Action and creativity within a specific role serve as a base definition for all 90 definitions associated with the word “play” of the English language. We see these three aspects as a child plays, discovering new schemas by which to interact with his world and find where he belongs through role play. The poet analyzes words and sounds as the child plays with blocks and gravity; the poet discovers new venues of communication while the child discovers basic physics. Play serves five main purposes in poetry and life: To recreate observances, to find new solutions, to explore roles of self and others, to work within a set of rules, and to imagine. By “playing with language,” poets achieve a variety of purposes, from preserving heritage, to spurring social reform; each poet plays with in his own means. But what separates poetry from other creative forms of language? The partition of poetry is the content communicated; that content is obscure.
When Mennonites such as Di Brandt and others from A cappella play with language, they are exploring their heritage as a child explores his attic. They recreate their childhood and community convictions, Di Brant especially, seeking to uncover the “self.” Di Brant looks specifically at the mother/child dyad in her book, Mother, Not Mother, setting form as a boundary for herself. The couplet format Brandt chose reflects the tension between “mother” and “not mother.” Di Brant uses poetry as “a way to calm [her] fears and anger” (Komunyaka, 17) as she accuses and laments within her poem. A quote at the beginning of her book supports this idea, quoting Alice Walker, “ When I didn’t write, I thought about making bombs and throwing them…”(Brandt, 7). Truly writing is a new solution to dealing with our emotions, our memories, and our thoughts.
Expression, however, is not Brandt’s soul purpose for writing Mother, Not Mother. Brandt set out to respond to the “missing mother” in western literature. Through her imagination, she calls out “Why can’t she write the mother…” (Brandt, 9) forming a defense for a literary figure, describing her labor and trails that should grant her the right to write her name in the stories of patriarchy. As Brandt plays with this idea, she also struggles with her own conflicting roles, “sometimes I hate / the mother // sometimes the not /mother // and here we are looking at each other” (Brandt, 54). Brant writes to preserve the role of Mother in literature as A cappella writes to preserve the role of their heritage; both children playing house to secure their gender roles as house wife and bread winner.
Preservation of culture & identity are very important part of play and culture; Komunyakaa brings attention to cultural death: “Languages are disappearing with the people who speak them, and they represent the ancient sources of our culture” (Komunyakaa, 20). Perhaps this death is what Amish and conservative Mennonites are trying to prevent, reaffirming their identity through poetry and lifestyle. Di Brant seeks to revive the dead mother, a risen Christ from the grave, by introducing literature that focuses on motherhood as these culture provide opportunities for group assimilation. “Every poem acquires it’s meaningfulness… [by] those who care enough to converse about it” (Hejinan, 10). By starting a conversation, Di Brant hopes to give meaning to the role of motherhood.
By recounting their lives in creative ways with meaningful form, Mennonite writers find new solutions to strengthen their identity. Playing with language has achieved the preservation and discovery of self.
Playmates through Connections: My Life
If any one ones plays with the meaning side of language, it is Lyn Hejinan. Just as no adult can understand the rules or context of child’s play, Hejinan’s scattered lines of child’s play makes sense to her. With further investigation, one can learn to play the same games.
When you first jump into My Life, the reader cannot easily decipher a sense of sentence. It seems she “delivered directly to the sensibility of the beholder without analytical explanation” (Komunyakaa, 14). But there is a picture in the scribbles of her words. When the book is read as one poem, not as a collection of individual poems, we watch ideas connect like memories, each poem echoing each other, as Jack Spicer suggest they should: “Poems should echo and re-echo each other… they cannot live alone any more than we can” (Hejinian, 12). By relating the reader to echoes from their own life with simple visions of birthday cakes and ponies, Hejinan entreats them to follow her mind to other musing that expound upon the “Idea that is much to big” . The intended purpose of her work and thought out format of 45 sections with 45 sentences representing each year of her life separates her experiments from the Oulipo group who truly over experimented with their N+7 poems (FOOTER).
By seeking a new solution to recount her observances and define her self, Lyn is able to connect the reader to their own stories and memories by use of brief imagery and connecting thought. She plays to call other playmates to recall and create their own games. Through identifying herself through experimentation with words, she calls her readers to identify themselves through experimentation with thoughts.
All in a Day’s Play: Komnyakaa’s call for movement
Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry also dives into his childhood through snippets of the past as Lyn does, merging themes of racism, American culture, and Vietnam nightmares to call others to form a more perfect union. As others volatily kill computer generated humans, Yusuf acts as the child who has played those games but grew board and disturbed by their inaction. His ingenious ebb and flow of metaphors, assonance, alliteration, juxtaposition -- name it the pattern of language; he has played it and played it well—serve as a call to movement for those left immobile on the couch, twiddling their thumbs over war. “We NEED movement to empower people with the spirit of life and that spirit depends on working for one’s life, one’s family and community”(Komunyakaa, 20).
Let Komunyakaa be the boy who plays at fishing in the sun, who shakes the dust out of carpets as a test of strength, playing to see how wind will carry the dirt. Komunyakaa does not play language simply to affirm his role as a black veteran responsible of reporting what he has seen, but understands what you play with and how you play determine the quality of your play; you can play with what you know to fill time, or you can play with novel ideas to devise skills and knowledge: “This need to belittle and mistrust content, at times, seems like a kind of high-brow slap stick that takes us away from the body, making us even more indebted to insignificance and abstraction” (Komunyakaa, 15). Here we find the first threads of a way to evaluate poetry, but not define it, Komuyakaa himself stating, “Poetry encourages us to have a dialogue through the observed, the felt, and the imaginary in this world and beyond” (Komunyakaa, 14), which a simple, “The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/ Petals on a wet, black bough” (Ezra Pound) can accomplish, and can also be accomplished by written accounts without creative form.
By addressing Komunayakka’s work, the language poets run into a cognitive dissonance: Is poetry which does not spur social or personal reform bad poetry? Quality and definition are two separate things; and quality depends on the individuals needs. It seems “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” rings true in the abstract world as well the concrete. But there remains one more poet introduced in English 210 who begs for us to play with his riddles.
Faith of a Child: Truth whispered by Waldrep
G.C. Waldrep gives no clues in his book Disclamor. His battery poems are a special play of poetry as he lays out his lines and words to visually interact with one another, mentioning local legends, echoing forgotten graffiti, and questioning the paradox of a park made from a weapon. Students within the English 210 class queried the usefulness of a poem that ventures so deep into one man’s mind that others are not able to reconstruct original meaning with certainty; but play has no usefulness some days beyond it’s abilities to make us think. If given the answer to the riddle, what play would exist?
Play comes not from the goal of any game, but the steps one must take. In a literary world where the author is dead, everyone plays differently. It is not on the stage, but in the music that there is dance. So here, in Waldrep’s explanation of stories and experience, none find a cry to abolish weapons nor to love one’s neighbor as one’s self; here one finds the elegance, the playfulness, of human thought. What is poetry but raw truth? What is play but raw want of a human’s soul?
The Whole of the Matter
While play consists of the very real goals to recreate observances, find new solutions, explore roles, work with limitations, and to create, it must be noted that without play of any sort, no human could grow. What is growth but discovery, and life but growth? By allowing humans to take language and play with it, society allows members to challenge themselves and their readers. This differs from a thesis, which pin points specific thought and theories; a poem contrast stories that tell of events past in clear contexts; poetry departs from instructions, reviews, and articles because it does not communicate the known. As play goes beyond knowledge, poetry describes what is understood yet remains mystery. The question why, or even at times, what, cannot be answered practically by any other means than poetry, just as a true smile or hug cannot be calculated. Poetry reflects humanity as humanity reflects God: such a playful deity that he created and interacts with the world. Pinpointing the definition of poetry is difficult because poetry pinpoints what has a name but no definition. How do you describe fear or love? Want and chastise has no method to rate their existence. Thus, none can define poetry any more than one can define play. We can only categorize and see the effects that come from free thought.
Go Play.
Works Cited
Brandt, Diana. Mother, Not Mother: Poems. Stratford, Ont: Mercury Press, 1992. Print.
Hejinian, Lyn. Introduction. Lyn Hejinian and David Lehman, eds. The Best American Poetry 2004. Scribner, 2004. 9-14. Print.
Komunyakaa, Yusef. Introduction. Yusef Komunyakaa and David Lehman, eds. The Best American Poetry 2003. New York: Scribner, 2003. 11-21. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment