On
Writing (Sentences)
Kate
Schapira
What
does a sentence do?
How
does a sentence sound?
I’m
a poet whose job, at the moment, is to teach people how to write sentences. Not
just sentences, but in prose writing
the sentence is the first unit of making and order, the place where materials
begin to become a structure, or a garment, or a fire, or a road, or a river.
In class, my
first comparison is often to a machine. What drives the sentence? I ask my
students. What moves, and what is moved? What has a bearing on the way it
moves? Which parts move which other parts? Later we’ll talk about which parts
are necessary, and which could be removed. We’ll talk about precision: what job is each part doing, and could
another part—another word or phrase—do it better? We’ll use adjectives like swift, efficient, powerful, smooth, and
nouns like impact and goal.
We do this most in the academic essay class, where students are learning
to argue. Sometimes we act like they’re making an indestructible machine for
imposing their will on someone else. A good sentence, in this reading, is a
winning sentence, and a bad sentence is a losing sentence.
At home, I try
to make some words do what I want. Then I try to let the words do what they
want. Both feel strange, maybe because only one of us can “want” anything. But
words do demonstrably have both their own meanings—resonances, echoes,
histories, possibilities and waveforms proper to each—and the meanings they
generate in their interactions with each other, the buzzing and yearning set up
as their forms overlap, pushing and pulling on one another.
Where does a
sentence lead?
How
does a sentence sail?
I’m
a poet who’s trying to teach herself how to write sentences. The more I read,
the more I write, the more I feel what makes a sentence is its motion.
I read Virginia Woolf and try to write
myself into the long game of her grammar, the long flexible phrases and high
spires and occasional shortcuts. I read Gertrude Stein and ask: how is this a
sentence? (Make it a real question, I say to my students.) I read Bhanu Kapil
to feel for a sentence’s stress points, remembering a talk she gave on
fragments and dismemberment. I read June Jordan and search my syntax for
accountability and presence, and the different kinds of power that different
kinds of sentences can have, or give. I
hesitate, my hand hovers: how can I know what kind of sentence anyone else
needs but me?
Is
a sentence that meanders a weak road?
Is
a sentence that throws lots of sparks inefficient?
I’m
a poet, and it’s tempting to say that a good line of poetry is a bad
sentence—does something a sentence would never dare to do, or is free from the
rules that a sentence must follow. In fact, most of the poems I love best have
in them at least some sentence sense, the power to carry me to a different
place in mind. By reading, I offer them that power; by writing, I exert it. If
it matters how I use that power, I can try to use it generously, well, in service
of illumination. But if it only matters that I have it, how can I then create a
sentence—a line, a structure—that gives it, that shares it, that opens it out?
Questions
can also be sentences.
Structures can
also hold openings open.
Kate Schapira is the author of four books of
poetry, most recently The Soft Place (Horse Less Press). Her eighth chapbook, The Ground / The Pass / The Wave, came
out last summer with Grey Book Press, and her newest, OVERHEARD WHILE HIDING FROM THE SUN, was recently published by above/ground press. She lives in Providence, RI, where she
writes, teaches, and co-runs the Publicly Complex Reading Series.
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