Timing and subversion are the twin engines of poetic craft.
Timing gives a poem its pulse, the periodic pause that reframes a line, the run-ons that tip meaning.
The withheld word turns expectation into revelation.
Subversion supplies the charge: a familiar image refracted, grammar bent to new purpose, an idiom undone to expose an surprise.
Together they arrest and dislocate the reader, making language do two jobs at once—comfort and surprise, recognition and rupture.
Master craft is not in grand statements but in the small, precise gestures.
A poem’s cadence converts ordinary speech into something that lingers, unsettles, and opens.
