Sentence

You can look at it two ways.  1) an arrangement of words; 2) punishment for a crime. 

I was collaborating with my friends Lena and Naomi on a zine, the Crane Project.  A collection of poems, stories, etchings and photographs of industrial cranes.  High in the sky.  I’d started a story for the zine but despairing at it’s inadequacies I dropped it.  But there was one sentence, so simple and complete that we published it on the first page of our zine.  I lift things up, and I put them down. 

Flipping through a notebook several months later sifting through all the fragments, observations, doodles, dictionary definitions, abandoned poems, ideas for stories and quotes from books I had read.  I looked at the poems.  They weren’t good, they weren’t bad either, so I started lifting out sentences that stood out, gathering them together on a new page.

I opened my phone, diving into the iCloud to read more.  As I opened each one a sentence sung out, an arrangement of words that worked, that supported the shaky structures they were trapped in.  A poem that could be so much better but offered one tiny flower. 

The first sentence I rescued was, the way the world looks when you are warm inside.

I had rules.  1) they had to stand as a whole sentence, though many are unframed by punctuation.  I’ve always regarded punctuation as a stunt.  The sense, the flow, should be dictated by the arrangement of words, not by fussy little rule bound roadblocks.  2) no more than one sentence per poem. 3) and not least, the poems had to be unpublished which was easy enough.  Poems that were condemned by a jury of editors, crimes against the publications they guarded. 

The sentences are arranged here on my website, screen captured as PNG files.  The sentences work as mash-up and as images in themselves.  A new collection.