My bookMeteor, which won the Gival Press Poetry Award, will be out in early 2019. I’m working on a brief Q & A about it, and this got me to noodling. One of the standard questions for any poet, any writer, is about their influences. I wrote many of these poems an eon ago; indeed, some are more than 20 years old. The most recent poem in the collection is from 2010. (Why did it take so long to publish? That would be another blog post. Suffice to say, I didn’t make much effort; I was more focused on writing an epic novel and a book about a book and the Mexican Revolution.)
Back when, I would have said that my main influences as a poet were, in alphabetical order, Raymond Carver, Harry Smith, Stevie Smith, Wallace Stevens, and W. B. Yeats. But I think that now, from this distant perspective of 2018, that in writing these poems I was perhaps equally influenced by James Howard Kunstler’s razor-sharp nonfiction, in particular, his The Geography of Nowhere, and by certain musicians prominent in the ’70 and ’80s– not only by their lyrics, but the physical ambiance they create, the trickster, shapeshifting way they pull down the astral by sound, rhythm, the masks of archetypes. In English, we lack vocabulary for this.
Thanks to the Battle of Hastings of 1066!
Because it is a blend of languages, mainly Anglo-Saxon and Norman French,
English offers unusual facility for diction drops and spikes, and you, dear
writerly reader, if you care to dare, can employ these for a richly dazzling
array of effects. Irony, comedy, sarcasm, intimacy, poignancy, revelation,
poetry, punch, sass, shock… it’s a long list and I’m sure that you can make
it longer.
Here, taken from a few favorite books and blogs, are some examples of diction spikes– that is, a sudden rise in the level of formality of vocabulary and syntax (wherein it all gets very elliptically Latinate)– and drops– gettin’ funky with the grammar and using short, sharp words.
See if you can spot the spikes and drops. I
separate them out for you below the quotes.
#
“What then, does one do with one’s justified anger? Miss Manners’ meager arsenal consists only of the withering look, the insistent and repeated request, the cold voice, the report up the chain of command and the tilted nose. They generally work. When they fail, she has the ability to dismiss inferior behavior from her mind as coming from inferior people. You will perhaps point out that she will never know the joy of delivering a well-deserved sock in the chops. True– but she will never inspire one, either.”
SPIKE:“What then, does one do with one’s justified anger? Miss Manners’ meager arsenal consists only of the withering look, the insistent and repeated request, the cold voice, the report up the chain of command and the tilted nose.”
DROP :“sock in the chops”
#
“Department of Transportation engineers explained that aluminum highway signs bore a chemical film which kept them from oxidizing. And that the film over time formed a halo effect, a light-purple tinge which migrated to stress points on the metals’ surface. The regional maintentance engineer didn’t think the sign looked a bit like the Virgin, by the way. You must of had to use your imagination. Though maybe, he admitted, he was unenlightened. The manager of the plant that supplied the aluminum sheets assured everyone that they weren’t treated by monks or anything. It was done by a bunch of folks in Alabama.”
SPIKE: “Department of Transportation engineers explained that aluminum highway signs bore a chemical film which kept them from oxidizing. And that the film over time formed a halo effect, a light-purple tinge which migrated to stress points on the metals’ surface.”
DROP: “…didn’t think the sign looked a bit like the Virgin, by the way. You must of had to use your imagination…”
SPIKE: “The manager of the plant that supplied the aluminum sheets assured everyone…”
DROP: “…they weren’t treated by monks or anything. It was done by a bunch of folks in Alabama.”
#
“As I thought about composing a new blog post over the past couple of weeks, I resisted the idea of writing about wildfire, even as the topic claimed a growing share of mind day after day. For one thing, I’ve touched the subject before. For another, yet another blog bemoaning the lack of precipitation seemed tiresome. Plus, well, geez: fires are such a downer.”
SPIKE: “…bemoaning the lack of precipitation seemed tiresome.”
DROP:“Plus, well, geez: fires are such a downer.”
#
“When I was a young man in the 1970s, New York was on its ass. Bankrupt. President Gerald Ford told panhandling Mayor Abe Beame to ‘drop dead.’ Nothing was being cared for. The subway cars were so grafitti-splattered you could hardly find the doors or see out the windows. Times Square was like the place Pinocchio grew donkey ears. Muggers lurked in the shadows of Bonwit Teller on 57th and Fifth. These were the climax years of the post-war (WWII) diaspora to the suburbs. The middle class had been moving out of the city for three decades leaving behind the lame, the halt, the feckless, the clueless, and the obdurate ‘risk oblivious’ cohort of artsy bohemians for whom the blandishments of suburbia were a no-go state of mind. New York seemed done for.”
SPIKE: “These were the climax years of the post-war (WWII) diaspora to the suburbs. The middle class had been moving out of the city for three decades leaving behind the lame, the halt, the feckless, the clueless, and the obdurate ‘risk oblivious’ cohort of artsy bohemians for whom the blandishments of suburbia were a no-go state of mind.”
This has been a year of extra-intensive reading, the bulk of it for my book in-progress on Far West Texas. Specifically, I’ve had some catching up to do on the oil industry and New Mexico history (impossible to grok Far West Texas without those subjects). I say this every year but truly, this may have been my richest year of reading yet. I feel so lucky to have encountered these works; each and every one of these authors has my sincere admiration and immense gratitude.
1. The Professor’s House by Willa Cather A deeply weird and profoundly American novel. I had been meaning to read The Professor’s House for years, and I finally did– and by uncannily felicitous happenstance, just after visiting Acoma, Chaco Canyon, and Mesa Verde. (P.S. Whoever calls this book flawed I call a puddinghead.)
2. The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek by Barry Cunliffe A brilliant book that evokes the ghost of a lost book and the world it came out of so unfathomably long ago. This is one I look forward to savoring again.
For the past several years I have been reading intensively about Texas, and that includes its fraught ethnic relations, and with these two books about slavery– both recent and major scholarly contributions– by golly, the whole thang just gelled. For U.S. readers I recommend reading first Torget; then, without delay, Resendiz.
The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 1610 by Genaro M. Padilla It astonishes me that so few Americans or Mexicans have ever heard of the epic poem Historia de la Nueva Mexico– and that would include Yours Truly, until I found The Daring Flight of My Pen. Padilla’s book about Pérez de Villagrá’s book rearranged all the furniture in the way I think about the U.S., about the Southwest, and about Mexico– and waxed the floor and put in new curtains, too.
7. Shrinking the Technosphere by Dmitri Orlov This book has an important and urgent message, but it also comes with a gamelan orchestra of super-freaky esoteric undertones. In other words, to appreciate the clanging in there, you have to be ready to appreciate it. Not for the pleasantly numbed of Smombiedom.
8. Resist Much, Obey Little: Remembering Edward Abbey Edited by James R. Hepworth and Gregory McNamee Its impossible to go far into reading about the American West without encountering Edward Abbey and his works, and in particular his iconic Desert Solitaire. Resist Much, Obey Little, an eclectic collection of essays and interviews, is at once a festschrift and an adventure in the funhouse of Abbey’s mind.
9. Big Batch re: The Oil Patch Having crunched through a library’s worth of reading on the oil industry, herewith a selection of some of the more worthy tomes:
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin This one won the Pulitzer Prize when it came out more than two decades ago, and most deservedly. It rewired my thinking about World War II, among many other episodes in the last century.
The Blood of the Earth: As Essay on Magic and Peak Oil John Michael Greer Reading Greer is akin to spooning up Swiss chocolate pudding: page after page of smoothly yumsie schoggi. Yes, even if it’s got crunchy stuff about oil and– keep your crash helmets on!– magic.
