Then there are rhythm writers; you should know this

(This article is Part-7 in a series; for Part-8, go here; for Part-6, go here.)

They back up and get a head start. By the time they launch on the page, they’re already in sync with moving tides.

DH Lawrence, Thomas Wolfe, F Scott Fitzgerald. 70 years ago, they mesmerized me. I didn’t separate what they were saying from how. Now I’m not interested in their what. But I still know the how has great power.

Lawrence: “We are bleeding at the roots… and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table.”

Wolfe:  “…in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars…Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”

Fitzgerald: “Summer was gone and now Indian summer. The grass was cold and there was no mist and no dew. After he left she would go in and light the gas and close the shutters, and he would go down the path and on to the village.”

Catching the motion of tides, or inventing them, a writer could give you one sentence of a thousand words.

Walt Whitman: “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…” Read it out loud, or think it out loud. Where are the accents? On “last” and “bloom’d.”

A stiff reader never catches on. He never finds the writer. He’s marching, but the writer is out on the water in a boat moving.

The mechanical give me ONLY data to ingest mind never sees or feels what’s going on. He’s doing Reader’s Digest chop chop on poetics flying through mountain ranges.

He’s breaking walnuts to understand how Nureyev is dancing.