Remarks from the Fray:
Adjectives are ensemble words, used to rag, delineate, sex-up, or glorify the plain-Janeness of whatever. Adjectives are the mind's genitive velcro-making ability - we humans have, and relish, to 'add on' to self and all the not self around us; this is our goose as opposed to duck, our goose of being cooked, our geese air-combing the seasons for us, our quill a'desk, down a'pillow, our quiet or copulation beneath the shading willow. We add on - must be something gristle in our genes.
This foreign ex-soldier/prisoner, security guard/student in another foreign land is seeking, not order, but clarity: he had to leave all his elsewhere. 'Order', in isolation, while not an absolute necessity is extremely useful and desirable. The clarity the student seeks is the matching of referential realities to the confounding nature of a new language; and, sadly, he is having to re-think/re-feel his past in order to allow for that matching to occur and flourish as wonted. There is poignancy to this poem that is being dragged-along by the stress of linguistic need, beyond the abstract, few of us can truly identify with this situation. Imagine having to ask if one's 'brothers were lost before older'; in Vietnam this was not even a proposition for this person, it was a thing of logic and emotion. Adjectives may color well, but they are poor thinkers, and even worse at grief.
"Nine and long." Here was an order that destroyed order. One wants to hope that a mouth full of new adjectives and living in a new land will compensate for that in optimum ways. But the adverbs of time, manner, and place are hounding. And no adjective can bring them to proper heel.
--Bratsche
(To reply, click here.)
Knowing what the teacher would likely know early on in her semester with this student -- the surface 'fact' that he was South Vietnamese and had been a soldier -- is proven in fits and starts to capture little or nothing of the magnitude of despair and suffering this human, this seeker of knowledge, trying desperately, hauntedly, to make sense of things, of anything, has been through.
I think she (the poet, in third-person, and yet almost as if the teacher were narrator) sought to tell his story telegraphically as a means of recreating for us the puzzle, both his -- not just about the oddities of English but the oddities of life, especially of a life and world of war -- and hers as she had come to fathom -- through the bizarre, almost surreal means of answering questions of grammar loaded with ricocheting reverberations half a globe away -- the sinking realities and ghosts behind his questions and what it was he was at a loss to express...but obsessively trying.
--zinya
(To reply, click here.)
The former POW is trying desperately to use language to impose some order, some clarity on his years of torture, but it's not really possible. To say "nine long years" is not good enough for him. It has to be "nine and long." The grammar of the English language frowns on such syntax, but "he knew no other way to say this." Some things are unsayable in the English language. Some things cannot adequately be put into words in any language.
Teague imposes her own order by following a strict tercet stanza form. Her use of short, declarative sentences simulates the narrator's teaching role and the man's lack of familiarity with English. This is one time when the lack of much figurative language is not a detriment to a poem. Most important, her detached tone points up the gap or disconnect between language and experience.
--MaryAnn
(To reply, click here.)
(8/8)
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Remarks from the Fray:
Adjectives are ensemble words, used to rag, delineate, sex-up, or glorify the plain-Janeness of whatever. Adjectives are the mind's genitive velcro-making ability - we humans have, and relish, to 'add on' to self and all the not self around us; this is our goose as opposed to duck, our goose of being cooked, our geese air-combing the seasons for us, our quill a'desk, down a'pillow, our quiet or copulation beneath the shading willow. We add on - must be something gristle in our genes.
This foreign ex-soldier/prisoner, security guard/student in another foreign land is seeking, not order, but clarity: he had to leave all his elsewhere. 'Order', in isolation, while not an absolute necessity is extremely useful and desirable. The clarity the student seeks is the matching of referential realities to the confounding nature of a new language; and, sadly, he is having to re-think/re-feel his past in order to allow for that matching to occur and flourish as wonted. There is poignancy to this poem that is being dragged-along by the stress of linguistic need, beyond the abstract, few of us can truly identify with this situation. Imagine having to ask if one's 'brothers were lost before older'; in Vietnam this was not even a proposition for this person, it was a thing of logic and emotion. Adjectives may color well, but they are poor thinkers, and even worse at grief.
"Nine and long." Here was an order that destroyed order. One wants to hope that a mouth full of new adjectives and living in a new land will compensate for that in optimum ways. But the adverbs of time, manner, and place are hounding. And no adjective can bring them to proper heel.
--Bratsche
(To reply, click here.)
Knowing what the teacher would likely know early on in her semester with this student -- the surface 'fact' that he was South Vietnamese and had been a soldier -- is proven in fits and starts to capture little or nothing of the magnitude of despair and suffering this human, this seeker of knowledge, trying desperately, hauntedly, to make sense of things, of anything, has been through.
I think she (the poet, in third-person, and yet almost as if the teacher were narrator) sought to tell his story telegraphically as a means of recreating for us the puzzle, both his -- not just about the oddities of English but the oddities of life, especially of a life and world of war -- and hers as she had come to fathom -- through the bizarre, almost surreal means of answering questions of grammar loaded with ricocheting reverberations half a globe away -- the sinking realities and ghosts behind his questions and what it was he was at a loss to express...but obsessively trying.
--zinya
(To reply, click here.)
The former POW is trying desperately to use language to impose some order, some clarity on his years of torture, but it's not really possible. To say "nine long years" is not good enough for him. It has to be "nine and long." The grammar of the English language frowns on such syntax, but "he knew no other way to say this." Some things are unsayable in the English language. Some things cannot adequately be put into words in any language.
Teague imposes her own order by following a strict tercet stanza form. Her use of short, declarative sentences simulates the narrator's teaching role and the man's lack of familiarity with English. This is one time when the lack of much figurative language is not a detriment to a poem. Most important, her detached tone points up the gap or disconnect between language and experience.
--MaryAnn
(To reply, click here.)
(8/8)