"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart"

I'm not quite sure how I feel about blogs, blogging, the idea of people actually caring enough to read my "thoughts on life." In my "India Ink" blog my tone resembles that of a cheerleader, a reflection of my delusional, if not noble, attempts to stay positive while spending far too much time flat on my back from food poisoning. My study abroad blog was for an entirely different audience, and looking back I probably was sincere in my somewhat sickening enthusiasm despite the conditions. But this endeavor is unabashedly self-serving; less about keeping the relatives updated and more about improving my writing. Or if I'm honest, more about improving my thinking. Last week I gave a presentation in my poetry workshop about an Octavio Paz poem "Vrindaban" (from which the title of this blog originates) and I totally bombed (the cheerleader voice rears its ugly head). Not that it really mattered as far as "point value" in the class, but more as an issue of pride and my own intellect. To be honest, even now I couldn't really tell you about the poem, how it functions off of the page, how it speaks to me (though I find that question silly, in actuality it's valid). Living and traveling in India, I sort of had to shut down a lot of my mental capacities in order to simply function when daily faced with extreme poverty, filth, and UTTER MADNESS! It took a good 3 months for me to feel normal again, to start breaking down that hard shell of a woman I'd become and open up to writing and emotions and literature.

Despite the somewhat healing hand of time, writing does not come as easily as it once did. Perhaps I'm still somewhat shut down to that vulnerable place in which I write, or perhaps I've changed and I the writing process will never be the same. Nonetheless, this blog is dedicated to thinking about poetry, and namely other people's poetry. My friend got me hooked on this site TED Talks, which is an online forum for the exchange of ideas. Yes, sounds a bit overreaching but perhaps the "big names" will give it some prestige; there are talks by Bill Gates, Isabella Allende, Al Gore, etc. all about different topics. It's fabulous, as if you could youtube lectures from your favorite contemporary thinkers on their specialty subjects. In other words, a more enriching manner of wasting time than rotting your brain on facebook. Anyway, I watched this lecture by Chris Abani on the importance of storytelling (I didn't know he was so funny, you can watch it here). He cites a few lines from Jack Gilbert's "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" which shall be my first poem on this blog (you can read it here or below).

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.


From THE GREAT FIRES: POEMS, 1982-1992 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)


Now I cannot make any promises on my poetry-analysis, after all I'm starting this blog to get better at reading poems. That being said, poems ought not be "analyzed" as if they were computer data, but rather "thought about" or "talked about" (PC enough for ya?).I guess I can start with... things I like about the poem? I must admit I've always had issues with prose poems, though can this really be considered a prose poem? Well, I'm waving my magic wand and saying "Yes" because that's the way the words seem to read, treading the line between normal speech and verse. Except in one instance in the first line, where both clauses seem to end unfinished and incomplete, not abruptly but in a timid fashion, hinting at the MYSTERY of the poetic world. Now this is a concept I love, something that I believe all capital-g Good poems should recognize, revere, and explore. Good writing recognizes that experience and the world cannot simply be boiled down into a few words. Writing is limiting and at the same time the closest we can come to interacting with the unknown and the mystery that is the human experience. And i do believe that is how Gilbert opens his poem and sets up this theme of language moving beyond itself but not in the concrete fashion we've come to expect of it. Looking at the title suggests that something has been lost, we've come to expect language and words to tell us everything when really it's beauty is in its inability to encompass all, leaving us (and our hearts) to fill in the gaps of understanding.

What else can I say? I love the words "psalms" if not purely for religious sentiment. The idea of singing your woes and your joys, the ultimate means of communicating with God, encompassing not only the spoken but the heard, the vocal and the musical. And I enjoy poems with cultural references, perhaps because a lot of my own poetry stems from my studies in other disciplines, namely in cultural studies. It's not that these reference make the poet appear to be more learned, nor are they necessarily meant to proclaim that themes are universal. Because there are agonies that happen other places in the world that I could never understand and I could/should never compare my own life experiences to these tragic events. But there's some beauty in stringing these global ideas together in a makeshift, homespun quilt that recognizes both the similarities and differences presented by cultural divides. Gilbert points out his own far-fetched outlook, recognizing that perhaps the Etruscan texts do not extend beyond what they appear to be, or perhaps the Minoan script isn't even writing but a map. Actually he might be saying that language is a map, only unintelligible to us in this time and place.

I think that may be enough for the evening. I gots papers to write, goodness gracious!