Words have more power than we sometimes realize. We tend to think of words as being a means of communication, but there is something more to words than just getting a message across. Words are much larger than a few letters on the page. The four letter word that starts with "F" and rhymes with "puck" is much larger than it might seem to someone who came across it without understanding its cultural (and personal) connotations. At a poetry reading I attended once, the poet Li-Young Lee described poetry (and the words that make up a poem) like the walls of a building. What's important to us about a building are not necessarily the walls, but the empty space that the walls create. When I say, "this is a nice room," I am not talking about the walls, but rather about the empty space that is divided off by the walls. The walls exist to create a larger, empty space, which we call a "room."
Words are more than just information. When I say "he died" a whole can of worms is opened. Images flash though your mind (who is "he?" do I know him? how did he die? etc.), judgments are made (was he murdered? was their foul play? should I feel sorry for him?), all based on those two simple words. The power of language is that it creates something larger than itself. The poet Richard Hugo understood this ability of language when he wrote this in his book of essays The Triggering Town: "I caution against communication because once language exists only to convey information, it is dying...Once you have the information, the words seem unimportant." When we attempt to minimize words and reduce them, we neuter language of its synergy. Take a look at this clip from the movie Dead Poet's Society. In this clip Robin William's character gives language (poetry) back its power by having the students remove the essay from their books that attempts to minimize/reduce poetry and language to a formula, to a vehicle for information, which Hugo warned us against.
Recently my mother was reading some poems that I had published in a small literary journal. After pouring over my poems for ten or fifteen minutes she told me "I don't think I get your poetry." I just shrugged. Poetry isn't trying to reduce language to a simple message; it's trying to shape language in a way so that the words mean something more than the sum of their parts. Poetry is trying to enact something through language which language shouldn't be able to enact. Poetry is trying to do with language what music does with some strings stretched to a certain point so that when plucked in the "right" order they make you tap your foot. There's nothing to "get" in the guitar riff from Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water, nothing that can be explained, it just makes you bob your head.
As you move through your life using language almost constantly, take a second to notice the power of that language. The power when George W. Bush says "patriotism" or when someone you care about tells you that he/she "loves" you or when someone forgets to say "please" or "thank you." Language is an immense and powerful thing. Below is a poem I wrote about this power. Enjoy.
On Words and Weight
These things that we call words sometimes become things
that enter our world and have weight here.
Like when my grandfather
would call sheep, sheep, sheep, in a low voice
in the morning and again after dinner
and those words became the ground-up feed corn
he'd pour into their trough
and then became their full stomachs
and the milk the lambs would suckle.
Sheep, sheep, sheep became the milk
the lambs would suckle all spring long.
Like when my mother
would call Oh, God. Oh, God was the return
of her mother's cancer. Sometimes those words
seemed to become like God and it would go into remission,
other times it would not and would become
her mother sleeping most days and all of us
letting her rest. Eventually those words become
all of us dressed in suits and skirts sitting in
the old Catholic church for her funeral. Oh, God
was her death.
Like when we
would call Joe O'Brian Stinky in forth grade
and that word clung to his clothes and smelled like
the hog shit from his family's small hog farm.
Then the word became us hating him back,
because he hated us from how bad
our words made him smell. I wonder if
Joe O'Brian still smells from our words.
Like when I
first called a kid an asshole on the basketball court
and it became the swelling in my upper lip
after we both threw punches and he landed
the only one.
And all those other words that have become so heavy
they have sunk straight through this world by now.
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