You Build Up My Senses

Once upon a time, I had the delicate, expressive soul of a poet. I wrote, read, and sometimes even bathed in poetry. I've since given the practice up, since poetry baths tend to leave one smelling like wet corduroy in the worst way. However, even though I've sold my poetic soul for Batman Legos, I still have a love for the subject. A nostalgic love, perhaps, but a love nonetheless.

The other day I had a good long sit down with a friend who came to me for writing advice. She meets with a tutor, who instructed her to include good sensory detail in her writing. Turns out (to the surprise of no one but me), I had opinions to share on the subject.

Sensory detail, to me, serves a very distinct purpose. Good sensory detail - by which I mean descriptions of the scenery through any of the senses - does not just to create a mental image in the reader's mind, but evokes an emotion. The same fact can be used to evoke several different emotions. For example, a warm room can be described by saying "The heat pressed down on his shoulders, forcing him deeper and deeper into the sofa," and that feels completely different from saying, "Sweat ran down the side of his face like his mother's carressing finger." Both denote heat, but both evoke different emotions.

I advised my friend to read poetry to help her get an understanding for sensory detail. After all, poets are brilliant at that sort of thing. Sadly, though, I'd realized that it had been a long, long time since I had made poetry an active part of my life.

So I've got a book of poetry in my bag right now (Michael Ondaatje's The Cinnamon Peeler, if anyone's interested), and I think I'll be posting more poetry on the blog here. Not original stuff - I haven't written a poem since... September, I think - but just good poetry that I've come across that makes me feel better about things and such.

That's my way with words. I'm, like, really good with words.