My young friend, Randy St. Clair, writes an interesting blog called East Acre and Beyond. Not long ago, he posted a lovely poem titled Through Doors and Into Places The poem is about managing and toying with memories. I very much like the phrase “through doors and into places,” and wish that I had written that line myself. Such lines in abstract terms hang above me like boulders I am free to dislodge and send tumbling through my own memories and thoughts kicking up images from my own life. You see, I have been through doors and I have been into places. So have you.
I enjoy a good mix between the abstract (without specific detail) and the concrete (with subjects certain) in writing. I consider abstract lines sort of like conveyer belts in terms of writing. They either allow the reader to load something on them from their own mind as they read, or they can be used by the writer to feed into more concrete images that then smash onto the reader as if concrete blocks dropped from above. As example I might write this: “I have followed love and lost my way.” This is entirely abstract in terms of composition, having no definite subject or image, but the reader will certainly affix something of their own to this. In a sense, I have set them up to drop a concrete block on them. So, here is how I would use the abstract and the concrete together:
I have followed love and lost my way. I have taken the hand of a woman in a red dress and leapt from the sea-cliff. We have lighted the tilted lanterns only to part in the gray silence of a stilted dusk. Our reflections met at the mirror and there we dissolved.
In the above paragraph I also used another favorite device of my own—to use three images for the same intent—to repeatedly strike, as if with a hammer. Regarding my own memories, I Sometimes I beat my memory senseless in the same way.
So there it is (abstract).
Go read Randy (concrete).
--Mitchell Hegman
No comments:
Post a Comment