Enjambment

I don't understand prose poems make me rethink my major is art mostly looks like someone let their three year old finger paint on the wall was a face with only the colors out of the tube can't get any brighter than the sky today.

Confused? Me too.

I'm not a poet. The art of poetry writing is interesting to me, but not enough to make me pursue it through the dark and sticky mire of my inadequacy. There are other things that are as challenging that I find more rewarding. But I will probably continue to dabble in it. One thing that I like about poetry is the device of enjambment. Basically enjambment happens when the line ends, but the sentence in a poem doesn't. It can be used to break a pattern and then catches the reader (or maybe just me) off guard. I get used to pausing and, or, finishing a thought at the end of a line. So the instant after I have comprehended the meaning of the line, I find that the idea continues on the next line and must adjust my understanding. That haltering thought adjustment, like the quick step one takes to avoid falling when one's foot has caught on a broken edge of sidewalk, is an interesting thing to be able to cause in someone else's mind.

(Does that make me a sadist? I want to mess with everyone's mind. *evil laugh*)

I also like the way the word sounds. Enjambment. It looks rather like a word I would type out and then realize I had made some egregious spelling error.

(Had to attempt "egregious" three or four times before I looked up "terrible" in my thesaurus and found it. I would never have guess it began with an E. I thought I had the last part wrong some how.)

The B belongs there so delightfully adding to the surprise of the idea. I can think of several words that ought to have Bs in them and don't. And some that have them and shouldn't. So the spelling pleases me. And the way it looks, that poor B squished uncomfortable between Ms and the J looks like the N has stepped on it's tail and it is about to trip over the A, rather they way my mouth and nose feels trying to get all those sounds in between nasal consonants.
Cough.
Sometimes my mind feels like an enjambment. If I start talking before a thought it fully formed, I tend to start multiple sentences before I decide which one I really want to say out loud. This leaves the person I am talking to rather confused. I suspect that I will do this without realizing it when I get old. It will be very amusing. And I find that I change my mind about where a sentence is going half way through it. I usually start over. But now and then, I find a sentence that started to say one thing and half way through decided to conclude a different thought. It is not always clear when the shift happened. One or two words might belong in either sentence. I used to see this in other students' writing a lot when I was a writing tutor.

(Who thought it was a good idea to make me a writing tutor?)

Learning to write was a challenge to me because I didn't think in sentences.

(Sound off, people. Who thinks in complete, grammatically correct sentences? Anyone?)

I think in a tangle of related ideas that exist in a images and key words that act like hinges, swinging one idea to meet another. I can be frustrating to try and express these thoughts because they are a web rather than a string.

(Thus, the loosely organized chaos of this post and many others like it.)

Sometimes I sit down at my keyboard and can't write a single sentence. Sometimes I free write, letting words connect to each other independent of the words preceding or to follow.

(Preceding is a rather confusing word. It means "come before" something and "go ahead of" something. Does anyone else find that spatially confusing. I want to it be in the back, or in the front. The head or the foundation. but not both.)

I think it would be fun to try and express a very specific idea that way; weaving together ideas and images that suggest something larger without completing a single sentence. It would continually trip up your brain, like an enjambment. (Like those school yard songs that always change the subject just as they are leading up to saying a dirty word.) All those ideas bounding around and you catch glimpses of them as they flash past in a whirling jumble of possible sentences.

I spun ideas till I got dizzy and wanted to hurl magic words at all the misunderstandings could be avoided like the plague wasn't started by rats but we continue to ignore them and they get bigger all the time until they walk out the door and parents remember all the things they should have told me how to do this in school today I met a person who raised his hand and made us all be quiet until he thought of exactly how do you ask the right questions anyway.