For today's class I asked my students to try their hands at imitating. They were to choose a short passage from their favorite authors and see if they can't imitate the sentences' structures and rhythms. Like a lot of our mini-assignments, I decided to try this one myself and chose the opening lines from The Echo Maker, the latest from Richard Powers. Aside from the parsimony of RP's prose, here's what I learned: imitation asks one to inhabit a structure, and as such it can be pretty challenging at first, but then it can become inventive, and the new passage takes on a life of its own. For me, a couple of rhymed words presented themselves, but rhyming of course isn't necessary. Oh, and also words and birds may have a thing or two in common.
RP:
Cranes keep landing as night falls. Ribbons of them roll
down, slack against the sky. They float in from all compass points, in kettles
of a dozen, dropping with the dusk. Scores of Grus canadensis settle on the thawing river. They gather on the
island flats, grazing, beating their wings, trumpeting: the advance wave of a
mass evacuation. More birds land by the minute, the air red with calls.
DH:
Words keep crowding as sleep calls. Reams of them cram in, wound among the folds. Squeezed from the day's moments, in phrases and
clauses, repeating with the broken fan. Hosts of figures dance in geometric
shapes. They cluster on my end-table, calling, clacking their consonants,
rounding: the condensed noise of a staged sit-in. More words tamp into seconds,
the night thick with sense.