Cyril Darkcloud

[Salinye]

...movement to me?

 

Now that I'm back I'm really focusing on the feedback I got in the writers workshop for my poem, Vanity. You mentioned something that I wish to know more about. At the risk of sounding ignorant, could you please explain what 'movement' in poetry is? I'm not sure I quite grasp the meaning, but I really want to learn!

 

I could have put this in the writers workshop, but I thought perhaps others might like to learn from the explanation as well. :0)

 

Thanks a million! I appreciate your insightful and educated feedback.

 

~Salinye

Edited July 11, 2003 by Salinye

[Cyril Darkcloud]

ooc: Little did I realize when I first promised Salinye an answer to this post that life would keep me away from the Pen for so many months.

 

ic: Deep it has fallen, so far that even the most persistent echo of its words produces no trace of motion within the air about the balcony of the Cabaret Room. Deep it has fallen, tumbling from sight and attentiveness somewhere far below the cliff faces on this side of the Keep. He sits upon the windswept parapet which he has claimed as his quarters here and places the white bow across his knees. Holding the bow he looks outward sending his sight along the shifting currents of air until he marks the location of the long unanswered post. Seeing the post, he rises and, placing the bow once more upon his back, steps off the parapet and into the wind. “To live is to move,” he says quietly as the wind bears him to the stone ledge onto which the post had fallen, “and nothing moves with the freedom of wind.” Stepping onto the ledge, he removes the glove from his hand and grasps the handle of the Stormreaver. He laughs softly as he does so at the thought that a character such as he, a storm-tossed man exiled to wander fierce and forgotten landscapes, should function on a board such as this as a vehicle of literary feedback. His fingers tighten around the handle of the axe and the air near the ledge shifts in its movement. His eyes narrow and he speaks quietly in the dialect of his people and with a gusting burst the winds carry the too-long-unanswered post up to the level of the Cabaret Room balcony along with the silent stormwalker. Stepping onto the balcony he speaks in the common tongue of this place so far from the sky, his accent more pronounced than usual after having spoken in the cadences of his distant home, “My apologies for not having answered this sooner, Salinye. A non-roleplayed response is being put together.” He turns, then, and steps off the ledge seeking out the winds of the Writers’ Workshop where Salinye’s original piece is located. He is a curiously defiant character, however, a character insistent upon having his own say in the telling of his tales and so he speaks with a quiet insistence to the one who writes the words of his tale, “I have done my part. Make sure you get that answer composed.”

 

ooc: As I’ll need a day or two to revisit the Writers’ Workshop and spend some time with the piece and its revisions, I figured I’d bump this question up to give others a bit of encouragement to read what is a fine and promising piece of writing by Salinye. Her work on her poem Vanity can be found here.

Edited December 3, 2003 by Cyril Darkcloud

[Salinye]

Salinye pauses midsentence as the curtains of her study are rustled by a gentle breeze. As the winds carress her face and dance in her hair they deliver a message bringing a smile to her face. "Ahh, Cyril is back. How fortunate for us all." Leaving that thought verbalized within the wind she turns her energies back to her research.

 

(Nice to have you back, Cyril! Thanks for the kind rp response!)

 

~Salinye

[Cyril Darkcloud]

I am likely to need a couple posts to attempt an answer to question, Salinye, so let me begin by posting a few generalized remarks:

 

As I generally make use of the notion of ‘movement’ when speaking about the experience of reading a particular work, it might be wise to take a moment to reflect a bit upon the act and process of reading itself, especially in terms of how it relates to the ideas of ‘time’ and ‘text.’

 

1. To really grow as a writer, I strongly believe, is not possible unless one is willing also grow as a reader. This is in no small measure due to the simple fact that the process of revising and editing a given piece of writing necessarily involves reading it, thus the stronger one’s ability to read critically the stronger one’s critical ability with his or her own work. Skill in reading is often the most overlooked tool in the process of learning to write well.

 

2. Reading is act that takes place, one might say unfolds, in time. This is so obvious that it seems silly to point it out, and yet it is very important. One never engages any text all at once – there is always a before and after about reading. Even the act of reading a single sentence involves the movement, in time, of the reader’s attention from one word to the next. Precisely because one does not have the entire text at once, reading tends to involve the reader anticipating what is to follow based upon what he or she has already read and strong pieces of writing make powerful use of the act of confirming or defeating the expectations of the reader as the story moves forward. [Note the sheer number of motion verbs I need to employ simply to describe this.] What is first read shapes and anticipates the reading of what follows later in the text, and what is read later in the text clarifies, recasts and provides the decisive meaning of what has already been read.

 

3. Movement is a part of reading. Physically eyes move along a page [or computer screen as the case may be ]. One moves to acquire the text that will be read, whether by walking across a room to pick up a book or by scrolling down a list of forum threads and clicking on a link. Internally, the reader also moves in the act of reading along the unfolding of the words of the text, and the particular ways in which those words might unfold can give rise to very different experiences within a given reader. A common and simple example of this is the sense of whether or not a piece ‘flows well’ – again, note the sense of motion implied in that description. The words on the page are themselves static, but there is an experience of movement about the act of reading them.

 

4. One of the effects of this is that some theorists, for example, Wolfgang Iser, will state that a text by itself is not a literary work. Rather a literary work is ‘brought into being’ when someone actively engages in reading a text. Those works in which the interplay between text and reader is particularly powerful are what are eventually recognized as classics. An entire school of literary criticism has come out this insight and is known as Reader-Response Criticism in which the experience of reading, understood as one’s responsiveness to the movements produced in the act of reading, becomes the starting point for interpretation.

 

I’ve made some oversimplifications here, but, hopefully, this is a helpful start. If time permits I’ll try and have another post up either tomorrow or Saturday night to follow up on this in terms of the notion of movement ‘within’ a piece of writing.

[Cyril Darkcloud]

Talking about movement ‘within’ a piece of writing is a curious thing as, quite obviously, a written text is static in the fixity of its words relative to one another and relative to the page. It remains, however, an important idea and perhaps a consideration of a few of the structural features of composition might allow us a bit of insight into this.

 

1. Visual Movement - Often the simple arrangement of words generates movement not only in the eyes which read them, but also in terms of their ability to narrow or broaden the focus of the ideas they convey. The use of spaces between lines or the use of long and short lines in verse has long been a used by poets, and an excellent example of such technique here at the Pen is the poem Words by Vlad who has been especially active at exploring this aspect of writing.

 

Vlad’s poem can be found here and my comments upon it are in the Critics’ Corner, here.

 

2. The Arc of a Story – It is something of a commonplace, especially among those who write extended, multi-part stories, to speak of plotting out a ‘story arc’, essentially an outline of the movements of a narrative over a given period of time, episodes or pages. The implied image here is that of the trajectory of a projectile – an arc of motion from one point to another. While very few narratives can be described as moving in the shape of an arc – they generally have too many ‘high’ and ‘low’ points for such a simple characterization – the idea is helpful as it serves to highlight the unfolding of a definite sequence of events over time so that the end can only reached and understood my moving forward from a certain beginning. Movement from beginning to end imparts a certain ‘forwardness’ to a text and this directionality shapes the narrative.

 

3. Emotional Movement – While this might seem to be merely something that takes place within the reader, that is not entirely true, as a well told story or a well written poem will tend to be written in such a way as to produce emotional responses – the highs and lows of a story, or the steady building of emotional intensity from word to word in a poem, for example. This can be done by the intense clustering of plot elements in a story or the relentless exploration and sharpening of emotional language in verse. The use of forceful and strong words, for example, will tend to heighten the emotional intensity of a piece whereas the choice of weak and overly general expressions tends to diminish emotional intensity.

 

4. Flow of Ideas – Narrative plots are not the only things that have a forward movement about them, arguments and expositions do as well as one idea prepares the way for the next and the arrangement of ideas relative to one another can give rise to a ‘smooth’ or ‘rough’ aspect to a text. For example, ideas that are strung together in a disjointed way or without clear transitions grant a disconnected quality to a bit of writing making it either unreadable [in the worst cases] or something akin to a series of stepping stones in a stream – one gets to the destination only by carefully placing his feet onto each stone one at a time. Pieces with tightly connected ideas and clear transitions between thoughts and units often have a sort of ‘seamlessness’ about them – one does not notice the structure much like one does not notice the feel of smooth road when riding along it.

 

5. Perspective and Place – Every piece of writing, including the most technical, is written from a perspective – be it an ideally objective observer, a position of authority or that of a an involved and invested narrator. When the perspective is constant and low-key throughout the piece, as in most technical writing, one does not tend to notice it. Often, however, a piece of writing will contain a variety of perspectives within it as, for example, when the author tales a story from the perspectives of various characters or allows the reader to ‘see’ through the eyes and ‘feel’ the feelings of diverse characters within the narrative. Your piece, Vanity makes great use of this in the way its scenes are presented – there is the public eye immediately around the model and the private view of the girls in their rooms and the reader is shifted between these locations through the movement from one set of eyes and feelings to the other. Narratologists call such a technique ‘focalization’ – that is focusing a scene through a specific set of eyes or ears or through a specific character’s voice. Related to this, is the use of ‘scene changes’ and changes of place or setting that one often finds in a longer work which helps to create the sense of movement within a world which makes many stories so powerful and immersive.

 

6. Pace – We will often describe a work as ‘moving’ quickly or slowly. This can pften be the result of the writer’s decision to rapidly move from event to event in a story or to ‘slow things down’ by dwelling on certain descriptive elements. In poetry, meter – the combination of accented and unaccented syllables – can also produce these effects. Stressed syllables, especially when clustered together, will tend to slow a piece down – thus these are often used at points of emphasis and impact within a piece – and unstressed syllables, especially when grouped together will often speed the pace of a piece. My own writing, at least poetically, tends to make use of shifts in meter, often in ways that will mirror the cadences of my speaking voice.

 

Again – quite a bit of oversimplification was necessary here. Still, I hope this has been helpful.