I love - this is perhaps obvious by now - a long sentence, with lots of descriptors and modifiers and additional clarifying or complicating phrases. But I was reminded recently of the power of a really great declarative sentence.
Sommer Browning’s knockout poem, Great Things from the Department of Transportation, operates largely through declarative sentences, many of them with the same grammatical subject and straightforward structure:
My mother desires to track my location on her phone.
My mother announces that she's "latex intolerant."
My mother is horrified that the children’s cartoon character Caillou is bald.
I hope you’ll read more. I find these declarations hypnotic, and they reminded me of a moment from Annie Dillards’s The Writing Life:
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”
“Well,’’ the writer said, “I don’t know. . . . Do you like sentences?’’
The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of the paint.’’
Prompt #9: Sentences & Very Local History
Select a central topic - a person or object - for your poem. If one doesn’t immediately appear to you, try finding something notable in your town. I came across this article about candies made in Philadelphia, and I've also been thinking about the dinosaurs that used to live in my part of New Jersey. (One of those dinos is pictured above, along with my goofball kids a couple years ago.)
Write your poem in the form of declarative sentences with the same subject, occasionally breaking the pattern with a more complex sentence or a quotation or a question. You could refer back to Browning’s poem for a model, or you could look at this brief and friendly explainer of different sentence types. Aim to write at least 15 sentences.
Sharing your work helps sustain momentum. I’ll leave the comments open, so you can share a poem title, a snippet of a line, or something else about your writing life.