May 14, 2007

Serpentine
I don't aspire to a novel-length sentence such as Marie-Claire Blais wrote once (broken into chapters which is really audacious--I'm guessing she did it on a bet), but I love a long sentence of the kind Swift used to send serpentine across the page, each phrase a little surprise (yet linked precisely to what went before), breath control meticulous and compelling, not a sentence to lose but to find yourself in, each clause a foray deeper into this dangerous world, mind made syllables, at every moment in every direction alert.

[This has been published previously in monkeybicycle.net as a one sentence story.]

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