Simple Declarative Sentences
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The teacher told me to use them much more oftenthan not, especially when I wanted to sayhow I felt about just looking at anything,not her, but out the window at a treeor a dog or a street or the other wing of the schoolwhere other pupils like me might be making facesbecause they weren't thinking about their lessonsor paying attention either. She said my pencilsneeded sharpening too, and though I was,well, promising, I couldn't count on herto promise me an A instead of a D-Minusif I didn't simplifymy syntax once in a while to Concrete Subject,Active Verb, and Direct Object ifI wanted to take the next step up those stairsinto high school where it was pen and ink and paperwith no pre-printed, prearranged parallel linesto keep me somewhat in line and where teacherswere even less permissive than she wasabout loose sentences whose modifierswent trailing off into nowhere, leaving behindlittle or nothing worth remembering,so I really tried and did my best to keep themshort and direct and pointed like exclamationsand as simple as they could be except sometimes. [End Page 527]
David Wagoner has published twenty books of poems, most recently After the Point of No Return, (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He has also published ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Ruth Lilly Prize in 1991, six yearly prizes from Poetry, two yearly prizes from Prairie Schooner, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for twenty-three years. He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to 2002, and he is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington. He teaches at the low-residency MFA program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop.
