Eloquence
Cornelius Eady's The Wrong Street is formatted oddly: line breaks are placed seemingly haphazardly, cutting statements in half more often than not. In class, we briefly discussed why Eady chose to do this.
Someone (I forgot who lol) suggested that Eady intentionally tried to make his poem look unorthodox, messy, and unprofessional, to convey a tone of desperation, as if he wanted to get the message out as quickly as possible and didn't have time to format it properly. Or maybe he's writing out the poem while words come naturally to him, not bothering to go back and format them.
Looking more closely, each individual line break actually provides a minuscule sense of mysteriousness to the poem. For example:
If you could shuck your skin and watch (Watch what?)
The action from a safe vantage point, (What vantage point?)
You might find a weird beauty in this, (In what?)
An egoless moment, but for (But for who?)
These young white men at your back. (Oh.)
So what's the point of this? By asking these questions, consciously or not, readers automatically read into each line instead of skimming over the poem. Maybe Eady just really wants his readers to understand the message he's trying to get across, and why it's important. Or maybe it's some ancient form of clickbait.
Someone (I forgot who lol) suggested that Eady intentionally tried to make his poem look unorthodox, messy, and unprofessional, to convey a tone of desperation, as if he wanted to get the message out as quickly as possible and didn't have time to format it properly. Or maybe he's writing out the poem while words come naturally to him, not bothering to go back and format them.
Looking more closely, each individual line break actually provides a minuscule sense of mysteriousness to the poem. For example:
If you could shuck your skin and watch (Watch what?)
The action from a safe vantage point, (What vantage point?)
You might find a weird beauty in this, (In what?)
An egoless moment, but for (But for who?)
These young white men at your back. (Oh.)
So what's the point of this? By asking these questions, consciously or not, readers automatically read into each line instead of skimming over the poem. Maybe Eady just really wants his readers to understand the message he's trying to get across, and why it's important. Or maybe it's some ancient form of clickbait.
I really like the way you formatted your quotes and responses, I think it did a really good job of showing what you mean. I think your point is useful-- that the line breaks make the reader curious of the next piece of action in the poem. They really add a sense of discomfort and uneasiness into the experience of reading it, which goes along with the subject of the poem. I think it's important to do these kinds of close readings when it comes to poetry, and I'm glad you did it for this one. I do want to say that his use of line breaks isn't all that unconventional-- plenty of poets write this way (introducing an idea and responding to it in the next line); so Eady is more accurately including his own interpretation/use of this technique rather than creating something 100% new.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting interpretation of the poem (I like the way you called it ancient clickbait haha) and I agree that consistently leaving readers hanging gets them to pay more attention and causes them to stop and think about what they're looking at. I also agree with Bella that the way you formatted the response was really effective at getting your point across.
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