Dak so bodeut, so dak bodeut

There is little more harrowing, more ecstatic or strange, than to find oneself plunged into a world in which words—-which had hitherto been so prized, so steadfast (perhaps), which could be trusted to bubble up to the surface of the mind’s pool in those moments of dire necessity and slip as spindrift from the tongue’s crest to fall, with variable accuracy, upon the ear of a listener, and to often be understood in some half of their intent—-become utterly useless.

Nothing so starkly brings out that grunting, that gesticulating and speechless animal, lying seemingly clothed within language, yet pulling always nakedly the body’s strings beneath, as this.  I am become prehistoric man, stubbled, scrawling hieroglyphs of lamps and computer adapters, modems and cooking pots, among intelligent, effortlessly communicable individuals, gripped again by that frustration, that immediacy of thought and absence of object, which led us first to construct signs to describe our common experience of this place…

For in April—-which is, of course, intolerable—-when the trees (which I have no way to describe save by pointing, so look, if you will, at the trees!) when the trees have gone from bare to a fire of blossom to bare again in a matter of some two weeks, and the trunks and branches rouge slightly with a blush as if of blood from heat returning and days of rain and the tiny leaf buds and every limb upraised and waving—-what word is there between us to describe what moves them?  What sound but the close-cropped mane of every hill a horse’s neck bowed running?

Even with a common tongue their are vast discrepancies in our understanding.  Imagine if I were from Gansu, China, and you from the Great Gold Plains, and we two stood suddenly in an immense and empty whitewashed room with no paper or pen between us, how quickly we would exhaust our conversation.  There is a saying here:  Dak so bodeut, so dak bodeut (“as a chicken looks at a cow, as a cow looks at a chicken”).  We would be as two animals, mute, occupying space.  Perhaps we would mumble something unintelligible now and then, gesture with our arms, begin to talk eventually to ourselves, but the rift between us would be impassable.

That is until we began to construct a new system of signs.  For our old ones would be impotent here, in this space bereft of referential objects, from which our strange words could bounce and become illumined to the observer.  Here, however, if I crook my right arm, and splay my fingers perpendicularly to the incline of my forearm, it means the Ga Chi bird will bring a welcome guest.  It means my neck aches; the floor is hard.  And if you distend your stomach, grinning foolishly, stand on your right leg, and wave your left arm in circles above your head, index finger alone extended and pointing down, you are telling me the ornamental rug has been misplaced, and the walls are caving in.

This is all just to say how wonderful, how positively improbable it is, that you have some idea what I mean when I say, “I’ve dropped my notebook”, “My glass is empty”, “I will see you at 5:00″.

Allow yourself to lose yourself, be it at your lamplit desk, or your moon-washed backyard.  Find us out there, mumbling aloud, wandering around, asking to listen.

heart candy.

In preparation for the endless holiday season, New York’s Overlook Press has sent over a copy of Jerry Williams, Ph.D’s newly-released must-buy contemporary break-up poetry playlist:  It’s Not You, It’s Me.  Culled from poems that have consoled him through various states of distraught over the sharper edges of monogamous love, Williams and Overlook have created an anthology certain to provide comfort to purchasers of niche-collections everywhere.  Friend dumped?  Dumped yourself?  Dumping someone and don’t know how to say it in your own words?—

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Some Thursdays ago I attended a TUCR event featuring Linh Dinh, a poet, short fiction writer, and photographer, who resides in Philadelphia.  I was struck — as often a convincing writer can do — by Dinh’s seeming command of the language of his work, his assuredness as he clambered over the sometimes jarring terrain of his words, which words were in a language not his first.  ”Command,” in fact, may be misleading.  Say instead the speech embodied him, his entire form taking on the stature of his speaking.  Say he was possessed, a shifting sculpture of the sound.  Suffice it to say, a person could tell he spends time reading his own work aloud.

Before him, conversely, read a graduate student, who mumbled his poems as if simply trying to get them out of the way.  I’m sure, of course, there were nerves involved.  We were in a lecture hall, though as such it seemed small, and the seats were well filled with many new eyes, including my friend’s and mine.  And yet, there was a certain discomfort, it seemed, with the words themselves —  strangeness, as in the recognition of an old acquaintance with whom, at one time, one was dear friends — by which roundabout way I mean, he wasn’t quite embracing the work he wrote. Read more »

A familiarly young Wallace Stevens.

I was recently pointed digitally towards an article written by James Longenbach for The Nation—-a publication which appears both as an internet persona and in print—-pertaining to Wallace Stevens, a modernist poet whose work appeared between the years of 1927 and 1972.  Early on, the piece touches upon the seemingly strange duality of Stevens’ pursuits:  The first as the Vice President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he performed Surety Law; The second, the voice of reserved understanding we encounter in his poetry, a tone which we might recognize in The Snow Man: Read more »