Smorg -
"Suffered accordingly" is horrific as a sonic. Listen to it: "Suffered" flows smoothly and then is abruptly cut off by the hard "ed." You then introduce a hard "acc" followed by a hard "ord" and then a soft "ingly." It's not particularly appealing to listen to, but if you switch it, "Accordingly suffered," you have a much more pleasing sound. "Suffered accordingly" sounds like a train wreck.
No doubt switching them has a certain effect: "Suffered accordingly" puts the suffering in proportion to their actions, whereas "Accordingly suffered" puts their actions in proportion to suffering. The former is superfluous.
Your short lines are jarring. They don't cause the poem to read faster - that's something your words alone will do (and how? through sonics, precisely, through words rolling into each other like a cascade), and the structure will only help or hurt (but won't make it happen). Just look at the first four real lines:
I hope you
understand why
your favorite sports team
lost yesterday.
What's the purpose of the enjambment here? It doesn't make the poem "read faster." To reiterate, we don't read a poem's structure, we read its words. The structure is far more valuable in amplifying and conveying the poem's situation: it effectively "situates" the poem, and it needs to do that with respect to the poem's meaning. The machine gun lines don't accomplish that; I'd say they works towards opposite ends...
Take care,
Brad
Points: 890
Reviews: 915
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