From a distance, most things look beautiful

Freewrite

What is something in your life that never seems to end?

Maybe you’re waiting for a callback. Perhaps you’re waiting in a long line. Maybe your poetry submission at The New Yorker has been pending for 2 years. Perhaps you’re “waiting on the world to change.”

Write about your subject using a single long sentence. Use every strategy at your disposal to prolong the sentence, including punctuation and conjunctions. Feel free to make your sentence run-on or grammatically incorrect, too—you’re evoking a feeling, not passing an English exam.

One-Sentence Poem: “My god, girlhood ripened” by Savannah Brown

Retrieved from her collection Closer Baby Closer. Reproduced in image to preserve formatting.

Divinations

A central tension of poetry’s form is the tension of the line break vis a vis the sentence. In poetry, the poet breaks the line where the poet deems the line is complete—and when the line is broken before the end of the sentence, we call that line “enjambed.”

A sentence only ends at a period. The omission of periods in Brown’s poem is startling: there are plenty of fragments that demand punctuation, but they are punctuated instead by whitespace, followed by the starts of new sentences with capital letters.

Nonetheless, this is a one-sentence poem. Technically, it’s not even a full sentence, since it doesn’t end in a period… but pedantry will get us nowhere. I’m interested in how this restraint of prolonging the sentence results in newer and stranger work. In this instance, the prolonged sentence reflects upon two coinciding themes: the endlessness of a soon-to-end girlhood (didn’t our teenage years seem to stretch past all our horizons?), and the desire for a tomorrow that lasts a single day.

Eschewing the period results in some really funky transitions and line breaks. I’m especially keen on this one:

The images are great, of course. “atlas psychedelic labyrinths”!! Stunning language. But I love the play with page space: the progressive indentations evoke that feeling of “soberly walking through / the family planning aisle”—and then we’re jarringly back to left-flush alongside a self-aware leap that speaks directly to the reader.

Many of the leaps and pivots in this poem do this: move towards a different subject, a different address to the reader. But these fragments also feel like memories, or at least diversions of thought. We’re either in the mind of a teenage girl, or the mind of a girl who still has access to her teenage mind, complete with the weirdness of coming-of-age online—and experiencing the disempowerments of sex.

Strategies for Prolonging a Sentence

Poetry is, first and foremost, an attempt to say something in a way that conventional language fails to. We’re using line breaks, literary devices, and other strategies to push past the boundaries of language.

As a result, I want you to feel empowered to break the rules. Screw grammar! Phooey to normativity! (Of course, don’t break the rules for the sake of breaking them…  but having fun is always a good reason.)

Here are some ways of prolonging your sentences in a one-sentence poem:

Lists: Some lists can go on forever, aided by commas and conjunctions.

Colons and semicolons: Both : and ; are punctuation marks where a period could have been placed, but the sentence demanded to go on. The colon : is particularly useful for preceding an explanation, demonstration, or list.

Em-dashes: The Swiss army knife of punctuation! Em-dashes—always useful for interrupting thoughts, generating surprise, or just keeping the sentence moving.

Line and stanza breaks: Both can be used as a form of punctuation.

Lacunae: a fancy word for “gaps,” leaps of white space can also be a way of punctuating language without using an actual mark, much like Brown does in her poem.

Prompt: The One-Sentence Poem

Write a poem that’s a sentence long. Challenge yourself to write a poem that is at least one full page in length, but also, see how far you can get with it.