Oh, it's not so bad after the first few days. Sometimes I shrink my stomach down by doing this when I don't have a lot of money. The amount of food we eat vs. what we need are startlingly different. I enjoy food immensely, but I also like to exert a certain amount of control over certain things in my life. I know you said that these lines were not exact: I've never thought about writing about myself as a peripheral character. I think part of it is that I don't know how I appear to other people, or at least I haven't thought about it much except in the context of their immediate reactions to me in a social situation. That could be something to explore though. As for your edit, 1=I, no? :)I love food so much I think I'd have a LOT of difficulty only eating once a day
but why break the line, "you know you're meant/"? It seems to me that you could get more play out of: You never do end up with the girl
you know you're meant
to end up with, so you find someone
sort of similar, less
convicted hair...
I don't know, that break just seemed a bit awkward to me, but maybe it works better in the context of the full poem. You never do end up with the girl
you know you're meant to end
up with, so you find someone
sort of similar, less
convicted hair . . .
Re: the edit, mais bien sur, humano. I'll dig up a copy of the poem and send it to you privately, or alternatively, I could send you a link to me reading it on Soundcloud (maybe both). I have problems with line breaks. I am thinking about them. I wish I could find more to read about them. My guru was telling me there's an article out there about the different ways and uses of line breaks but I've been unable to find it. I think it would help me. Half the time when I write about myself as a peripheral character it's because I'm commenting on or critiquing my own actions. I have a tendency to break things out in the 3rd character in conversation, too, which is why I feel like it's just a twerk of my communication style: I'll be talking to a friend, say something, and then throw out what I think their reaction is in the third person. Hard to explain. Example: Friend Brian: blah blah blah Me: I like ducks, they're so dumb looking. [pause] Brian's like "You're so weird, Emily." Brian: [opportunity to either disagree or agree with what I think his reaction is] Really works best in person, don't think it translates well on the page here.
I do that too, especially when someone is on their phone for no reason. That drives me nuts. Yeah, send me stuff. I made a soundcloud recently, but I haven't played with it much. On the list of things to do. I have not seen the article you speak of. I think. I left a bunch of books when I moved last time and of course they were the boring ones on shit like poetics. Line breaks are something that are very important for me, especially because of my own style of writing where I generally don't like leaving just the one meaning, but rather layers of exploded images. Anyway, you're familiar with poetry forms, and in those the line breaks are generally dictated by the form. For free verse, lines are of course, broken in many ways. You can break by breath, to create sub-images or supplementary images, whatever but there are ways of breaking lines that weaken rather than strengthen. This doesn't mean that you have to break lines so that they can all stand alone. Some poems do that, but more often than not it comes across as a bit weird and for me, usually it feels forced and artless. Anyway, my general goal with linebreaks is to create tension and to get the most meaning I can out of the sum of my lines. For this reason, I sometimes write my first draft as a blob and then break it, or else write the first draft, then squish it into a blob and re-break everything. To show you what I mean, I'll use a little poem I shared already. The lines, when unbroken amount to nothing special: A relationship is as simple as locking eyes with someone across a crowded room. That beautiful someone you imagine the rest of your life with for the rest of the day. But, by breaking it, we get different tensions and meanings:I'll be talking to a friend, say something, and then throw out what I think their reaction is in the third person.
Or A relationship is as simple as locking
eyes with someone across a crowded room.
That beautiful someone you imagine
the rest of your life with
for the rest of the day
Both of those are a bit heavy handed and graceless though, in my opinion. In the first one, the tension isn't well managed and therefore is inconsistent feeling. The second one is more consistent, but it feels like being strangled and the first line (among others) end weakly. Instead, I went with: A relationship is
as simple as locking
eyes with someone
across a crowded
room. That beautiful someone
you imagine
the rest of your life
with for the rest of the day
This way, it feels controlled but not controlling. The first line is long enough that I feel like it gives the opportunity to reflect. "*Is* locking eyes with someone 'easy'?" Then, there's the physical space between the idea of locking eyes with someone and the crowded room. Then next line gives more room for thought on one meaning and then the next line modifies it. All that said, playing with line breaks has made me really really picky about them. A relationship is as simple as locking eyes with someone
across a crowded room. That beautiful someone
you imagine the rest of your life with
for the rest of the day.
I know my line breaks are...well, "distinctive." They have been known to bother people. When they work, they really work. But for me the way I break the lines is often the only way TO break the lines. So I try and consider them part of my "style" and in the meantime try to learn more and experiment with them. Edit: I know I have a tendency to write lines that drive up towards a tension and then break before the tension - the subject, perhaps? - resolves. I think that's what people don't like.
That's how I would do - just playing - much more to respond to in your post, of course, but not right now. A relationship
is as simple as locking
eyes with someone across
a crowded room. That beautiful
someone you imagine the rest
of your life with
for the rest of the day.
I would go further and edit (this is just me playing. when i go and edit something it's about me putting it in my personal style, I'm not saying I think it would necessarily be better this way - just wanted to see how I'd warp this to my own voice) to this:
It is NOT the same as what you posted though. A relationship locks
eyes across a crowded room.
Some beautiful someone,
the rest of your lives
imagined for the rest
of the day.
That's interesting. This construction forces "your" to refer to "A relationship" and "Some beautiful someone", eradicating the implicit "I" of the poem. Also, there is no real "who" to whom the eyes in "eyes across a crowded room" belong to, which forces it to also be a verb in the context of the singular line. See? Line breaks are wicked important!