Have Good Sentences in Your Ears
I have been thinking about this advice from poet Jane Kenyon:
Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.
Somewhere I have a clipping of this advice from, I think, the American Poetry Review from the ‘90s. It’s been in the background of my mind for years, especially this part: “Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears.”
I thought of this advice again recently when listening to a recent episode of the podcast Between the Covers, in which the host, David Naimon, interviews author Christina Sharpe about her latest book, Ordinary Notes. The book is in part “a love letter to Sharpe’s mother and how she cultivated and nourished, in the face of all the brutalities of our world, an atmosphere of Black life, Black art, and Black thought within their home,” to quote the episode notes. Listening to Naimon and Sharpe speak, I thought about “good sentences in your ears,” as the voices and sentences of both struck a chord in me that I had forgotten needed striking. Have you ever had that experience, when reading or listening to an intelligent person’s voice, of the balm of wisdom and careful speech? It’s the kind of speech that I sometimes think of as “helping organize the mind,” especially when it’s feeling especially disorganized. Such intelligent, compassionate language brings me back to myself and also awakens my mind to be more than itself, to meet another thinker where they are.
I was thinking about these ideas again this week when I once again picked up a book I very much appreciate, Borealis by Aisha Sabatini Sloan. Sloan’s extended essay in sections is a different, but equally important, example of getting good language in your head. This book helps me think through how much/how little we need to provide as essayists to draw the reader in and provide a sense of voice, of consciousness moving through the world. And, as the book proceeds, it helps me think through the intersection of inner, private concerns with larger social concerns and how we might work with those.
Good sentences to have in your head as a writer or poet are ones with interesting sounds and syntax, but also ones that provide a sense of what’s at stake, what is compelling for us individually and communally. They leave space for the reader or listener to meet the writer or speaker where they are. Good sentences are searching for something— some wisdom, some insight, some sense of what it means to move through the world in a specific time and place, with a specific body and mind.
Here’s an assignment for this weekend: Read and/or listen to some “good sentences.” Pay attention to your own body and mind moving through your world and begin to put sentences to that. What are some of the details of your world, your life? How can you begin to share those in thoughtful, deliberate ways that also leave room for a reader or listener to meet you there and consider something new?
News
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Memoir in Collage, taught by Megan Baxter
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