Word for Word
Literary work and collaborative translations by students from Columbia University’s School of the Arts Writing Program and the Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig 2011/2012. Here are excerpts from my essay.
in formal essays
. . .
a word on words:
mytho|cine|lumin|osity
noun
a condition of watching one’s position change
. . .
a sentence on sentences:
When we were in 4th grade and learning to write sentences, our teacher Mr. B told us to write the “subject” of our sentences on the front and the “predicate” on the back of 3×5 cards, and he held me back from recess because I didn’t cut my sentences cleanly and he said, “you’ve done this all wrong,” while I stared at the words on the card and saw I divided my sentences where I needed to breathe in them and I didn’t understand his suggested division between “subject” and “predicate,” still didn’t maybe until college when I took a grammar class and spent 3 hours a day 5 days a week diagramming sentences and watched myself avoid/loathe those 180 minute blocks until I embraced/loved diagramming and the structures began to overpower my language: I read novels and saw diagrams, I wrote essays and saw diagrams, I even heard people speak and saw diagrams and this was the most fascinating/disturbing of all because I actually saw speech, and it was flat and flimsy as a 3×5 card and I began to ask myself which is more sacred, the sloppy sprezzatura of a “how’s it goin’?” or the shapes on a page containing a moment like that since the sentence diagram is an exercise of putting the sentence under glass, spreading its wings and pinning them to board with neat labels to the side, making breath impossible and what if it wasn’t meant to be 2-dimensional at all, like when my dad stood by his car in front of my apartment complex to pick me up from college after those long semesters of language classes and I first saw his comma-shaped hearing aids, and realized a diagram would always separate “I” from “you” with vertical lines while a breathed-out sentence could move air from the depth of my body into the ear of yours, even unperfectly, but still, there are moments when I’m thinking like 4th grade and my thoughts don’t fit sentences, but that’s how they leave me to live for themselves, and when it comes down to it, I don’t want this sentence to end, but by talking about the ending, I’ve already created it and sentences are a metaphor for how everything is punctuated, maybe this is why we’re sentenced to death.
