I had a very disappointing realization the other day…
It turns out that when you view ARB in feed readers, they may omit a lot of my very deliberate formatting of text. (Not to mention a surprising number of the pictures.)
So the words may be all there, but the look may be all wrong.
And frankly, that bothers me.
I remember when I discovered the poetry of e.e. cummings…
It was the first time I was really challenged by the written word, with his awkward punctuation, shards of syllables, and lurching line breaks.
It took a long time before I was able to appreciate the format intellectually, but on a visceral level, I got it right away. I realized that although these seeming discordances made the reading harder, they turned the structure itself into an integral part of the poem.
The shape of the text affected the experience of reading.
It slowed you down, made you think, and reinforced the tone of the poem.
The very complexity of the appearance wrangled the work into a visual representation of how the impact of language extends much farther than mere words.
And ever since, I’ve added shape and appearance to the list of “things I play with in writing.” (Right up there with idiom, colloquialisms, and vernacular.) For play with language, I do. That word-snobbery I have been accused of really isn’t so much a love of excessive syllables or erudition as it is a dislike of allowing something so vital and dynamic and fun as language get flattened into a simple linear plodding of text.
It seems to me we should be able to do so much better.
I suppose the crux of my disappointment is that, though I'm certainly no Cummings, like him, I relish "such minutiae as commas and small i’s,in which…my [originality] thrives."
Unless, of course, it's viewed through a reader…