Enjambment
One of the interesting and rewarding things about putting a book into the world is to witness the myriad and often unexpected ways people engage with it. For example, Jelani Greenidge wonders about the spiritual issues the book, in his opinion, raises — and of course even the Vatican’s Pontifical Council has weighed in on the problems of driver savagery.
Michael Giberson, meanwhile, delightfully salvages a moment of poetry of which I was not even aware.
He writes:
I found a sentence (p. 126) to read nicely as a bit of traffic poetry (I’ve broken the prose sentence into three lines, in the manner of most poetry):
Or the hiccup in heavy traffic that passes through you
might be the echo of someone who, forward in space
and backward in time, did something as simple as change lanes.
He then elaborates:
I particularly like the way the meter has a sort of pulsing flow through the lines until you reach the last two words, which to my ear must both be stressed. A spondee, in poetic terms, that brings the flow of the sentence to a halt, while echoing the “hiccup” at the beginning of the first line.
You might also note the manner in which the syntactic unit “forward in space and backward in time” is broken over two lines, a poetic device called enjambment, which seems appropriate for this found poem about a hiccup in heavy traffic.
![[del.icio.us]](http://www.howwedrive.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://www.howwedrive.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://www.howwedrive.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Google]](http://www.howwedrive.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[MySpace]](http://www.howwedrive.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/myspace.png)
![[Slashdot]](http://www.howwedrive.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/slashdot.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.howwedrive.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Yahoo!]](http://www.howwedrive.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.png)
This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 9:15 am and is filed under Book News, Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
| 
February 6th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Re: “a moment of poetry of which I was not even aware”?
Wow, I had imagined that you labored over the sentence until it sounded just right.
Ah, well, maybe one day I will learn how to write so effortlessly.