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The Sincerest Form
October 29, 2006    File under: Language

When I wrote, last week, "The World Is Poorly Written," I'd just burned a half-hour watching a PBS documentary on fire. Before that, there were other linguistically dissatisfying shows, but I'd tuned in hoping to catch another episode of "Eyes on the Prize," which had been running earlier in the week, only to find weak narration of forest fires and magma.

I'll grant, maybe when language is exposed to fantastic heat, the normal ligatures break down and dangling modifiers and participles become the dominant carbon, abandoned by their proper geologic parents and hungry to bond with some molecular or grammatic chain, but I thought PBS was better than that. Honestly.

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A student describes himself as "stoked for poetry." So, I have taken to calling him "The Poetry Furnace." But, as yet, no such magmatic disruptions of syntax.

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Is there a "hot" poet whose language melts and re-alloys as a result of superheating?

Maybe that poet is Alex Lemon?

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Denver is warmer today. Leaves valve lightly in the wind, as if asking for the rake, ready for the black-bag compression, the slow breakdown fire of compost, and then translation.

Posted by Jake Adam York at October 29, 2006 10:35 AM



COMMENTS

Christine Hume does it through cold in Alaskaphrenia.

Posted by: Mathias Svalina at October 30, 2006 8:59 PM