At first glance Pratt’s famous quote from this excellent movie seems odd, yet there is a beautiful awkwardness in it that has made it one of the movie quotes I use the most even fourteen years after the movie.
Sometimes a single line sticks out to you and you don’t know why, so you read it over and over again trying to figure it out.
Is it worded wrong?
Am I interpreting it wrong?
Do I not know the meaning of a particular word?
Why does this one sentence stand out to me?
This happened to me today. It happened while reading the last line of the poem CLYDE POEM I: DOWN SOUTH from the book Locomotion.
The line is:
a place we both used to
a long time ago know.
I reread these two lines over and over again trying to figure out why they were sticking out to me. At first I thought the author had written them incorrectly. I thought maybe it was supposed to read:
a place we both used to
know a long time ago.
But the more I read it I realized the author made no mistake.
What happened was the author took a simple boring everyday sentence and made it beautiful.
While I thought that these two lines were incorrect I was actually mistaken because in fact they were the essence of poetry. The words rolled off my tongue, they flowed, they had a heartbeat, they were fluid and bumpy simultaneously, but they worked. The words sang to me.
This is how poetry is supposed to be. It is supposed to make you feel. I felt a lot of things during the short course of time that I was reading locomotion. Ultimately I think this is what every poet wants.
Even when a poet writes in free form styles and their work is almost unrecognizable as poetry the reader will see it as poetry when they come across that line in the poem that sings to them and makes them reread it ten times over.
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