My ModPo, a Well-Lighted Place
Note: revised as of July 31, 2026
by Alonna Shaw
Humans need interaction, whether sitting around a campfire sharing stories or at a coffee shop with a poem instead of a device. This essay is my personal inquiry: How much explaining makes a difference? Maybe, sometimes, none is most effective. Now I will describe my journey, a.k.a. "explain" quite a bit.
More than a coffee break, time disappears when our brains, hearts, and nervous systems can enjoy a "connection" break, get out of our apartments, out of the office, and go to a place that doesn't require preparation, a place that welcomes that part of us that we keep inside, that rarely gets to come out and play. We can be vulnerable together, just wondering out loud why that word, that way?
Joy through the light of others, camping out around an arrangement of words, while our spark kindles back into the air where it can grow.
That is ModPo in a nutshell, online and in person. We gather together. That is a foundational way I continue to teach myself, by supporting others in their curiosity. They teach me. When Al Filreis conveyed that we could read poems closely, openly, collaboratively, and adventurously, not as a mystery to solve for a single cryptic meaning, my eyes began to shine.
The course uses words that confused me: close reading, parataxis, meta-poetry, open, and difficult. My mind didn't shift all at once. I gradually came to understand and absorb this fresh way. The guiding principles were DIFFERENT, unexpected, and filled with engagement, risk, and adventure; a.k.a. FUN, which appealed to the straight-A kid I had been who loved to learn but needed a challenge.
Parataxis, the word itself, kind of hurt my brain every time I heard it. Merriam-Webster defines parataxis as placing clauses or phrases one after another without coordinating or subordinating connectives; Cambridge similarly emphasizes the absence of a conjunction showing their relationship. In other words, parataxis leaves out explanatory words. Figure it out on your own, kind of thing. There is an absence of words like: because, although, since, or while to guide our thinking about what or which is more important. This lack of direction leaves the door open for readers to explore what is on the page.
While juxtaposition is a broader, less specific placing, parataxis asks more of the reader.
My own mind is especially drawn to juxtaposition. I enjoy noticing things. I hold fragments, images, memories, and moments together until relationships begin to emerge. Learning ModPo's perspective on parataxis gave me a literary language for understanding what I had already been practicing, but upped the game. I needed to question my use of explaining: is that really the goal, or is it something deeper?
A poem does not always tell us how to connect the pieces. It lets relational meaning happen. These side-by-side pieces are the moments in life and art that bring a smile, flipping a switch to "on." I think in collaged images, so this feels comfortable.
As my story unfolds, I'll include a Parataxis Playlist that traces my own path toward understanding the term. Some works use parataxis directly; others helped me approach it through juxtaposition, line breaks, accumulation, or visual analogy.
My Parataxis Playlist: Julia Vinograd, "Why I Write Poetry." This poem juxtaposes widely varied images within a connected line of thought. How paratactic is it? Not strongly paratactic, because the poem guides us through its developing intention. Imagery includes God, friends, sea turtles, Saturn, melon, a paper bird, and a rope of words.
Strangely, I can still have a negative reaction when the word poetry is brought up. Maybe it's a preemptive way of indicating my interest and approach aren't connected to that inherited use, which is bogging down the word?
I've come to think of poetry as conversation. There is no big mystery to solve. A conversation starts by noticing something in ourselves when we first read something, or when a word, a line, a repetition, or perhaps the space in a poem prompts a question. Look for what is vague. Notice what catches, unsettles, puzzles, or opens a question. Then someone shares what they notice, maybe why this is placed next to that, and so on. How is uncertainty delivered to us on the page? Life is vague and difficult. Why shouldn't a poem talk to us in that gray language we know?
Grownups need play, too, not as an escape from seriousness but as another way to expand our perspectives, rather like writers must put their project away before revising, so they can return with fresh eyes. I must confess, a little spontaneous silliness won't hurt. Do we take ourselves too seriously?
My way into acknowledging that my truer, internal self needed to come out and play was through kind encouragement in the online chat threads, back in 2015; each time a community teaching assistant (CTA) said hello, pointed me to something, noticed something about a comment I'd made, or suggested that I post a thread asking my question. What really spoke to my heart were images. The CTAs started a visual thread of paintings and other art as poetry.
It almost didn't matter that we were there for poetry. We were there for a different way of doing things. These modern and contemporary poems were doing things differently from many of the poems I had been taught. The relief and joy for me was the freedom in discovering that a poem could be entered, questioned, broken open, and shared.
My experience with ModPo did not start out easy because I had a habit of trying too hard at everything. And I didn't understand my relationship with poetry, despite having written it since childhood.
Art and writing develop through stages of revision, while collaborative close reading gives me an opportunity to light up with connections without the labor of new creation. Instead, it happens through conversation because I have lived a life and bring myself. That is all I need as preparation: to be a human, vulnerable, and engaged, engines on. That is how we bridge different lanes in life and connect what we know to what others do. That is the carrier engine: intention and attention, not constant examination of what the poetic metrical feet might be hammering out, in my opinion that is.
I particularly gravitate toward poets whose lives move in more than one lane and who weave the mundane into poems. Mundane isn't necessarily bad; it can point to how we fill our days, the "plot line" of our lives. A poet can be a doctor, an accountant, a scientist, a parent, a salesman, a hospital cleaner, an art curator, a truck driver, a jack-of-all-trades just getting by, etc., composing poems in scraps of moments.
We write while working at something, taking care of loved ones, and supporting those who need us. But did we forget to light our own fire before rising up to greet the sun each day? Let's call that flicker our "heart line." Our love story includes our own lives, too.
Philip Levine's "What Work Is" may not be a standard ModPo poem, but it belongs near the conversation campfire for me. When you get to those last lines, you'll know something about what poetry has given me: a way to ask what work makes impossible, or suddenly possible, in the plotline and heartline of our lives. The blur of rain can reveal what has and hasn't been attended to. The blur of life.
My Parataxis Playlist: Philip Levine, "What Work Is." This poem uses narrative juxtaposition, placing work, rain, waiting, mistaken recognition, and brotherly love within a developing story. How paratactic is it? Not primarily paratactic, because the poem continually connects and explains its situations. I initially experienced its scenes, in my mind, as static frames like in a graphic novel, but they flow as a continuous narrative.
So, I am here, doing some more explaining.
Ever since reading every book in my grade school's very small library, I thought I had discovered a way to widen myself. I would learn and experience everything, bring it all into my field of vision. What I couldn't find in books, surely the grownups knew. So my process started young: read, then confirm with the people who knew, or did they? I used to think that there were right answers.
I must've read Emily Dickinson back when I was eight or nine. Her influence is clear in poems I have written ever since, yet I didn't feel authorized to belong to poetry because I didn't find my way into the space and text of formal poetry… or Shakespeare. I couldn't find an opening, couldn't connect with that kind of structure or sound. Art filled that void. It gave me permission to exist as I needed to, yet still I remained isolated and solitary.
Maybe you have experienced this too, a feeling inside about your own creative impulses, but were unsure what was "allowed"? Or how to move forward?
What if someone found out that I wrote poems, had collections, wrote while driving, wrote at auditions, wrote on my scripts, wrote in those moments in the car watching Los Angeles rain stream down the windshield before going in for a meeting? Any scrap of paper, receipt, or takeout bag would become my page.
Back in 2015, we had just unpacked after a cross-country road trip, and I was sick. I wasn't going to sit around being unproductive, so I signed up for the Coursera online course ModPo, hosted by Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania.
I was grumpy, somewhat abrasive in my unsure interactions in the forum conversations … I was on the verge of letting out my secret, but I was afraid. How do I admit my connection with poetry since childhood, when it is "WRONG" according to the poetry I learned throughout school and in college?
My Parataxis Playlist: William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow." This poem uses lineation, the deliberate arrangement of language into lines, to separate parts of one grammatical sentence so that each image can stand out. How paratactic is it? It creates some paratactic effect, but its syntax remains connected. The wheelbarrow, rainwater, and white chickens occupy distinct visual spaces while remaining parts of one sentence.
Recognizing parataxis in many of the poems I encountered through the course helped me trust that my own collage-thinking had real wings. I really needed to let go of explaining, though. I'm often too abstract, protectively opaque, so maybe there is a diffused gray area ahead in my creative work to reduce explaining and let the work convey, well, something unexplained.
In the past, I've described my art, editing, writing, and tone as minimal, and affectionately, myself as a robot lacking a warm fuzziness (until AI put a negative spin on that by invading our screens with a bizarre world of language that is no longer "Lost in Space" ... I can see that robot's arms flailing filled with warning for Will Robinson). When I'm not being abstract, I can be a little too direct at times.
On a softer note, in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," Hemingway begins, "It was very late and everyone had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the trees made against the electric light." From my artist's perspective, this has a paratactic feel in the way images accumulate, but it is constructed inside a grammatically connected sentence, so not literal parataxis. We can enjoy the descriptive stepping stones that ask us to be in the space and not just read about it: café, old man, shadow, leaves, electric light.
Hemingway's sentence gathers these images before the larger story reveals their emotional importance.
Looking at things from angles other than eye level appeals to me. In David Hockney's photographic collage Pearblossom Hwy., he describes his process of shifting perspective by photographing a road sign while on a ladder, capturing the top edge of the sign. He brings that altered perspective into the larger piece, leaving the viewer with a subconscious feeling that isn't obvious at first: something is different here.
My Parataxis Playlist: David Hockney, Pearblossom Hwy. This photographic collage is not linguistic parataxis but a visual analogy to it. As Hockney describes in Huell Howser's Videolog, separate photographs, angles, scales, road signs, intersections, desert, car, and text are assembled within one field of vision, subtly shifting the viewer's perspective.
As a visual analogy, Hockney's collage helps me think about how fragments can retain their distinct perspectives while entering into relationships with one another.
Let's be poetic rebels and toss out the idea of hierarchy and lose "this is more important than that." Let's ask: What is the space doing? How is the work directing or refusing to direct our attention? Hockney offers a visual way to understand what the course helped me hear in poems.
I now had language for a process I had already been living through before I knew how to name it.
In much of my writing, I was already drawn to fragments, place, image, and memory. My work gained focus and began to grow.
In my own visual poetry and film work, including That Spot, Tidal Language, "Thingy Thing Paper Woman Centos," and Memory's Line, I often bring image, language, body, and place into the same field before I know what they might mean. Even the garbled remains of a floppy disc, which I harvested for my found-language experimental poems with translations, create a current-day experience when read with modern eyes.
Some of my favorite tools of perception are juxtaposition, spatial relation, and restraint. Maybe I should ditch the explaining? Then I could see what parataxis does in my work, how it might move beyond my language and leave an impression.
We can create that parataxis just by being present, while gathered around a poem in a space filled with our light and shadows. Maybe that is part of the point: being people together in our many vulnerable, light, lonely, dark, safe ways of holding life together. Or maybe the inherent desire for connection becomes connecting conjunctions, so maybe narrative juxtaposition still has a place in our hearts?
So maybe the answer is sometimes, don't explain. Other times, maybe a little helps ... it's too bad "and" automatically indicates one before the other? And is a pretty good word. I suppose if we omit "and," then we could just say "we." Tangents do interrupt. Sunshine gets past Cumulus.
My Parataxis Playlist: Rae Armantrout, "Speech Acts." The poem places phrases, fragments, and images beside one another without supplying explanatory bridges. How paratactic is it? Strongly paratactic. Their relationships remain open for readers to explore. Examples include "mama turnpike," "sexy tough shit," "steady state," "thought bubble song," and "churn."
The community supported me through my discomfort as I went on my adventure to get the hang of this new-to-me poetic way. They invited questioning and ushered my slow arrival of illumination. This kind place became my wonderland of Oz. I learned to free my heart to have a brain, to embrace splendid mistakes, and to feel at home.
Those dear CTAs were the special messengers, the Lions, Scarecrows, Tin Men, and Dorothys. In the light and in the shadows, always there: Borkowscy, Teri, M.C. … I want to name you all. I became a CTA the next year, and then the online Global Study Group became my family. Gwen and I still continue our poem exchange. Now it is 2026, and I've connected with my in-person Tokyo group who bring me such joy. Thank you. I'm excited to see where our adventure goes, and we are all there … here.
During those ten weeks in 2015, and a second bout of the flu, I traveled roads once thought inaccessible. I tasted new ways for words to flutter. I touched the sky. The ground beneath me became solid. And my creative work matured in ways it could not have without the endless learning that goes on in my Oz. There was a place for someone like me, like anyone.
I most appreciate that we arrive there as readers, listeners, or noticers.
The warm kindness of the community provided so much. Let's call it a safe, warm place filled with the strength of shadows who have our backs.
"This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves."—Ernest Hemingway, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," 1933
A place can have shadows and still feel safe. Things said too directly can burn like the midday sun.
In ModPo, a poem is not treated as a locked room with one correct key. It is more like a lit place with shadows, where we don't need to be experts; we are free to notice different openings between the shapes. We can be there together and look.
My Parataxis Playlist: the "tears in rain" monologue spoken by Roy Batty in the 1982 film Blade Runner. This is primarily a cinematic catalog that juxtaposes memories from one life. How paratactic is it? Its paratactic effect is limited because the speaker, dramatic situation, and emotional movement connect the experiences. The memory cluster includes attack ships, Orion, C-beams, the Tannhäuser Gate, moments, time, and rain.
Rae Armantrout's poem helped me understand the distinction clearly: parataxis is not simply the placement of different things together. It occurs when language places elements side by side without supplying the explanatory bridge that tells us exactly how to connect or rank them.
Roy Batty's monologue then returns the playlist to "human" experience. His memories are connected as one life, but their gathering reminds us that each person's moments matter. What we have carried does not have to close the path; placed beside new experience, it may help another path come into view.
Writing this essay became a learning journey for me, too. By constructing the playlist, I could wander among these works and notice where juxtaposition, lineation, accumulation, visual analogy, and parataxis meet and where they differ.
I asked where the breaks occur, what the spaces and pauses are doing, why these things have been placed beside one another, and how much explanation the work provides. Rae Armantrout's poem brought the distinction into focus: I recognized parataxis when the language withheld the bridge and invited me to remain alert inside the relationship between fragments.
Reading poems closely has helped me accept my life's many lanes and how collaboration with others opens possibilities I might never have reached alone. It seems simple, but sometimes rain blurs things, and we might need a second look at what is right in front of us.
That is how I feel about poetry now. We are luminous fragments. Why not share them?
ModPo is the free online course Modern & Contemporary American Poetry, hosted by Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. Participants need no prior experience with poetry.
For more on parataxis: "On parataxis," a short ModPo video on YouTube. There is a special acknowledgment at the 4:45 mark about Perelman's poem; the entire conversation is helpful.
Notes / References:
ModPo, Modern & Contemporary American Poetry, Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "Parataxis."
Cambridge Dictionary, "Parataxis."
Julia Vinograd, "Why I Write Poetry." Discussed in ModPo, "Julia Vinograd's 'Why I Write Poetry,'" with Ken Paul Rosenthal, Kelly Writers House / ModPo, June 5, 2026.
Philip Levine, "What Work Is," in What Work Is, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow," originally published as section XXII in Spring and All, 1923.
Ernest Hemingway, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," Scribner's Magazine, March 1933; later collected in Winner Take Nothing, 1933.
David Hockney, Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986, #2, 1986. Photographic collage / chromogenic print. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and Huell Howser, Videolog, 1988.
Rae Armantrout, "Speech Acts," The New Republic, March 2, 2015.
Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, 1982. "Tears in rain" monologue spoken by Roy Batty, performed by Rutger Hauer; screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, with Hauer's alteration of the final speech widely documented.
Alonna Shaw, Tidal Language, "Thingy Thing Paper Woman Centos," Memory's Line; and That Spot on YouTube; "0.SCR" and "AWARE.DEF" with translations published in filling Station Magazine, Issue 71, Science & Tech, March 2019.
