The passive voice

[vaneramos]

My friend Tina Blue has written all kinds of useful articles about the craft of writing. One of them, Active Voice vs. Passive Voice, made me think about passivity (an acknowledged problem in my life). I wondered, "How passive could I possibly be?" That question inspired this morning's poem. Don't worry; this isn't my life. Well, sometimes parts of it are. It is a caricature.

~~~~

Lives were lived

Sparrows were heard

quarreling on the window sill

behind an air conditioner.

A sunbeam was felt

distantly, through glass

on pale skin barely warm.

A bearded man walking his dog

was noted

by disembodied eyes.

Pedestrians were observed

waiting at the busstop

or at the corner

for traffic seen to pass.

The kind of weather

was betrayed by clothing

of the many passersby

was rarely felt

except when the mailbox

was checked

or a trip to the corner store

was made

for milk or a can of soup,

things needed.

On a cutting board

at the kitchen window

the potato being cubed

by disembodied hands

was later eaten

without hint of salt or herb

by disembodied lips

and teeth clattering in their space.

Meanwhile a letter from a parent

was briefly scanned

by a disillusioned mind,

inserted in the envelope again

and thrown away.

Another evening was endured.

A telephone message went unanswered.

TV was watched.

An ex-lover was despised.

A cat was kicked.

The clattering teeth were brushed.

The light was turned out.

For a while traffic was still perceived

whining through the street below.


Somewhere else

another room, barely lit

was occupied

by someone's pubescent daughter.

There were problems at school.

A test had been failed.

In the yard at noon a fight had been fought.


In the occupied room

some tears were shed.

~~~~

I'm having trouble formatting these verses. Inserting spaces before the lines doesn't work. I used the "ul" code to create indents, but it also created paragraph breaks where I don't want them. The poem is supposed to be all one verse down to "whining through the street below," then a break and a new verse down to "fight had been fought," and finally another break before the last two lines. If anyone knows where I can find some tips on how to format poetry for this site, please tell me.

Comments

passive!

[(Anonymous)]

Van, it's amazing how effective the entirely passive verbs are in this poem (which by the way when read with its spaces as formatted by the program, seems fine)
It's an eerie feeling of complete distancing, alienation. And yet.. it also reminds me of the idea of "no-self" -- of life and events being lived through me, the passive detached observer. Yikes! Head hanging over the void. Awesome poem! (Elisabeth is being me)
(Is there a passive form of the verb "to be"? Confusion is being felt.)

Re: passive!

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thanks Elis. That "eerie feeling" is exactly what I imagined while reading Tina's article (the phrases about disembodies body parts actually come from her amusing footnotes), and that's what I hoped to achieve in this poem. I am pleased by your comments.

[draco-kc.livejournal.com]

Here's two ways...

First, the easy way: Wrap the poem in <pre></pre> tags. That lets the web browser know that it's preformatted text, and will preserve your whitespace (tabs/spaces). The upside is that it's quick and easy. The downside is that, just using the <pre> tags your text will probably end up showing up in everyone's browser in a monospaced font like courier. To modify that behavior, you'll need to add a CSS style attribute to specify the font you want to use, like this: <pre style="font: 12pt 'Times New Roman';"> (For more CSS formatting info, you can peruse the CSS Level 2 Specification at w3c.org.)

Second, the harder way: Wrap each line in <div></div> tags that have a "style" attribute set, you can manually give eacn line a different margin this way (and/or font, color, size, etc.). It's done just like you would with the <pre> tags: <div style="margin-left: 0.5in">Miscellaneous text</div>. The upside is that this gives you much more detailed creative control over each line of the poem. The downside is that every time you want to change the style attributes, you have to create a new <div>, which can get tedious.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Many thanks, Drac! Expanding my knowledge of HTML, what a pal! I'll experiment with this.

[stephe.livejournal.com]

I had trouble with inserting tabs for one of the poems I posted. I thus also find the comments from draco_kc very helpful. Thanks.

Have you considered leaving in the paragraph breaks? There's a lot of disembodiment in the poems, and the breaks strengthen that theme.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Maybe. Disembodied is fine, but it's less coherent with the breaks, and that's a problem.