'Iron Trees Grow from Filament'

As a novice newspaper reporter I was naïve. I assumed my colleagues loved words as much as I do. Not flowery language or gaudy poeticizing, and certainly not heartfelt cliches, which are always embarrassing, but words artfully precise. There’s a thrill to arranging words with concision so they render meaning with vividness and without unintentional ambiguity. Yet most of the reporters I knew treated words with indifference. Some seemed to distrust and even resent their medium. A few took a reverse pride in writing badly, an attitude encouraged by certain editors. Now I know such thinking is hardly confined to journalists. Poets, novelists, editorial writers – many seem to hold a grudge against language. They throw words together like action painters or inflate them with hyperbolic gas.

 

I’ve been reading Kay Ryan’s brief, skinny, witty poems again. A thoughtful reporter could learn a few language lessons from them. Her poems are always highly compacted, dense with information, but never willfully obscure or pretentious. She arranges her words as precisely as a Roman mosaic, and each contributes to the whole, without excess. Here’s “Chemistry” from Elephant Rocks (1996):

 

“Words especially

are subject to

the chemistry

of death: it is

an acid bath

which dissolves

or doubles

their strength.

Sentiments

which pleased

drift down

as sediment;

iron trees

grow from filament.”

 

Long time use wears down language, blunts its texture. Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne are exciting to read because they write in a language still bubbling and raw, not overcooked into pabulum. They worked words like clay. After centuries in the acid bath of conventional usage, those “iron trees” can still grow. It helps to look at a familiar word as though you had never seen it before. With etymology, a sure rhythmic sense and a respect for tradition, an old word becomes new. Read Eric Ormsby’s “Origins” from For A Modest God (1997):

 

“I wanted to go down to where the roots begin,

To find words nested in their almond skin,

The seed-curls of their birth, their sprigs of origin.

 

“At night the dead set words upon my tongue,

Drew back their coverings, laid bare the long

Sheaths of their roots where the earth still clung.

 

“I wanted to draw their words from the mouths of the dead,

I wanted to strip the coins from their heavy eyes,

I wanted the rosy breath to gladden their skins.

 

“All night the dead remembered their origins,

All night they nested in the curve of my eyes,

And I tasted the savor of their seed-bed.”