'I Can Taste the Language'

The Scottish Poetry Library in 2006 asked American poet August Kleinzahler to name some of his “old favourite” books. This is how he replied: “Old favorites, gee . . . Moby-Dick, Isaac Babel’s stories. I could go on. I seem to respond to closely written texts, sentence by sentence, where I can taste the language, experience the musculature of the syntax.” 

Nicely put. How telling that a poet’s first choices are prose writers, though not, fortunately, writers of “poetic prose” from the tribe of Thomas Wolfe. I share Kleinzahler’s taste, though not exclusively. In the wrong hands, “closely written texts” can turn into purple prose or high-compression avant-garde inertia, with words so dense they emit no light, like a black hole. My preference is always for language that is rhythmically organized, balancing the explicit with the denotative, unafraid to share some of its music – formal beauty tempered by a commonsensical regard for the reader. Good prose is such a pleasure.

 

In the September 7, 1935, issue of The Saturday Review of Literature, Walter de la Mare published “The Art That Nature Makes,” in which he writes:

 

“Words are not merely fixed symbols with an absolute meaning and innumerable personal connotations; they consist also of sounds; and of sounds made by the most complex and direct of all instruments—the human voice. Which of the two is the more natural, speech or singing, I cannot say; but the one can be of at least as delicate, supple, and mutable a melody and charm as the other.”

 

I would argue that the same applies to prose. Most of us, of course, read prose silently. I propose an experiment: try reading a favorite writer aloud, fiction and nonfiction, Nabokov and an essay by Hazlitt. Pay attention to the flow and the logic. Do they stumble? Do they commit what jazz musicians call a “clam,” a wrong note? Read with someone else present and watch their reaction. De la mare writes:

 

“Needless to say we may value poetry [and prose] more for its ideas, its philosophy, its message, its edification than for the delight which the mere music of its language may bestow. But that music absent, poetry, in the generally accepted meaning of the word, is absent, whatever else may remain. Like all immediate appeals to our senses, mind, and being, it is a secret language, but one with scores of dialects.”