Word of Mouth
Philip Booth
"Evening"
I'm consistently drawn to the sparse poems more than to the wordy poems, and this was one of my favorites so far. I think what jumps out at me the most is the impact of the line breaks. It reminds me of what was said in class, how each line should be able to stand on its own. I love that some poems are formed so that not only do the lines as written hold narrative meaning, but how they break offers an additional, isolated interpretation. Sometimes, just with the placement of the line break, two lines that create a single sentence might have three different meanings: the original sentence, then the two lines as they break. Like Booth's lines here:
Except for having to finish the postcard he's almost
written his mother, the boy is happy. Watching him
pour more ketchup onto his salad, his father
invents another new face. The boy grins.
I just adore that in too many ways. The last line has an infectious charm by itself, and in context, it has another level of humor, pathos and deeper meaning. It reminds me of what Professor Ellison said to me once after class. I had mentioned that I feel comfortable writing from a "snapshot" point of view, one moment in time, and she reminded me that we should keep the outer edges of that snapshot in mind, so that even if the picture is a still shot, the content is alive. In a nutshell, that's how these line breaks work for me. The snapshots and the living image all work beautifully, both independently and together.
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