A bit more about fragments

I've been having a wonderful time exploring this approach on another poem—and I've remembered a couple more things:

1.

white

space is

important

The white space emphasizes (or creates?) the more fractured experience, but it also allows the reader to make his or her own leaps from word to word, line to line, stanza to stanza. That happens in any poem, but with a lot of white space, the reader has more time, more room. Or that's my theory.

2.

One lusciously ethereal example that helped inform our work in Sarah Vap's class was Anne Carson's translations of Sappho. Because so much of Sappho's work was lost, it has become fragmented, and so it leaves the reader openings.

I confess that I sometimes I have trouble reading some of the more broken-up poems. I'm a narrative woman at heart, and I want it all to make sense. Buttoned-up and tied with a bow.

But I'm trying to let go of things, and maybe my old ideas about sense can loosen up a little. In the meantime, it's fun.