'Alone in a Room with the English Language'

“One of the offices of poetry: to use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity.” 

“Shapely speech” is nicely put. Guys I knew, when being polite, might describe a girl as “shapely.” You know what that means. It means pleasing. What about “the radicals of existence”? I don’t know what that means. “Radicals” intended etymologically, meaning “roots”? As in chemistry or politics? All of the above? A similar “office” applies to prose as well, though “office” sounds a little high-falutin’.  

 

“To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumor, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic impromptu wind-tunnel ideologies. To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, against opportunistic mendacity.”

 

The ethics of writing. As John Berryman puts it in his biography of Stephen Crane: “Crane was a writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.” An honest writer comes equipped with a bullshit detector that he applies first to himself, then others. Lies enter language by way of politics, fashion, self-aggrandizement and any effort to seek approval. The hardest part of writing is keeping it vital while remaining faithful to the truth.  

 

“If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it can (and deserves to) die. Or that mission will be replaced by a spectacular dumb show loaded with content, whipped up drama, and ‘language.’ It will be a polymer mold of what once was primary material. What can replace the completeness and immediacy of feeling that the sounds of words whip up or lay down?”

 

W.S. Di Piero might be describing prose or poetry assembled by artificial intelligence. What I’ve read or seen of it, even when it’s a competent copy of a human creation, feels hollow, dead inside. Something is missing, something vital and as personal as DNA or the individual human sensibility. Something “sentient,” to use Di Piero’s word. Algorithms write like backward children eager to please teacher.

 

[The quoted passages, a single continuous entry, is drawn from Di Piero’s Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebooks (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017).]