“I build my language with rocks,” Edouard Glissant
What does it mean to build one’s language with rocks? I don’t have an answer for that question but Layli Long Soldier’s poems make me think of language built with rocks. And language built with light.
Yesterday in class we focused on forms of attention and we put the emphasis on poetic form in particular. We considered the form of words, the form of poems, and the strange permeable forms of empty spaces on the page.
Consider Long Soldier's use of broken words. Here’s a section from “leftist,” for example:
…
but more
radi
cal in
support
of so
cial
change to
create
ega
litar
ian
soci
ety (20)
…
There are many things we could say about these lines but, at the level of the broken word alone, we can think of broken promises. The white settlers, for example, grievously broke their word to the Lakota people. They made a promise that they didn’t honour. If some words in this collection are broken, others are connected in unexpected ways. The final word of the first poem, “grassesgrassesgrasses,” is one of these oddly-connected compound words. On the one hand, it fills our mouths with grassesgrassesgrasses as we read the poem; it prepares us for what follows. As we read that word—or three words strung together—we’re disarmed by its strangeness and uncertain how to understand it. By the time we’ve finished reading Long Soldier’s collection, however, we have a sense of grass itself as words, as earth, as violence, as punishment, as complicity, as silence, as beauty. The meaning does not settle.
“Vaporative” may look like a knife but it does not come to a point (turn to page 23 and look at it). It evades the point. As you read, try not to look for the point or the “message”: move with the poems, feel grassesgrassesgrasses in your mouth, read the empty space, look at the form, look again, read the poems out loud, read them to yourself, sing them, dance them, think about them as rocks, as earth, as grass, as children, turn the book around, look outside, read again. And repeat. "However a light . . ." (Vaporative).
Finally, here’s the clip of Long Soldier reading “38” that we listened to in class.
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