I have an addiction
to reading fiction…
I spent a large chunk of the weekend reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. How large? Think about how thick that book is.
Along about page 650, I was having a really hard time putting it down, and I started getting testy.
"No, I need to read it now! I have to find out what happens."
Now I am reading Girls in Pants, the Third Summer of the Sisterhood—another novel, another kids' book. (When I was a kid, I plunged into summer reading. Now, as a parent, I seem to be reading the bidding of my kids. My mandatory list...)
But after my long poetry-only reading period, I was a bit startled at how a good narrative, a fast-moving plot, could wrap me around its dramatic little finger.
Can poetry be a page turner? Or should it even be?*****Without any plot worthy of Machiavelli or the Medicis, I've updated the sofa with some poems inspired by visits to Italy and France.
Yesterday I rode my bike across the I-90 bridge to work and back. With a minor detour (missed a turn), it was a 34-mile round trip. That was a physical arc—and this morning I'm really on the downhill side.
Today I'm going to do a reduced bike commute and ride most of the way on the bus, which means I get to read. Novel or poems or Poets & Writers? Although I love the poems, I lean toward the novel—and why is that? Again I ask whether I should try writing fiction again?
Instead, I'm working on these Camargue poems, which are really like little interlinked character studies. It's another series in which I'm not sure the poems, and their characters, will be able to stand alone. But I realize that it's my own way of writing stories.
I fail at writing fiction because I'm missing the plot genes. I'm convinced: It's a DNA issue. But I'm thinking that maybe in these little poetry links I can replace a plot with an emotional arc—a concept that Lana Hechtman Ayers recently introduced me to. She's good at seeing the emotional arcs. I'm not, so that's another thing to work on.
When you're pulling together a collection of poems, or when you're working on a series of poems, do you look for an emotional arc?
