[James Midgley]

.

Holiday Phrasebook

The heat of midday is the heat inside a word
like flint, or a phrase like walled garden
where a groundsman leans asleep
against a tree, limbs tucked onto the island
of its shade, like a well-organised spider.
Firewood not quite catching alight

lies at his feet, snakelike in the buttery light.
Light is a word that sheds another word:
shadow, which subtitles lizards
that can't rest in this or any garden
whose pavings are a disassembled oven. Island
spirits may huddle in the groundsman’s sleeping

head, but mine is full of this heat and his sleeping.
No snake stirs from the bonfire’s future light
and even falling apples seem slow to land.
Where was I? -- What was the first word, the logos
that got me started? If this were truly that garden
you’d have to fetch some water, rouse the serpent

with a cold draught and the cool pink of a mouse.
Out on the balcony I’m teetering on sleep,
a slow pulse aligning with the crickets’ gardening
shears. I’m poring over a phrasebook: la luz,
jardín, isla. My salted flesh is a foreign word
like any other. It lives under me like scorched land

while my mind runs aground on a different isle
where Odysseus’s men were translated into swine --
were spelt. Their fatty skin still gleamed with words
they had no use of, finding themselves in the deep sleep
of another's waking head, set alight
by squealing aphasia in the witch goddess’s garden.

We are all born pink and squealing to such a garden
is what I’m grandly thinking, but the heat of the island
melts the thought around my head’s unlit
and piggledy innards. Inside, no creature
gathers itself up, neither wakes nor sleeps --
instead there is a babble of words-not-words

inside one garden inside many heads human and animal,
each island taken under by the depth-charge of sleep
into blood: blood-heat, blood-light, emptiful of words.


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[Glenn Wright]

Hi, James—

I like the liberties you took with the sestina form. I have never been able to write a successful sestina because I get too caught up in the web of repeated words. By translating the repetends into different languages and metamorphosing the animals, you not only give yourself some compositional freedom, but also reinforce your theme of poetry arising from a warm, foreign, sleepy, magical place in the poet’s mind. Enjoyable.

Glenn

[Carl Copeland]

James, I’ve been settling into this poem over many readings and enjoying it more every time. The words being studied weave a spider’s web of sleepy associations, and the sestina structure keeps every word in play, reemerging in new contexts in new forms and figurations, which is how language develops—poetically! (“Aphasia” points me back to Jakobson’s pertinent article.) I’d interpret the meltdown of meaning and thought in S5-6, the “babble of words-not-words,” as the poetic bubbling cauldron of all language, though I’m still wondering about the bloodbath in the last line. In the words of Mayakovsky, “Yes, you’ve got something here!”

[Matt Q]

Hi James,

The main reference points here are the Genesis creation myth, in the first four stanzas (the garden, the snake, the apple, the wall, logos -- the Word "that started me"), and then the Odysseus pig-transformations, in the fifth and sixth stanzas. The link being the role of the word/language in creation. Island-hopping to Odysseus after four stanzas of Genesis does seem a bit of jump, though less so now than when I first read it. Maybe this is exacerbated by the transition, which in effect, seems to be "and then I started thinking about something else", and could maybe more compelling – though it's linked at word-level at that point by the island, I guess. Overall, the bigger theme seems the role of language in creating the world, and keeping us apart from it.

The N literally is on holiday, and has a holiday phrasebook, which gives him foreign words to replace existing words. I'm not sure how that all works figuratively. He's clearly not on holiday from language, from his mind/language-created world. But maybe the phrasebook is for when he is? Or maybe it's not playing a figurative role.

What’s the conclusion of his musing? That we are all word-created, born into a word-created world, I think. And there is no (or very little) access to noumena, the things-in-themselves: inside his head, no actual creatures, only words-not-words (so maybe thoughts, or a mixture or words ideas and images? -- or that "word", itself, is also a name, a construct, part of the mind-created world?). And that the mind, and the mind-created world, is separated from -- or a barrier to -- the (real) body and the (real) world, and other people/minds: each mind (and mind-created world) is an island. Except, the close seems to say, in sleep, deep sleep maybe, when the mind-created island disappears and we sink into our carnality, our blood. The Greeks turned to pigs also find themselves in the "deep sleep" of the languageless pigs' heads.

And maybe that's the holiday? A holiday from language that only happens when we sleep? (Or if we're (un)lucky enough to be transformed into animals!). Maybe the “holiday phrasebook” is to be used then (though I’m not sure how) or to be studied in preparation for such an occasion?

There's more going on, I think. Alongside Genesis, in the opening stanzas, there's reference to heat and fire. Clearly the N is somewhere sunny and hot which may be affecting his thinking, making him prone to be sleepy, to wander in his musings. Though I'm less sure what role fire is playing. There's fire inside words. A creative, generative fire? Heraclitus' ur-element? A power to burn/scorch the things they name of their uniqueness (he describes his body as "scorched")? And paralleling the fire inside words, is the garden inside the walls, which maybe suggesting that Eden inside the walls is akin to the fire in the words, so that fire is analogous to Eden somehow? Maybe there's a suggestion that Eden precedes language? But I don't think so, given that language precedes the Fall, and the apple.

I did enjoy the ride: the images and the wordplay, and the play with the myths. It's clever and fun. The form is well-handled and I like the variations on the repetends. The underlying philosophical ideas, assuming I’ve read them right, are pretty familiar, though, from European (and Buddhist) philosophy. So, at that level the poem seems to tread familiar territory, and doesn’t really in itself seem to take me anywhere new. But maybe that’s just me and my familiarity with such things – maybe I’ve even been reading them in and you’re after something else? I wondered if this familiarity is why the poem didn't grab me as much as it might have. But maybe it's more that I'm left wondering what the N is doing here beyond musing on a sunny day: what’s at stake for the N – why does this matter to him? Where does it take him?

best,

Matt

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Matt Q

But maybe it's more that I'm left wondering what the N is doing here beyond musing on a sunny day: what’s at stake for the N – why does this matter to him? Where does it take him?

“There’s more going on, I think,” as you say, Matt, but does there have to be? It’s a question that interests me and came up recently in Marshall’s thread:

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

When I read a poem (or when anyone does, for that matter) my mind immediately goes into the mode of actively trying to detect metaphors or greater meaning. When there's a "road" in a poem, it's usually more than just a road, as in 'the road not taken" and many other familiar poems and songs. What I was looking for in your poem, and not finding, was at least a small hint or vague sense that we are dealing with more than just one particular road, and the driver is on some sort of significant journey. Instead, at the end I could only conclude that the poem is no more than it appears on the surface, which for me was not sufficiently interesting.

Originally Posted by Barbara Baig

… with all respect to Roger, everyone does not read a poem that way. Some of us prefer to surrender to the words and images and music and discover the meaning of the poem that way. I'm not saying one of these approaches is better than the other; but they are very different.

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

And with equal respect, I disagree. I believe that everyone reads poems that way, whether or not they know it. A poem about trying to decide which road to take, or about pausing one's horse in the snowy woods, would be trivial if the mind did not automatically allow the situation to resonate into other meatier concerns. Frost once said a poem has to mean two (or more) things at once, and I agree.

I do tend to approach poetry in Roger’s “mode of actively trying to detect greater meaning,” but I think there are good poems that resist that approach—snapshots, say, capturing and sharing a moment that’s memorable without pointing beyond itself. Why can’t a poem just be “musing on a sunny day”?

[Roger Slater]

Why can’t a poem just be “musing on a sunny day”?

Because that would be very boring . . . unless your musing had at least a hint of significance beyond its apparent subject matter. (Can you really muse on a sunny day in a poem without at least indirectly tapping into the trope that sunny days are good and full of optimism, and cloudy days aren't?)

[Carl Copeland]

If I don’t find musing on a sunny day to be boring (though at times I might), why should a poem about it be? And is any feeling we get about a poem (goodness, optimism, discouragement, etc.) a trope that saves it from triviality? It would have to be pretty dry prose if we can’t wring some feeling out of it. But I’m starting to feel like a hijacker, so I’ll try to shut up. Mea culpa.

[Matt Q]

Hi James,

Not sure it makes much difference, but just to clarify, when I wrote "just musing on a sunny day", I didn't mean "just musing about a sunny day". Rather, he's musing, and that musing is taking place on a sunny day. I hadn't realised that was ambiguous until I saw Roger and Carl's comments.

Matt

[Hilary Biehl]

The blood at the end may have to do with our physical/animal existence, as opposed to our linguistic existence. There's an important tension here between the body and the word that runs through the poem, I think.

Here, words turn into the things they name - the phrase "walled garden" suddenly has a man sleeping inside it, the word "light" sheds the word "shadow" which "subtitles" the lizards as they run around (that's wonderful, by the way). The N's own "flesh is a foreign word" that "lives under [him] like scorched land," which to me suggests that he lives mostly in his mind, in the word-part of his mind specifically, and is usually disconnected from his body. The heat is the force which temporarily changes him from that floating logical mind back into the flesh and blood that he fully inhabited as an infant before learning to speak. The N's thoughts start out in the realm of words but are, by the end, in some other realm - they have been transformed, like the men turned into pigs whose skin "still gleamed with words / they had no use of."

That's how I'm reading it, at least. I like it very much, in spite of its being a sestina.

[James Midgley]

Hi Glenn, Carl, Matt and Hilary -- many thanks for your takes on this piece. Plenty for me to mull over. I'm glad you all found things to like here -- and I also read with interest the side conversation (hi Roger) on the way words signify and possibly bring to the fore their figurative nature within a poetic context (which I won't weigh in on myself, here). My apologies for taking a while to get back here.

So, thank you again, all of you, for your kind attentions and comments -- and for engaging with this most hated of forms.

Cheers.