American Sentences in the Rain

My first time in New York, by the Hudson, under a black umbrella.
So much rain, waterlogged shoes, and Miss Liberty draped in cloud and fog.
Open umbrellas in an open-topped bus, watercolour city.
Dodging puddles on Fifth Avenue, we found shelter under awnings.
New York dripping in my ears, American sentences in the rain.

Kim M. Russell, 2017

American Sentences in the Rain

It was fifteen years ago, so I had to use an image found on Pinterest.

My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Sunday Mini Challenge Micro Poetry ~ Streetlight Rain

Today is the day we put the ‘mini’’ back into the Sunday Mini-Challenge and return to the option of form poetry. The object of this challenge is to write a poem in no more than 10 lines (but we may write in fewer than 10 lines all the way down to a single American sentence). We can choose our own form or write in free verse, if preferred.

Kerry tells us that the American Sentence as a poetic form was Ginsberg’s effort to make the haiku American: if a haiku is seventeen syllables going down in Japanese text, he would make the American Sentence seventeen syllables going across. In his book Cosmopolitan Greetings, he published two and a half pages of these nuggets, some of which had scene-setting preambles.

32 thoughts on “American Sentences in the Rain”

  3. These are wonderful, Kim. They capture the vagueness of memory, which holds on to impressions rather than sequences. I especially love the final sentence. It bridges experience and the art.

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