Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Burma / Myanmar Cyclone



I've watched with some disbelief the numbers of Burmese people killed in Cyclone Nargis rise from 350 to 50,000. The Times reports, too, that the junta which runs Burma (or, as the military insist on calling it, Myanmar) were warned 2 days before the cyclone struck (by India) and that they are still hesitating about opening their borders for aid.

The plight of the Burmese people over the past decades has been a sad and worsening one, and the recent cyclone is not just a meteorological tragedy. While the weather cannot be controlled, many lives could have been saved were it not for the oppressive control of a small number of people who have grown rich off Burma's teak forests (now largely gone) while censoring, depriving, and imprisoning those it is meant to govern, preventing any means of discussion.

Emma Larkin's Finding George Orwell in Burma is an all-too readable account of the situation in Burma; Emma Larkin is a pseudonym because of the restrictions of the Myanmar junta on foreign journalists and writers. I'm not one to recommend an Amazon purchase, but they're selling it for $6 in hardcover.

Burma's story is continually passed over without resolution, and I fear that the solution isn't monetary aid (though that's necessary) or people helping on the ground (thought that's vital) but some larger form of action. To find out more, go to Irrawaddy, a Thailand based magazine focussing on Burma.

To donate, I suggest here

Friday, May 2, 2008

HACASHND: An (early) Turn to Language

In a post mourning the passing of Aimé Césaire over at In the Middle, JJC recalled how Césaire's poetry not only restored to him a love of French (and other?) languages which had been a little dented by high school rote learning, but also unsettled the expectation, "Wasn't politics the realm of the prosaic, wasn't art a realm untouched by cultural turmoil and decolonization movements and racism?" he writes, "Forget buying une voiture. I was shopping for Cahier d'un retour au pays natal."

You should check out the group blog In the Middle, which I hesitate to call a medieval blog, not because it isn't (well, it isn't being written in the medieval period, though for a medieval person currently blogging, see Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog) but because it really troubles the line between ideas of the medieval as past/passed. Hence posts on Césaire, whose work I'm looking forward to looking more closely at, thanks to JJC's post.

Here, though, I'm beginning to answer a question he posed in the comments, wondering what turned me towards poetry.

Anyone ever play Dingbats? Or, as it might be known in the US, Whatzit, either known as the "game of batty wordplay" or the "board game of fractured phrases."

In the game, you're presented a card. On the card are letters arranged in ways that might look like gobbledegook, or might be recognizable words with letters spread about the card, or might resemble words you're familiar with but in strange combinations. You're meant to associated each arrangement of letters/words with a recognized idiom, "three blind mice," "make-up," "cash in hand" (this last would look like HACASHND). Some examples here.
As much as the idea is to "solve" the "puzzle," what these cards do is ask you to think about how language works, in relation to itself and to common idioms.

I played this game when I was knee high to a grasshopper, with my family, mainly when we were living in Germany during school holidays. To play a game that relies on an audience with shared expectations of recognized functions of language (idiom being a very idiosyncratic aspect of individual languages) when in a country which speaks a different language, merits further thought. Thinking back, though, I was less struck by this and more by the way words could be broken down, unexpectedly combined, rethought.

That, then, is a radical for poetry. It's particularly true of certain poets, (see my post on Saroyan below), but I don't mean to align the re-conception of language in Dingbats only with a poetry that gets defined as, and isolated as, "experimental." I remember being won over by Gabrielle Calvocoressi's debut collection, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart by the line/stanza break

heads bent beside their husbands
come up from orange groves

just greening


That break seemed to refigure what language was drawing my attention to in the world, and how these lyric elements of husbands, orange groves, and ripening were combining together. One doesn't have to do what Saroyan does, or Susan Howe, or P. Inman in order to draw attention to language. Put somewhat essentially, I'm more interested in poetry which is conscious of language used in relational ways rather than referential ways (though can the two be so cleanly divorced?). That's part of what I understand from the phrase "the turn to language" which is used by Barrett Watten in Grand Piano Vol. 6; while it describes a particular moment associated with language-centered writing in the 1970s, Watten's interest in the turn to language by his collaborators is useful beyond that context. And so, while I think of some of the work of explicitly language-centered writing as exhibiting the properties I look for in a poem, that dingbat process, I think we can and should undergo such a process both when a poem visually disturbs our expectations and when it appears not to. It would, of course, be a mistake to remove from a poem the power to turn (us) to language. which is one danger of the sort of labeling of poetry schools that happens in contemporary poetry in some camps at the moment (but that's a topic for another post).

(It seems that Whatzit, at this website, has rechristened itself Dingbats, and is now messing around with images, too. Boo!).

And a Dingbat to leave you with:


B
A
B
E
L



(well, it seemed appropriate given the post...answer it in the comments)