http://theblogpoetic.wordpress.com/
Alexis Orgera lives in Florida. She is the author of How Like Foreign Objects, available from H_ngm_n BKS, and two chapbooks: Illuminatrix (Forklift, Ink) and Dear Friends, The Birds Were Wonderful! (Blue Hour Press). She also writes at The Blog Poetic.
“…the dogma that words come to us out of the past with proper meanings—fixed and immutable—is a fallacy. The only meanings a word has are those that the speakers of the language choose to give it.” The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing
This from Wikipedia’s entry on linguistic prescription:
In linguistics, prescription denotes normative practices on such aspects of language use as spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and syntax. It includes judgments on what usages are socially proper and politically correct. Its aims may be to establish a standard language, to teach what is perceived within a particular society to be “correct” forms of language, or to advise on effective communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might (appear to) be resistant to language change; if the usage preferences are radical, prescription may produce neologisms.
Prescriptive approaches to language are often contrasted with descriptive linguistics, which observes and records how language is practiced. The basis of linguistic research is text (corpus) analysis and field studies; yet description includes each researcher’s observations of his and her (own) language usage. Despite apparent opposition, prescription and description (how language should be used, and how language is used) exist in a complementary dynamic tension of mutual linguistic support.
Again, from Kane in Oxford: “Words, then, are far from being tokens of fixed and permanent value. They are like living things, complex, many-sided, and responsive to pressures from their environment. They must be handled with care.”
I love the freedom of language, neologisms, mutability–moments that allow for creative energy. I also love grammar, rules, usages that make the reading experience universal. Maybe that’s why I write poems and edit. This is a political topic, to be sure, but it’s definitely a matter of craft as well.
Where, as a writer, do you think should be and is [of how language is used] meet?
which we were doing at some point in the last 10 or so posts, there’s a prose poem of hers from Plainwater that makes me want to die.
On Waterproofing
Franz Kafka was Jewish. He had a sister, Ottla, Jewish. Ottla married a jurist, Josef David, not Jewish. When the Nuremburg Laws were introduced to Bohemia-Moravia in 1942, quiet Ottla suggested to Josef David that they divorce. He at first refused. She spoke about sleep shapes and property and their two daughters and a rational approach. She did not mention, because she did not yet know the word, Auschwitz, where she would die in October 1943. After putting the apartment in order she packed a rucksack and was given a good shoeshine by Josef David. He applied a coat of grease. Now they are waterproof, he said.
Have we mentioned that the winter issue of Sixth Finch is alive and kickin’?? As usual, Rob has put together a superb issue of poetry und art. Go to, go to.
Did we also mention Issue #22 of Forklift, Ohio? Oh yes. I’d say buy one now. What a fantab lineup.
5
this works in the bedrock, too, or undifferentiated gas:
one feels up the two legs of the possibility and, ever
tightening and steered, rises to the crux, to find
there the whole mystery, the lush squeeze, the centering
and prolongation: so much so that the final stone
never locks the peak but inlet: outlet opens unfolding
into nothingness’s complete possibility, the strangling
through into the darkness of futurity: it is hard at this
point to avoid some feeling, however abstract the circumstance:
if one can get far enough this way where imagination
and flesh strive together in shocking splendors, one can
forget that sensibility is sometimes dissociated and come:
…
1
The sexual basis of all things rare is really apparent
and fools crop up where angels are mere disguises:
a penetrating eye (insight), a penetrating tongue (ah),
a penetrating penis and withal a penetrating mind,
integration’s consummation: a com- or intermingling of parts,
heterocosm joyous, opposite motions away and toward
along a common line, the in-depth knowledge (a dilly),
the concentration and projection (firmly energized) and
the ecstasy, the pay off, the play out, the expended
nexus nodding, the flurry, cell spray, finish, the
haploid hungering after the diploid condition: the reconciler
of opposites, commencement, proliferation, ontogeny:
…
A latent review of Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James Books) by Chad Sweeney.
I have a confession to make. I’ve been a rotten reader. In six months, I’ve read two novels, a few sporadic articles, and maybe one or two books of poetry—cover to cover. Maybe I don’t belong here. Maybe I’m an impostor in the ranks. But, whatever.
That said, I have my reasons for shelving my skillz for more potent, if untenable, desires.
Lately, as I’m climbing back into my reading chair and remembering how comfortable it can be, I feel this way:
LOGGIA DOCUMENT
I’ve looked for it under tables
among junkyard cats
fussing dead things.
Its letters turn
with barrow birds
in sleeves of warehouse glass.
It rattles
the pampas grass,
one dry word seven summers long.
I’ve knelt in the twilight of idols.
I’ve chipped my teeth
on the bright water.
This is the final poem of Chad Sweeney’s book, Parable of Hide and Seek. “Its letters turn / with barrow birds / in sleeves of warehouse glass.” Read that aloud. Do you hear the rhythm? Do you see the fragility of language in the shards of warehouse glass?
Sweeney’s book is swimming in these charged moments. Its one of those twenty-five or so books I’ve had stacked on my desk to review for months, one of those books I’ve picked up sporadically and read a poem at a time. What I’ve discovered through my stunted reading practice is this: Duh, a good book of poems wants reading—and, sure, poets (and their friends and editors) spend a lot of time sequencing poems in a collection, thinking about narrative structure and flow—but Parable of Hide and Seek has convinced me that a good book of poems wants each of its individual poems savored, wants its vertices studied, wants you to read a poem to your dog each night before bed—more than it wants you to read it cover to cover with a fabricated purpose.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (in clay) from Bullhead Entertainment:
I have the antibodies for an autoimmune disorder called Hashimoto’s Disease, which is the precursor to hypothyroidism. It’s not so bad when kept under control, but occasionally my thyroid gets sluggish, poor guy, and the great world spins. It fucking spins. This morning, amidst wrinkled-sheets depression, difficultly swallowing, extreme cold, racing heartbeat, and some vertigo, I finished reading the 2009 National Book Award Winner, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.
I think maybe I’ve been reading this book since 2009, with my own world spinning much more viscerally around me, with seemingly more interesting books finding their way into my view. I wasn’t happy about this book for a while, and I couldn’t make myself finish it. The shifting voices wrenched me out of “the zone.” (Even though I loved, for instance, Olsen’s Calendar of Regrets, the characters of which had much more tenuous connections.) Many of said voices, particularly McCann’s take on a black hooker, seemed inauthentic and weird.
The book centers around one real-life event, Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, but it’s about much more: the interconnectedness of the fictional people surrounding the event. So I sat down this morning, feeling all thyroid-y and spinny and fatty, and I finished the book. Maybe it’s because my world’s spinning at the moment, but I finished that last page and I cried. I thought back to all the beautiful parts of the book, and I realized that I could probably forgive some of its missteps simply for the way it weaves the changed and changing lives of strangers together–from a hippie Irish monk to bald circuit court judge to a group of mothers who’ve lost their sons in Vietnam to a mother-daughter prostitute team–for the beauty of chance, how chance dangles like a tightrope walker above us, in Ferlinghetti’s words, “constantly risking absurdity and death.” I don’t know. The jury’s still out, I guess, until I get my thyroid levels back in order. Days like these, I can’t handle it, reader, that you and I could be connected by the invisible wire of something we both experienced separately many years ago, or something we both missed altogether, the absence of which has shaped us.
School’s out, and now it’s grading time. The students in my Deeper Poetics class turned in final portfolios last week, which include 5-7 page prefaces outlining their poetics in terms of what we studied (poetry and prose about poetry) throughout the semester. In true procrastinator form, I’ve only read five of the portfolios, but what I’m struck by is how each student took something distinct, and distinctly her/his own, from the class.
Against the backdrop of essays by James Tate and Heather McHugh, one student, Kejt, writes about her Quaker roots, and how during Sunday service, “I sit in the pews with everyone else in stillness, and we wait.” She goes on:
In poetry, the silence is just as important as the words chosen. To wrestle with and engage poetry fully we have to come to grips with our terror of silence, of emptiness, of lack. There are a lot of reasons for this societal fear of not speaking, and my Quaker beliefs compel me sometimes to spend time considering why we’ve built a culture without much room or gratitude for silence. Poetry has to contend with wordlessness, though, has to touch it, caress it, and circumnavigate it.
Wow. Beautiful, huh?
And on revision, Andrew writes:
Much of my stylistic growth, I feel, is attained through increasing the volume of my output, that is to say, by writing more poems. I’ve adapted the revision process to suit my needs according to that acquired knowledge. Thus, revision has become to me not the process of modifying an existing draft of a poem to more clearly articulate its project, but reemploying the elements of a single image or idea in order to produce as many variations of one concept as a I possibly can. The result is a method of revision that reproduces a poem so many different ways they hardly resemble a single source.