/lit/ - Literature

>>16168108
>carrier pigeons fall from the methane sky
>carrying wounded apologies to their kin
Very nice, my favorite lines, except the repetition of carrier/carrying would bug me, but that’s your choice. I hope you continue to write.

>>16168211
Wow that was vivid! The fantastic or strange elements were really well placed and gave me an odd pleasure reading about them, very good descriptions


Mine:
>I often find myself inexplicably struck by the poetics of found texts. I am drawn to things which were not quite meant for the world of literature (or perhaps it is only that they are things I have come across by accident, since a reader in this digital age often digests so much information abutting and introducing a text before they actually come to read the real text at all) or passages which have shone ebulliently beyond the reach of their original intentions. I am struck by the power of certain historical anecdotes, details of history books or entries in encyclopedias, of the definitions contained in antiquated dictionaries which demonstrate something of a bygone faith, the genealogies of the bible when they are read aloud in the manner of an incantatory prayer, and instructions as to the mastery of a complicated or archaic instrument whose use has become redundant. As a boy I would carry home oddly shaped or glittering, worthless rocks. I had no place to put them and could not justify their accumulation, yet I could not resist. The poetic allure of mysterious objects (“The aim of literature [...] is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart,”) has bewitched me from the day I formed my first memory. It was a piece of driftwood half submerged in the Kansas River that vaguely looked to me like the head of Medusa and which I felt sure had once rested on the shore of a land where there were men and women who had never heard the word America, never had to wear clothes or brush their teeth, and had no knowledge of the rapid mechanization of the universe. Genesis says that mankind was formed from dust, womankind from bone. The Norse say that the first man and woman were once driftwood. There is a kind of kaleidoscopic fragmentation in modern literature—whose shoulders are weighed heavily by sagging time—that is working its spidery hypnosis over me. I do not know why and perhaps the process of the unaccountable bewildering is what has gotten its powerful hooks in me. I began to read, first because I loved stories, and then once again because I did not feel I understood the world, and thought books would teach me. Now I think I do it for more than just the things I’ve mentioned, but I’m not sure how to verbalize what it is.

It’s not for anything or part of a larger story, I just want to know if I have even a bit of promise and where I have room to grow. How is the style/flow of my writing? Still new to this although I’ve always read widely and deeply.