Notes Towards A Future Craft Lecture
There is a gap between the way in which we talk about the metre of poetry and the way we talk about a line of prose as a singular unit.
This is a good thing — it’s kind of exciting that the cultural presence of the study of rhetoric hasn’t kept pace with the past two hundred years — because it means we can write stories that predominantly rely on a single word; that Anna Burns can begin Milkman by writing, "The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died"; and Helen McClory can write a single sentence about Jeff Goldblum — "The Jeff Goldblum that wakes up in the morning, opens the curtains, and says, softly, 'Oh!'" — and we can say that this is music.
Given that, it is somewhat of a surprise that — like Michael Ondaatje's Buddy Bolden — we aren't all "obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key." (Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter.)
It is a surprise because there is a line. It has no name. And it is worth our while.
Above: the first hand-written page of Borges’s ‘Library of Babel.’ (via.)