59 degrees
mississippi river road path, north
Running again! Well, mostly walking with a little bit of running too. Since I have only run once (and with a brace) in the past 2 months, I’m easing back into it with this plan. Today I walked for 4.5 minutes and ran for .5 minutes 6 times. It felt good to be running again. I was surprised by how fast 30 seconds went by. On Wednesday, I’ll walk 4, run 1 and Friday: walk 3, run 2.
As I read more poetry and experiment with my own poems, I’m thinking about line breaks. I found a useful exercise in which you take the same poem and arrange the line breaks differently depending on 6 Ss: speed, sound, syntax, surprise, sense, and space. I applied it to a poem I wrote about the body a few months back. Here’s the original poem:
The body is a machine.
Not the body as machine
or the body is like a machine
or the body is only a machine.
But, the body is a machine.
An efficient machine,
capturing energy, consuming minerals, converting air into breath.
The body is an intricate machine,
made up of muscles and tendons
and ligaments and joints and bones
that work together in the complex process of locomotion.
The body is a marvelous machine,
containing strange creatures
with multiple heads and fantastical names.
The body is a beautiful machine,
composed of grace and exuberance and joy.
The body is a powerful machine,
able to endure intense pain and absorb tremendous force.
The body is a delicate and temperamental machine;
it can shut down from overuse, lack of use or repeated abuse.
And, here’s a version where I took the best parts of each “s” attempt:
The body is a machine.
Not as
is like
is only
but is
An efficient machine,
capturing energy,
consuming minerals,
converting air into breath.
An intricate machine,
containing muscles and tendons
and ligaments and joints and bones
and organs and arteries and veins
and fluids and systems that work together
in the complex process
of locomotion.
A marvelous machine,
made up of strange creatures
with multiple heads
and melodious names.
A beautiful machine,
composed of grace
and exuberance
and joy.
A powerful machine,
able to endure
intense pain and
absorb
tremendous force.
And a delicate and temperamental machine
that can shut down from
overuse,
lack of use
repeated abuse.