA (Pudding House Publications), MULTIVERSE(GOSS 182),and PRISONER'S DILEMMA(Lopside Press).My novel, SHIVA'S ARMS is available from The Writer's Lair Books. I keep an author's blog at http://shivasarms.blogspot.com, and an art and poetry blog at http://snellsisters.blogspot.com.
Pico Iyer once said something resonant about the value of being an outsider, and how an unfamiliar culture, in this case Japan, transformed his writing. He said that Japan's "genius for silence and for thinking about others, its habit of self-erasure" caused his sentences to grow " shorter and shorter, and more and more empty, till they looked a bit like that room where I'd slept in the temple. My pages became so quiet you had to lean in to hear them, and, as with any good Japanese, completely unstriking, and neutral on the surface...Image had taken the place of idea."
This is one of my favorite words, although I've only used it twice in my poetry, once in a baseball poem and one about lurve.
Wiki says--In poetry, syzygy is the combination of two metrical feet into a single unit, similar to an elision. Consonantal or phonetic syzygy is also similar to the effect of alliteration, where one consonant is used repeatedly throughout a passage, but not necessarily at the beginning of each word.
Mathematician James Joseph Sylvester (1814-1897) employed "the apt juncture of syllables" in his poetry, a serious avocation and the subject of an article in the current Bulletin of the AMS. The author speculates "about which of the nine muses would most likely have been given the assignment of overseeing [Sylvester's] monochromatic verse.. "'The deaf one,'" some wag volunteered.
like lists. Like Jhumpa Lahiri in The Namesake, right?
This afternoon, as I sipped a mango lassi (blend ice, plain yogurt and mango slices; add sugar to taste) I thought about how much ink has been spilled on the importance of first lines in a novel. There must be a list for that, I thought--and several appeared at a quick click.
From the haunting (Rebecca), to the stately (Anna Karenina), to the breezy (Howards End) to the detached (Jane Eyre), first lines "are more or less context free, whereas final lines carry the contextual burden of the entire novel and, for maximum effectiveness, often need several sentences to do their work." says Charlie Harris.
So where's the list for last lines? American Book Review promises to publish a list of best last lines next year. Lance Olson, on his blog, observes that "last lines often carry what I think of as a sort of rhythmic burden, a sort of aural crescendo that depends on the lines just before them to establish the right rise and fall, or rise and rise and rise, or ironic brake or trap door."Endings are loaded, and contain the whole story in a few words.
Here are a few examples.
"The others listened with interest, their naked genitals staring dully, sadly, listlessly at the yellow sand. --Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
"Tomorrow." Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things.
"He planned to call it 'The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger Delta.'" Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart.
Of course, sometimes an ending loses the reader. Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters ends with an image--well, I don't want to go there.
For my own first novel, I called on an image I had used as a symbol and refrain throughout. When a reader said, "I just finished the book, and I'm sitting here crying," I was at least as moved as she.
Sometimes my husband reads to me from the Bhagavad Gita. The translation we use is by Juan Mascaro, who conveys the textual meaning with clarity and poetry. The fact that he translates from and to languages not his own is a unique feat, I think.
This verse is among my favorites: " A leaf, a flower, a fruit, some water, whoever dedicates it with love, I accept with the devotion of his soul." Andre Weil wrote about it during his time in the slammer. In a letter to his wife he said, "If I get started on this topic, I won't finish for a year--but I can hardly amuse you by describing the walls of my cell, which are the only landscape before me now...all I have to offer Krishna is water, or now and then an orange or banana that they give me for desert; sometimes, these last few days, a young leaf, all crinkled up still, that the wind has blown onto the walk--but no flowers." (from The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician-Autobiography of Andre Weil, translated by Jennifer Gage Birkhauser.
About the Gita, Mascaro has said, "The Bhagavad Gita is a book of Light and Love, but it is above all a book of Life ... Karma is work and work is Life."
For your downtime pleasure: excerpts from "Quote Poet Unquote" by Dennis O'Driscoll, as found on the PaperCuts blog.
"I like reading poetry at night -- a doctor I know claims that this is because `poetry is the only thing you can read when you're drunk.'"
-- John Lanchester
"My self-esteem is so low that getting the Pulitzer Prize just made me break even."
-- Franz Wright
"There's nothing like a punch in the mouth to remind you that that poem about your next-door neighbor was not as clever as you thought."
-- Simon Armitage
"The poem that says `I love you' is the little black cocktail dress, the classic thing that everyone would like to have written one of."
-- James Fenton
"I started a PhD in English at the University of Chicago because I loved poetry-which I now realize is like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs."
-Michael Donaghy, Verse
I'm looking out my office window, trying to write answers to an email interview, but mostly I'm watching a low-slung fox hunt a squirrel. The fox makes me think of a coat I once had, its plush, silky collar. That, in turn, reminds me of my mother, sitting in the Chinese chair, swaddled in the old mink stole she uses as a sweater.
I'm not concentrating. I put myself in my readers' shoes:
Would the reader like to know that when I had the idea to write Shiva's Arms I did not think ahead to how I would have to immerse myself in the culture that had rejected me as an unsuitable bride? Would the reader smile, knowing that it dawned on me days later that I would have to break barriers of time and distance, break down and mend fences, and leave myself vulnerable to the very people I was trying to avoid? Would the reader like to know how I squared my shoulders and took the bull by the horns, and yes, wrote the letters, made the calls, parsed the accents?
The reader might like to know that in order to get close enough to convince readers, I had to do research. Would the reader want to know how many books I read, South Indian recipes I tried, how often I spoke to immigrants "this side"? Would the reader like to know that what I did not include in this book would fill another?
The reader might be interested that the family scandal I manufactured was almost true. Would the reader like to hear about the negotiations for using that information? Fiction should afford privacy, but in a culture convinced that everyone is looking, that was an unreliable concept. The reader might be surprised as I was when the chorus went from "Don't tell that story!" to "This is the way it really happened." The reader might like to know that what I did not include in the first book will fill another.
Katru vanga ponen oru kavithai vangi vandhen!
(I went out for air and came back with a poem)
Koyakkatai
She spoons jaggery and coconut
on rounds of rice-and-dal dough,
brings the edges up and crimps them
into drawstring purses. She sets each
dumpling in hot water, and the steam
fogs her features. She becomes young
again, wearing the yellow sari.
All night, I dreamed of koyakkatai.
She pinches my cheek as if it's another kind
of pastry, and I can see her as she was: sandals
flapping all the way to temple, her offering
of one hundred and one sweets in her arms,
her children clamoring for their share, galled
to think she would give away their bounty.
I like them
Mar 3, 3:58pm
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