On Syntax: Creating Silence
A Craft Short
from:
Mary Stein
Creating Poetic Silence in Prose
I have a confession to make. There is a perverse and envious part of me convinced poets are permitted to dip from a well of inspiration while prose writers must crouch, dog-like, to lap at the damp muddy edges of puddles. In his essay “Live Yak Pie,” poet James Tate alludes to the inherent drudgery of prose:
While most prose is a kind of continuous chatter, describing, naming, explaining, poetry speaks against an essential backdrop of silence … There is a prayerful, haunted silence between words, between phrases, between images, ideas and lines … The reader, perhaps without knowing it, instinctively desires to peer between the crack into the other world where the unspoken rests in darkness.
But there is a hopeful part of me that feels my endless pursuit of the right-hand margin is not necessarily at the expense of achieving “prayerful, haunted silences.”
Much like poetry, Lydia Davis’s story, “A Second Chance,” prioritizes syntactic storytelling, using phrasing and parallelism to amplify narrative identity. The story ends:
If you could have your mother die a second time you might be prepared to fight for a private room that had no other person in it watching television while she died, but if you were prepared to fight for that, and did, you might have to lose your mother again in order to know enough to ask them to put her teeth in the right way and not the wrong way before you went into her room and saw her for the last time grinning so strangely, and then yet one more time to make sure her ashes were not buried again in that plain sort of airmail container in which she was sent north to the cemetery.
Scene in this passage is secondary to how the narrator expresses a seemingly perfunctory wish. Each clause first reveals conditional desire, ending with descriptive material rooted in scene. This pattern builds tension between how the narrator would have liked to experience her mother’s death and how it truly occurred, creating dissonance between desire and narrative reality. Davis’s sentence syntactically boomerangs, departing from and returning to the idea of a second chance at losing her mother. Beyond expressing narrative desire, the syntax reflects how the narrator’s memory operates: its parallel form illustrates the landscape of her obsession––reliving her mother’s death. Davis uses syntax to create a form necessary to the story’s content, achieving the effect of poetry.
In addition to Lydia Davis, Deb Olen-Unferth and Mark Anthony Jarman also thwart the drudgery of prose by using syntax to mime the effect of space in poetry. Their less conventional story structures reflect a poetic attention to repetition, parallelism, and rhythm, as well as to intentional omission or fragmentation—all techniques to create slippages that provide space for resonance and create the effect of “prayerful, haunted” silences. These slippages can exist between the narrative interior and narrative scenes; they can exist between the story told through narrative and the story expressed through syntax.
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Davis, Lydia. “A Second Chance.” The Collected Works of Lydia Davis.
New York: Picadour, 2009.
Tate, Jame. “Live Yak Pie.” The Route as Briefed. Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 2002.
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Mary Stein mostly obsesses over writing fiction. She lives in Minneapolis with her partner and their black lab. She received her MFA from VCFA and is a contributor for Numéro Cinq.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Loved this lecture, Mary. Empowering and engaging. I’m enamored with the idea of “prayerful, haunted silence.” Thanks for shifting my brain a bit.
Good job Mary! Keep up the good work!
Jen and Kuatree,
Thank you for reading and commenting!
Yes, yes. I seem to find poetry in all kinds of interesting places–it slips so nicely into other genres.
Mary, your thoughts slow me down, remind me how intricate or work can be if we allow it (can stand it). I have often felt like the structure of prose, say, short story, acts as a type of poetic form; here I am reminded that the poetic is not necessarily a way of sounding, blooming prose or something, but a way of constructing. Thanks, for this.