[Janice D. Soderling]

I'm certainly not about to look any gift horses in the mouth and all contributions are welcome.

But especially I am looking forward to finding some "high art", an isolated sentence or two that one can savor, even torn from its context, and perhaps a brief explication telling why it works so well for the you who suggested it.

Of course, it isn't an order (god forbid), just a shivering little wish sent on a cold and rainy day from the north where winter will soon have us physically and mentally snowed-in again.

PS. And perhaps a tag telling who wrote and/or translated it? I think I recognize Nabokov above; the text is indeed well-writ and holds one's interest--but musical?

Consider the poetry in John Steinbeck's opening para of "The Grapes of Wrath", more poetry than we find in a lot of poems--the rhythm, the repetition, the parallels, imagery, metaphor (green bayonets), personification (rains came gently, protect themselves), the sensory quality.

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.

Cross posted with Dean.

[Michael Cantor]

Here is the opening of Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country:

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Umzimkulu, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea; and beyond and behind the river, great hill after great hill; and beyond and behind them, the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand.


The grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. It holds the rain and the mist, and they seep into the ground, feeding the streams in every kloof. It is well-tended, and not too many cattle feed upon it; not too many fires burn it, laying bare the soil. Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.


Where you stand the grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. But the rich green hills break down. They fall to the valley below, and falling, change their nature. For they grow red and bare; they cannot hold the rain and mist, and the streams are dry in the kloofs. Too many cattle feed upon the grass, and too many fires have burned it. Stand shod upon it, for it is coarse and sharp, and the stones cut under the feet. It is not kept, or guarded, or cared for, it no longer keeps men, guards men, cares for men. The titihoya does not cry here any more.


The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh. The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth. Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man. They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away, the young men and the girls are away. The soil cannot keep them any more.

[Alex Pepple]

::Slightly off-topic:: & for all of you with a keen or even passing interest in good prose writing, this year's flash fiction workshop is coming soon to the neighborhood's Fiction Forum!

...Alex

[Chris Childers]

The opening of The Sound and the Fury, part 3:

The day dawned bleak and chill, a moving wall of gray light out of the northeast which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous particles, like dust that, when Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and emerged, needled laterally into her flesh, precipitating not so much a moisture as a substance partaking of the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil. She wore a stiff black straw hat perched upon her turban, and a maroon velvet cape with a border of mangy and anonymous fur above a dress of purple silk, and she stood in the door for a while with her myriad and sunken face lifted to the weather, and one gaunt hand flac-soled as the belly of a fish, then she moved the cape aside and examined the bosom of her gown.

The gown fell gauntly from her shoulders, across her fallen breasts, then tightened upon her paunch and fell again, ballooning a little above the nether garments which she would remove layer by layer as the spring accomplished and the warm days, in color regal and moribund. She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child’s astonished disappointment, until she turned and entered the house again and closed the door.

The earth immediately about the door was bare. It had a patina, as though from the soles of bare feet in generations, like old silver or the walls of Mexican houses which have been plastered by hand. Beside the house, shading it in summer, stood three mulberry trees, the fledged leaves that would later be broad and placid as the palms of hands streaming flatly undulant upon the driving air. A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn. Then three more joined them and they swung and tilted in the wrung branches for a time, screaming. The door of the cabin opened and Dilsey emerged once more, this time in a man’s felt hat and an army overcoat, beneath the frayed skirts of which her blue gingham dress fell in uneven balloonings, streaming too about her as she crossed the yard and mounted the steps to the kitchen door.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Paton should have got the Nobel, like Steinbeck and Faulkner did.

Thanks for all of these suggestions. Truly there is much poetry lurking in prose that comes from a master's hand.

PS. Looking forward to the fiction bash, Alex!

[Nausheen Eusuf]

The opening paragraphs of Bleak House are gorgeous in their insistent rhythms. The second paragraph, especially, is almost hypnotic.

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Nausheen, yes, yes, Dickens. I almost know by heart the opening to A Tale of Two Cities.

I can think of many Southern US writers who write like poets; for instance Carson McCullers (beginning of The Ballad of the Sad Café)

The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton mill, the two-room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two colored window, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long. On Saturdays the tenants from the nearby farms come in for a day of talk and trade. Otherwise the town is lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world. The nearest train stop is Society City, and the Greyhound and White Bus Lines use the Forks Falls Road which is three miles away. The winters here are short and raw, the summers white with glare and fiery hot.

If you walk along the main street on an august afternoon there is nothing whatsoever to do. The largest building, in the very center of the town, id boarded up completely and leans so far to the right that it seems bound to collapse at any minute. The house is very old. There is about it a curious, cracked look that is very puzzling until you suddenly realize that at one time, and long ago, the right side of the front porch had been painted, and part of the wall—but the painting was left unfinished and one portion of the house is darker and dingier than the other. The building looks completely deserted. Nevertheless, on the second floor there is one window which is not boarded; sometimes in the late afternoon when the heat is at its worst a hand will slowly open the shutter and a face will look down on the town. It is a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams—sexless and white, with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief. The face lingers at the window for an hour or so, then the shutters are closed once more, and as likely as not there will not be another soul to be seen along the main street. These August afternoons—when your shift is finished there is absolutely nothing to do; you might as well walk down to the Forks Falls Road and listen to the chain gang.

Doesn't that melody just roll off the tongue: a miserable main street, a day of talk and trade, a curious, cracked look.

One can swoon when reading:

It is a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams—sexless and white, with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief.

[Tim Love]

On http://may-on-the-short-story.blogsp...oetry-and.html there are claims made for the power of sound in short stories.

In "next word, better word" by Stephen Dobyns, the first sentence of Henry James' "The Middle Years" is given a few pages of attention, but not especially for its musicality.

Fish's "How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One" sparked discussions. Of "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (Fitzgerald), someone wrote - I love how it's so tantalizingly close to iambic pentameter - 5 iambs followed by 4 and 1/2.The cadence carries the reader forward in the first phrase with four staccato syllables. The choppiness of the second phrase brings the current's restraint to life, interrupting the flow of the sentence. The final phrase glides easily, but the missing twentieth syllable leaves the reader anticipating more. One can imagine the novel's last sentence repeating endlessly, beginning again where it left off. And of course that's the point. The art of the sentence is in its structure as much as its words.

[John Whitworth]

You don't want too much poetry in novels in my opinion. You can't digest 600 pages of it. Dickens is sparing of the kind of thing he kicks off with in Bleak House. But in short stories...

Shena Mackay writes novels but I can't warm to them. But short stories. Try 'Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags'. What a title! This is the opening of 'Electric Blue Damsels'. The whole book is a masterpiece. I met her once. Very straightforward and unpoetic, thank God.

You see them in the Underground with their schoolbooks and across the counters of shops and waiting of tables in restaurants, slinging burgers and pushing brooms, girls and boys in whom an exotic cocktail of genes has been shaken into a startling and ephemeral beauty: birds of paradise nesting in garbage, or captive tropical fish shimmering in the gloomy backrooms of dank petshops.


And later in the same story:

His brain turned to coral: emperor and clown, harlequins, rainbows, unicorns, angels and devils, queens, jewels, damsels, glowlights, butterflies, cardinals, swordfish, surgeons, anemones, starfish, sea-horses, dancing shrimps, golden rams and silver sharks, flying foxes, albino tigers, lyretails, parrots and corals; freshwater and marine tropicals from the Indian Ocean and the Pacific swam through its branches. He took out a stack of library books.

She's terrific with lists. Why she is not a Dame of the British Empire or whatever it is these days (usually awarded to sportswomen) I cannot imagine.

[John Beaton]

This, from "Beautiful Losers" by Leonard Cohen. As I was reading the novel many years ago, I was blown away by that passage and went over and over it, almost to the point of memorization.

I had the pleasure of sitting through a poetry reading by Ann Michaels once. She was inspirational.

John