Genitive Wednesday

Today I'm giving a poetry reading in a colleague's class and then fielding questions. Often students ask about where I or poets in general (like these students) "get ideas" for poems. Another way of asking this questions is "What is it that drives poets" (when it's not a taxi-cab driver, har har)?

My friend Kevin Clark tells great stories about having taken a workshop from the famous Southern bad-boy poet and novelist (Deliverance) James Dickey, known for archery, boozing, and fighting--a schtick associated with Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway and countless others, of course, even if the particulars differ. Apparently Dickey roared into the classroom wearing a hat that Burt Reynolds had given him during the filming of Deliverance. The roar of the poet, the smell of machismo!

To open up the workshop, Dickey asked the graduate students what, fundamentally, poets like to do in their art. Of course, trying to get on the good side of the Great Poet, the students were tempted to say that poets like to depict real gritty life, or to be the "unacknowledged legislators" of the world, or to "express the inexpressible," or to get carried away by inspiration, or to devote their lives to art. (As Seinfeld might say: Yadda, yadda.)

Kevin smelled a rat, however, and remembered that W.H. Auden's famous anticlimactic answer to the question was simply this: "Poets like to play with words." Of course, Auden was being a bit coy, and Auden did much more than play with words. But that was, in fact, the answer Dickey was looking for, and Kevin gave it to him, and we'll simply slide past the several ironies of Dickey's and Auden's having agreed with one another.

What Auden meant, I think, is that words constitute the medium of poetry, not ideas, inspiration, life, or love. Words are to poetry what paint is to--well, painting. By saying "Poets like to play with words," Auden was implying, perhaps, that poets shouldn't lose sight of the medium itself even when they're trying to write "about" something. Often the so-called "idea" for a poem comes simply from playing around with (or working with, if that phrase seems more respectable) language, even if the poem, when finished, seems to be "about" something else, such as a red wheel barrow or having your heart broken.

It's true that readers usually want more from a poem than simply the poet's having played around with language, and who can blame them?! To some degree, I ignored that consideration in the following poem, which plays around with a) words I enjoy, as words, b) rhythms of phrases and c) the grammatical/linguistic notion of "the genitive case," which in Latin refers to words whose endings change so as to signal that they are being used to suggest ownership (the bird's beak, or the beak "of" the bird), description (the field-lilies or the lilies "of" the field), or location (the farm tools, or tools associated with or tools "of" the farm). I think you get the idea that the genitive case in English is often signaled not by a changed word-ending (English is mostly different from Latin in that respect) but by bringing in the word "of" for assistance. I think Gore Vidal said one of the thorns in a novelist's side (he probably didn't use this analogy) was trying to avoid the double genitive: "Speaking of the King of Sweden, the Norwegian laughed." The repetition of "of" can seem awkward/awkward.

In any event, playing with words, rhythms, and the genitive case, and unafraid to repeat "of," I decided--many years ago--to write a poem that played with words, more or less for the fun of playing with words. Whether readers consider it fun is highly debatable, one reason I kept the poem relatively short. I won't read this poem today to the students, but I will encourage them not to forget to play with words, seriously--to work with words, that is. The poem:

Genitive Case

Of eucalyptus, of acacia,
of rhododendron, tubers,
and pubescence, essence and
viola. Of pulse, of frond,
of pool and cool, of breeze,
arrest, and musculature. Of
hush and curvature. Of rush.
of whisper, moan, variety,
shoulders, piety, also variegation.
Of ripe, of lip, of full. Gladiola,
of. Form, firm, fern, tongue, smell:
of these of course. Of you. Of to doze and of
to languish. Of liquids, tubas, lobes,
and drums. Of cheek, chin, choice.
Of moist. Of measure for measure,
for olives of all, of grape and fig,
laze and sprawl, days and quirks.
Of sycamore and buttocks, of
cedar, water, smoke. Of willing
and of waiting, salt and wit.
Of grin. Of sum.