The Most Social Thing

Listening to: Fairy Tales  / Anita Bakers     Mood:  slightly melancholy

This week I've thought a lot about language as a social dynamic. I was writing in my journal the other day and I concluded the days post with a personal observation that language was the most social thing people do. The next day I picked up from that point the night before because it seemed like a heavy way to leave the day's entry. I thought to myself that I needed to defend that pronouncement.

Picking up on this point I continued the conversation with myself yet another day.  I felt that I needed to define social for the sake of this argument and I did, assigning it this definition: actions or things people do in groups (group consisting of at least 2 or more).  My quick list of social activities then looked like this:

• dinning
• talking
• traveling
• work(ing)
• governing
• fighting
• sex
• playing
• reading

In all these activities talking/communicating aka language is or can be a factor. Yes, I suppose you can have silent sex, but it is certainly possible, even likely that language will play a role. While two people don't have to be together for reading, it remains an interaction at minimum between an author and at least one other reader. And so I concluded my second day journal entry feeling I had  justified  my original elevation of the significance of language in society today. It most often can and will be the center point of any other social undertaking.

With the decline of language skill among many American students it is easy to envision trouble ahead in their lives when a core part of their social interactions are hindered by marginalized language capabilities.  I'd like to believe that this trend is not permanent, but then I'd like to believe that poetry would also enjoy a renaissance. As the John Lennon song Imagine says, "you may say that I'm a dreamer."

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More on Truth and Poetics

The other night, I noted a quote by Laurie Sheck and then headed off to bed to contemplate her words. I'll repeat them here now.

"The poet unmasks the language of power. The language of power is the language of the lie."

As I thought that evening about her words, as well as the following day I kept coming back to the thought that if poetry unmasks the language of power, and the language of power is the language of the lie, then poetry must be about truth. But that was an easy step for me because I've come to accept poetry as in essence a truth.

Now I know there are plenty of individuals who fail to understand the concept of poetry as "a truth" but for those who might be reading this and shaking their head, let me explain.

Where you often here people argue the concept of poetry equals truth is they will often ask about a specific poem and the details therein. When they find that the poem is not specifically about an incident that really occurred to the poet, they will jump on that as fiction.

For some, truth is an absolute. It is indisputable. Within that context, if you hold something to be true but I hold something different to be true, one of us has to be wrong. It is an all or nothing proposition. In the realm of poetics today I think we must accept that there are truths that are less than absolute. We can see something and explain it for example in a metaphorical context. In fact you and I may explain it using different metaphors. You may be able to agree that you can see what I am saying but you might have chosen a totally different metaphor then I. In this way, language allows for truths that are not absolutes. It is in the language of poetry that we can see the same thing in different ways sometime looking squarely at that which is disingenuous and calling it out.

If language has power (and I believe it does) it has it to the extent that we allow it to. Poetry frees us to use language rather than allow language to control us. Through poetry, that lie is looking a little less secure to me.

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Though for the Day

If language did not affect behavior, it could have no meaning. ~Kenneth L. Pike

Gamers will 'w00t' over word of the year - Internet- msnbc.com

Gamers will 'w00t' over word of the year - Internet- msnbc.com: " Expect cheers among hardcore online game enthusiasts when they learn Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year. Or, more accurately, expect them to 'w00t.' 'W00t,' a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness, topped all other terms in the Springfield dictionary publisher's online poll for the word that best sums up 2007."

Poets and Evolution of Language

For me, poetry, more than any other form of literature has brought to the forefront a greater awareness of the dependence of language upon external factors. This underscores a dynamic of human communications that surprisingly make language subservient to both pictorial and emotional whims, and adds a layer of complexity that amazingly is evolutionary in nature.

Since poetry is generally regarded as the best words in the best order, such focus on word economy greater exposes each word to scrutiny, thus providing greater focus upon meaning. Individual words stand out far more in poetry than say fiction or essay or any other written communication endeavor.

It is amazing to me how the centenaries of language evolution must have progressed as man sought to find common quotients in expression. The transference from cryptic drawings to word sounds and the vastness of vocabulary expansion seems to me nothing short of phenomenal. There can be no mistaking this was an evolutionary process and it seems to me somewhat odd to think that even today this evolution is still in process right under our noses.

Is not the very articulation of metaphorical usage pushing the envelope of language? It seems to me the answer is yes, and in that context poets have a significant role to play in moving and shaking the language of our culture. The question I have, is which side of the curve are poets more often on? Are we ahead of the curve pulling language, or are we behind the curve pushing the cultural change of language as the read them in society today?

A childs view of broken

"I have woven a parachute out of everything broken." ~ William Stafford

Broken is such an useful word. As a child, I most recall broken as something that was most often very final but I hoped otherwise. It mostly related to toys. There was at first the expectation that an parent (being a duly qualified grown-up) could fix or reverse this condition and restore it to something close to original form.

As we grow older, we discover that many more things can be broken. Bones, promises, relationships. We break laws and sometimes laws themselves are broken and need to be fixed. Language, spirits and even society as a whole can be broken.

Stafford in this quote, appears to have maintained a bit of the child's view; that even the broken can be made into something useful. Perhaps in our naivety, we have only hope and the cynic in us has not yet developed. A process that is more likely to come with the passage of time through experiences.

Keeping such hope, especially in light of inexplicable tragedy like we have experienced in the recent events at Virginia Tech, is a good thing. Believing we can still achieve something meaningful out of such loss is important to us all.

The poet William Stafford speaks of weaving a parachute out of everything broke. We need a parachute right now. Something to break our fall. Giving hope of something other than a broken spirit. We need Stafford's view of life.