It’s 1:53pm on Sunday, August 14th, and my response to Sarah Boyle’s poem Darling of the Wolf God must be turned in on the 15th, so arguably nobody is “under the wire” for another 24 hours and yet panic has set into my fingertips and I’ve spent the morning irritable and pacing. Let me speak clearly — I love this poem. I first read this poem over a year ago, and each time I read the poem I am reminded of how and why I love the poem… in a way I feel completely unable to translate into language. I’ve been avoiding sitting down to write because Wolf God slams me against the shore of precisely what it is that makes me hold the written word so close. Maybe that’s the kind of thing you don’t want to describe, don’t want to pull through the madness of midnight to the bleak clarity of morning because there are feelings and there are words and sometimes the two really ought to take a break from each other. Anyway. It’s 2:06pm now. So I’m going to try.
As a tween I kept a journal in transliterated Elvish, like Lord of the Rings Elvish. Someone told me recently that the term “tween” is confusing; that nobody knows what it means. I’ll probably never know what it was I wrote about in that journal but I find it really fascinating that in the “grand scheme of things,” as they say, my hidden diaries and secret codes obfuscate my past above all from myself. I am thinking about Sarah and twenty years from now, when her knowledge of Old English, already tested by the pidgin reconstructing seen in Wolf God, grows fainter, displaced by more important memories of ————. What is it to read something you wrote and no longer understand it, not conceptually but literally? In an essay for the Poetry Foundation, author Ocean Vuong writes, “English readers will understand more clearly what I want to say to my mother than my mother ever will,” a sentence immediately comprehensible to the rest of us first-and-a-half generation immigrants, those that came to the United States young enough to gain fluency in one language while losing it in another. As soon as one crosses the border, the clock starts ticking down the time until child and parents no longer speak the same tongue. Wolf God is a border-poem.
It’s also a middle finger to the concept of readability, to the breaking down of things for everyone’s comprehension. Similarly, it rejects the idea that mass appeal has any true ties to value, something all writers struggle with as the publishing industry grows more and more inhospitable to anything beyond cookbooks and adult coloring books. “Either you read for information, say to learn something, or it’s only worth reading fiction if it’s a sweeping, grand book,” writes Jenny Zhang in an interview with Nate Brown for the LA Review of Books. “It’s only worth spending your time with a novel if it can be a contender for the Great American Novel, if it’s a multigenerational saga, if it covers historically significant events, if it’s about war and peace. Otherwise, it’s too small somehow and lacking in practical value, and your time would be better spent on reading nonfiction or a newspaper.” In another world, I ask Sarah about entry barriers in writing, and how all written work by a woman or other marginalized person is inherently seen as incomprehensible but also not worth the effort of comprehending. Wolf God challenges the reader line by line — how far will you go with a work you don’t understand? How much empathy do you have for your younger self, who while learning English was perpetually surrounded by meanings that were just slightly out of reach?
It’s 2:45pm and my ears are ringing. I developed tinnitus last year as a side-effect of the Wellbutrin I take daily, and I frequently have to enable closed captions when I watch films now, because otherwise I can’t grasp as much of what is going on. I know others who will not watch films with subtitles because “it’s not worth it,” and I think about Bush’s song Personal Holloway, where the word “paracetamol” caused me to change the letters to numbers and add them in the search of meaning I was positive had been put there. In college, I learned that “paracetamol” is just the UK term for “acetaminophen.” Grass is something you smoke, birds are something you shag. I read Wolf God again and wonder about the children raised with Esperanto as their native language in the same world where one oughtn’t write marketing copy above a second-grade reading level. Esperanto was planned to be the international method of communication before being supplanted by English. Is it surprising that all the languages pushed towards international use are Eurocentric? Is it more surprising that Esperanto was banned in the Soviet Union?
I’m wandering off the path, maybe, or perhaps there wasn’t a path to begin with. In linguistics, a “garden path sentence” is a sentence whose onset words or clauses cause you to parse it incorrectly, leaving you feeling jarred by what is technically a grammatically correct construction. Example: The old man the boat. In newspaper headlines, these are known as “crash blossoms.” Wikipedia has an entire page devoted to example sentences used often in linguistics classes, incomprehensible sentences constructed from small words everyone knows. Wolf God is a syntactician and a psychologist meeting for cheap wine and ravioli in a cream sauce. It’s all the bizarre words for “mix”: farrago, mishmash, potpourri, hodgepodge, gallimaufry. Even now, thousands of years in, there are so many interesting things being done with language, with communication, and with understanding. So many stories that walk the tightrope of clarity, play with the scraps of meaning stuck between the refrigerator and the wall. It’s 3:17pm. This is one of them.
As a tween I kept a journal in transliterated Elvish, like Lord of the Rings Elvish. Someone told me recently that the term “tween” is confusing; that nobody knows what it means. I’ll probably never know what it was I wrote about in that journal but I find it really fascinating that in the “grand scheme of things,” as they say, my hidden diaries and secret codes obfuscate my past above all from myself. I am thinking about Sarah and twenty years from now, when her knowledge of Old English, already tested by the pidgin reconstructing seen in Wolf God, grows fainter, displaced by more important memories of ————. What is it to read something you wrote and no longer understand it, not conceptually but literally? In an essay for the Poetry Foundation, author Ocean Vuong writes, “English readers will understand more clearly what I want to say to my mother than my mother ever will,” a sentence immediately comprehensible to the rest of us first-and-a-half generation immigrants, those that came to the United States young enough to gain fluency in one language while losing it in another. As soon as one crosses the border, the clock starts ticking down the time until child and parents no longer speak the same tongue. Wolf God is a border-poem.
It’s also a middle finger to the concept of readability, to the breaking down of things for everyone’s comprehension. Similarly, it rejects the idea that mass appeal has any true ties to value, something all writers struggle with as the publishing industry grows more and more inhospitable to anything beyond cookbooks and adult coloring books. “Either you read for information, say to learn something, or it’s only worth reading fiction if it’s a sweeping, grand book,” writes Jenny Zhang in an interview with Nate Brown for the LA Review of Books. “It’s only worth spending your time with a novel if it can be a contender for the Great American Novel, if it’s a multigenerational saga, if it covers historically significant events, if it’s about war and peace. Otherwise, it’s too small somehow and lacking in practical value, and your time would be better spent on reading nonfiction or a newspaper.” In another world, I ask Sarah about entry barriers in writing, and how all written work by a woman or other marginalized person is inherently seen as incomprehensible but also not worth the effort of comprehending. Wolf God challenges the reader line by line — how far will you go with a work you don’t understand? How much empathy do you have for your younger self, who while learning English was perpetually surrounded by meanings that were just slightly out of reach?
It’s 2:45pm and my ears are ringing. I developed tinnitus last year as a side-effect of the Wellbutrin I take daily, and I frequently have to enable closed captions when I watch films now, because otherwise I can’t grasp as much of what is going on. I know others who will not watch films with subtitles because “it’s not worth it,” and I think about Bush’s song Personal Holloway, where the word “paracetamol” caused me to change the letters to numbers and add them in the search of meaning I was positive had been put there. In college, I learned that “paracetamol” is just the UK term for “acetaminophen.” Grass is something you smoke, birds are something you shag. I read Wolf God again and wonder about the children raised with Esperanto as their native language in the same world where one oughtn’t write marketing copy above a second-grade reading level. Esperanto was planned to be the international method of communication before being supplanted by English. Is it surprising that all the languages pushed towards international use are Eurocentric? Is it more surprising that Esperanto was banned in the Soviet Union?
I’m wandering off the path, maybe, or perhaps there wasn’t a path to begin with. In linguistics, a “garden path sentence” is a sentence whose onset words or clauses cause you to parse it incorrectly, leaving you feeling jarred by what is technically a grammatically correct construction. Example: The old man the boat. In newspaper headlines, these are known as “crash blossoms.” Wikipedia has an entire page devoted to example sentences used often in linguistics classes, incomprehensible sentences constructed from small words everyone knows. Wolf God is a syntactician and a psychologist meeting for cheap wine and ravioli in a cream sauce. It’s all the bizarre words for “mix”: farrago, mishmash, potpourri, hodgepodge, gallimaufry. Even now, thousands of years in, there are so many interesting things being done with language, with communication, and with understanding. So many stories that walk the tightrope of clarity, play with the scraps of meaning stuck between the refrigerator and the wall. It’s 3:17pm. This is one of them.