Ange Mlinko

Breakthroughs

If I had to pinpoint the moment when I stopped feeling lonely as a poet, it would have to be the day I picked up Susan Stewart’s Poetry and the Fate of the Senses at the St. Mark’s Bookshop five years or so ago. Perhaps I am reminded of it because, looking back at my previous three posts, I feel an unacknowledged debt to it. Or perhaps because of the unusual flood of sensation that accompanies the change of seasons. The eruption of molars–my son’s—could be part of it. One can’t avoid reflecting on bodies, pain, and intersubjectivity when a baby lifts his grimacing face to you for comfort, and the burden is on you to figure out the trouble when right through the O of his groan you see the startling white gleam breaking on the swollen gums.

10.01.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (15)

Ange Mlinko

Nowhere’s Vernacular

I [heart] A.E. Stallings’s post on the vernacular:

Do I think the “plain-spoken” impetus in poetry has gone to far? Yes. “Plain-spoken” often just means dull and listless and unimaginative writing. Real plain-spoken people are more imaginative than that. “Idiomatic” after all, is Greek for “individual,” for “peculiar.”

There are poets who do plainspoken masterfully, and then there are the imitators. It’s a paradox that beginning students are always struck by: poetry is made up of the language we all use, but not everyone can just toss off poems. Even the plainspoken is a style, wrested through hard-won technique. (I think of James Schuyler, who was W.H. Auden’s personal secretary in Ischia; he once said of Auden’s work, If that’s poetry, I guess I’ll never be a poet. The irony is that one could say the same thing of Schuyler’s work. It’s that peculiar.)
Stallings’s post touched off another set of associations on a parallel track. I, too, was an ex-pat for a while—just a short year—in Ifrane, Morocco, in 1999. It wasn’t long enough to miss the American vernacular, but I became keenly aware for the first time of the jeers aimed at my native tongue. “Ah, American,” a librarian told my husband, wagging her head. “The Berber English!” Berber, of course, is one of the indigenous languages of Morocco, but you know—a redneck dialect. The Queen’s English was like to Classical Arabic. That was just the Moroccan view—you don’t want to know what the British academics thought of us!

09.18.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)