Sound and silence are important. On page 24, Mary Oliver makes a great comparison of 2 nouns, synonyms, with different sounds: stone and rock. She can see the smooth roundness of "stone." She can see the jagged edges of "rock."
Poets of every level: Can you think of other examples of nouns that have similar meaning but contain different sounds?
During a Triangle Sisters in Crime Zoom call, I asked a question about Thriller/Mystery/Horror novels using deus ex machina, god out of the machine: an ending that isn't prepared for by the author(s).
2054, a thriller I read over the past few days, seems to demonstrate my point. The novel begins with the President of the United States dying from remote manipulation of his DNA. During the autopsy, the surgeon finds the President's heart has been altered remotely.
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Raymond Kurzweil and his Singularity, the combination of biology and technology are referenced.
Update: p 253 Sarah Hunt achieved Kurzweil's Singularity. She put obstacles in the way to prevent any scientist achieving a second advent of the Singularity. Explains the alteration of the previous president's heart. [However, at the end of the novel, it seems that . . . well, the Kurzweil premise doesn't exist! Seems like deus ex machina!. I looked at the Amazon reviews: no reader seemed to pick up on it. I need to look at Goodreads reviews next.]
Stanza 2
The golden eagle, for instance,
has a heaviness in him
moreover the huge barns
seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off
toward the deeper grass.
What does the poet gain from using "for instance" and "moreover?"
1. the 2 are more appropriate in prose. In many ways, Ghosts is a prose poem. In addition, the 2 are denotative language, which ground the reader in prose. The 2 prepare the reader for the later beautiful metaphors.
2. the two set off the assonance of the "seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off."
Stanza 7
What does the poet achieve by using "of, in, to"?
Throughout the poem the poet's achievement is settled in the brilliant use of language and image. She writes of the extinction of buffalo, bawling beasts, yellow-eyed wolves. A lesser poet would have started by naming the animals. Oliver refrains, in several sense of the word. The front rhyme of "of, in, to," is abc, bbc, ba.
Many thanks to Triangle Sisters in Crime, guest speaker Jaden Terrell for mentioning this first novel by Walter Mosley. A master class in good writing. Great irony. Great vignette. In Chapter 1, the metaphor "a Black man with ten children and one on the way" becomes a vignette toward the novel's end. Great fix for the sagging middle. Great, economic style that is the small letter "c" continuity of thought that presages the mouse and Mouse of the novel. Evocative word choice in Chapter 4: bankbook. How long has it been since you've seen that term? Well done.
Mosley writes a first person narrative from an unflinching culturally accurate ethnic perspective. For several years, I had on a book shelf former president Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father and his highly praised account of his early years, another unflinching culturally accurate ethnic perspective. My drafts are much improved for reading these two great authors one after the other. What I really want to say: I first heard his name on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh, NC. What Teevee and mass media presented to me was how Caucasian he comes across on a Teevee screen and in mass media. Dreams adds the puzzle pieces of Black family and Black culture, and after reading I can see why racist, bigoted folk get their teeth set on edge. Effective writing: he saves the chronological story of his grandfather and father until the last chapter; the final paragraphs are a tour de force.
I'm looking forward to reading The Audacity of Hope.
From the incomparable English writer Mary Stewart, who passed away in 2014, the opening of The Moonspinners, available where you buy your novels or ebooks.
From The Writer's Digest Handbook of Short Story Writing: Preface by Joyce Carol Oates. "How will [my students] know they are writing their true subjects? By the ease with which they write. By their reluctance to stop writing. By the headachy, even guilty, joyous sensation of having done something that must be done, having confessed emotions thought of as unconfessable, having said what had seemed should remain unsaid."
