Nathan McClain

cantfindit

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of fellowships from Sewanee Writers' Conference, The Frost Place, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in New York Times Magazine, Poem-a-Day, The Common, West Branch Wired, upstreet, and Foundry, among others. Source

The Sentence

begins with its subject,

          which is the sentence.

 

Track the sentence

          to find out what happens

 

or how it will act. It is

          the subject, after all. To track,

 

meaning keep an eye on,

          which is synecdoche,

 

part representing the whole

          of a thing. One

 

may track a package if he pleases.

          One may track a person,

 

though you’d probably want

          the whole of him, not only

 

an eye, or perhaps

          only an eye. Look how

 

the sentence is so capable

          of embracing contraction.

 

A him may function

          as a subject, but that depends

 

upon the sentence, i.e., A man

          is subject to his sentence.

 

You understand.

          Such syntax renders it like

 

a package showing evidence

          of having been tampered with—

Published:

2019

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Ars Poetica

Humor & Satire

Literary Devices:

Bleeding Title

when the title of a poem acts as the first line

Caesura

a break between words within a metrical foot

Personification

the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing

Synecdoche

a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa