Finding A Good Sentence

The first thing that we have been asked to do as a class is look for sentences. The assigned readings are out of a book recently published by Stanley Fish, How to Write A Sentence. The book begins by relating the reason for looking at and loving sentences as a writer. Sentences, says Fish (and Annie Dillard) are the paint used by writers. In order to be a writer one must first love sentences, in the same way painters must love paint.

Naturally, I completely agree. However, I want to focus on the advice that Fish gives at the end of the first chapter in which he explains that a study of good sentences requires the imitation of good sentences. This is the same I would argue for all art. Imitation is key to a practice of writing because it teaches you about form and style. This is the same advice given by Austin Kleon in his book Steal Like an Artist. 

"Once you get the hang of it -- " says Fish (pg 10), "zeroing in on a form that can then be filled with any number of contents -- you can do it forever."

I see this as fundamentally the work of poetry. Take a form, understand it, break it down and use it. Perhaps this is the way with all art, but I think that it is especially important to the crafting of poetry because you are working specifically with form.

Take a sonnet. Writing a sonnet has rules: It must have 14 lines (except when it doesn't), it must have a particular rhyme scheme (except when it doesn't), it must have a turn or volta somewhere in the middle (except when it doesn't), and it most often discusses love (except when it doesn't). If we take the sonnet form and zero  in on what those aspects mean, we poets can break it, use it, change it to being something different and new. In this way Fish seems to be saying, every sentence must be a poem.

The sentence that I collected for this week is:

"I thought myself as a city and I licked my lips." 

I absolutely love this line. It is an excellent reason to subscribe to the poem-a-day from the Academy of American Poets. I took it from the poem Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors, by Richard Siken.

I think I like it because it does something to the brain. It is more powerful still because of the rejoinder on the next line:

"I thought myself a nation and I wrung my hands"