One Word: Striking
While aiming a lens at my face, the photographer whispered, “You’re striking.”
This quality lives far from pretty. Daisies are pretty. Adolescent hamsters are pretty. William Wordsworth wrote pretty poetry. It wasn’t striking. Striking poetry ambushes us. The sensory details are chosen to paralyze, discomfit, or inflict pain. When such poetry bears lilies, they fester. When such poetry harbors horses, they crush toes. When such poetry casts a fishhook, its metal sinks into an open eye.
Striking phenomena resemble beautiful ones in their force and strength. “Beauty quickens,” said critic Elaine Scarry. “It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid.”
When I was
