Handy Syllables

"For from the root out, from all over the place, the syllable comes, the figures of, the dance ..."

While Olson isn't much fun, what with all the SHOUTING, I did dig a little on his devotion to syllabic weight. Syllabic history even. With apologies to Minola Prep, this is a pretty cool concept.

Olson talks about how "is" comes from an Aryan root "to breathe," how "be" comes from a root "to grow." These things suggest that we should respect syllabic connotations, that even the smallest utterance can carry this dense array of ideas. As others have pointed out, Olson isn't a linguistics guru, missing as he does the concept of phonemes. Though one syllable, "be" isn't the simplest construction: it's made of two phonemes. Still. What Olson misses isn't of much concern, since the reader is probably going to miss it all anyway, right? You have to ask: how would the poet's knowledge of syllabic history or reverence of syllables affect a reader who doesn't share that knowledge?

This gets us into the Minola Prep thing. You run, you impress with your display, your instinct. Not your history. But where O'Hara's flippancy is obviously funny--and I want to have a little farm with O'Hara somewhere on a brownstone roof, a roof farm full of quiche and fedoras--I wonder about its validity. Don't you hone instinct through experience? Let's say I understand and respect the smallest contortions of my calves and whatnot, allow that understanding to enhance my running. You can't see my fussing, but you sure as hell feel it when I escape your attempts to rob and bludgeon me.

Please stop trying to rob and bludgeon me. You are bordering on antisocial. You.

So this is what interests me: the mystical syllable. The syllable that does its work simply through effect. If I say "be," you with the evolution of language intact in your chemicals somehow hear "to grow." Here, I think, I'm getting at Olson's zealous froth, his !!! and devotion to Poetry's supernatural power. As I think Trisha pointed out, far less practical than we should probably be.

But it's still fun to imagine an intricate puzzle of syllables, crafted with a lore-heavy intention but designed to remove any lame-ass resonance of knowledge for knowledge's sake. Sheer effect. Effect due to history.

And then I think of something like a human scenic sublime. Some of my favorite poems are quite sublime, totally mysterious, lacking any "show of power" and still managing to pluck me in the hardest ways. Maybe it's because they're rooted in mythos and language so old that I feel the punch of that lineage? I imagine the poetry of Joseph Ceravolo or Frank Stanford bound up in this sort of thing. Is this obnoxious as that deep image shit?

I don't know. It seems sort of different than the concept of sublime as "never before seen, oh my god, i don't even know what to say, oh my god oh my god." One of my favorite examples of that type is from the movie Gummo, where the kid eats spaghetti in a bathtub. It's beyond beautiful or horrific: it's something I never imagined imagining.

Yet I feel the same thing from this Frank Stanford poem, even though maybe it's because of a rich linguistic (syllabic?) history, all these sounds and words and all their connotations:

Tale
--Frank Stanford

The maid used to pull the drapes
So I could see dust

When it didn't rain
I bought gum and worked in the boat
There was a locked up shack down the road
With a stack of records in the bedroom

We could tell when strangers were around
From what they drank

The girls waited in the orchards
There was no need to lie

***

I don't know. At some point, in poetry, in the best poetry, you hit something, you're unanchored, not unanchored like that boring Billy Collins quote about the cornfield, but you (you) are a little like that scene in the movie Labyrinth with David Bowie, when the girl falls down the hole and gets caught by the helping hands: these waves of disembodied, white-gloved hands, suddenly appearing and stretching out in all directions. All these hands! Where did they come from, who have they touched, which fingers have been burned, palms and knuckles, why are they linked, clasping you maybe, maybe just brushing--and you fall for a few seconds past all these hands. And then you're back again. And not sure what you saw, only that you saw through a field of hands that never seemed to start or end, a sort of temporary forever of hands.