'An Integral of Various Dissimilar Parts'

Dr. Johnson identifies nine meanings for composition in his Dictionary. The first -- “the act of forming an integral of various dissimilar parts” – recalls Aristotle’s notion that perceiving similarities among dissimilar things constitutes genius. A basic human drive is to find pattern in the seemingly random. Johnson’s sixth definition is the most succinct -- “written work” – and corresponds to my favorite subject in grade school: composition. That’s what they still called writing when I was a kid. I was a lazy student who excelled only at what interested him, and putting words together was always a kick, a way to organize my disorganized thoughts. Soon I discovered that often I didn’t understand something until I had written about it – a phenomenon that remains in place. Words are thoughts and sounds made real and sharable with others. 

Writing, of course, is complemented by reading. A writer – say, Jonathan Swift – impresses you with his precision and concision, the power he musters with words. You imitate him, plagiarize him, try out his voice and technical devices. With time, you absorb his lessons and customize them to meet your own needs. Occasionally, you reject him entirely and find a new teacher.  

 

A veteran fifth-grade teacher among my readers tells me her students, to put it bluntly, don’t read and can barely write. None find writing a pleasure, even at the level of storytelling and autobiography. It’s a familiar teacherly lament. I have no solutions. It may already be too late to fix things.

 

Eric Ormsby is a sensualist of sound, one of our finest poets and critics. In 2005, Canadian Notes & Queries dedicated an issue to Ormsby and included an interview with him, “Menageries of Vocables,” conducted by Robyn Sarah. It was later collected in her Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry (2007). Ormsby is enviably articulate:

 

“I’d like to think that there’s no English word I couldn’t conceive of using in a poem somehow. And why not? The world is full of fantastic beings – why should our lexicon be any less so? But I have to admit too that this besottedness with words, this playing the ring master in menageries of vocables, can be a self-indulgence.”

 

That’s poetry. Ormsby’s prose is comparably accomplished. He chose it as a conscious act:

 

“Slowly I came to see, to my pleasure, that there were many things I could express in prose that would not have worked in poetry, and I began to enjoy writing prose enormously. . . [Y]ou fashion a different authorial voice when you write prose; you can be casual, digressive, a bit offhand or even genially banal – you can make various forms of small talk – all gambits that doom a poem.”

 

I’m speaking as a writer, one who learned the hard way that he can’t write poetry. Good prose of many sorts – reading it, writing it -- can be as intoxicating and fulfilling as verse. Ormsby says:

 

“[P]rose is connected in my mind with the world of affairs, with conversation and interchange, in a way that poetry isn’t – or at least not immediately so. . . . I can’t write the essay or review until I’ve mulled it over for a while, and I can’t actually put words to paper until I’ve thought of an opening sentence or, better, opening paragraph. Once I have that, the rest follows smoothly.”