I Thought Poets Were People of the Word

"The Sky is Aqua on Thursday Nights"
Actually, it was Susana Gardner's comment that started this: her point that mIEKAL aND and I were "the wordmeisters," meaning, I think, not just the stringers of words together, but the makers, the inventors, of words. But it seemed to me that word coinage is merely the most elemental act of poetry, especially the way mIEKAL and I practice it, and that we do this because we are in the thrall of language, slaves to meaning and the flying buttresses of meaning (the sounds and the shapes) that hold it temporarily in place.

So I spoke and recorded a little extemporaneous aural essay today, one that began with the idea and the sentence, "I thought poets were people of the word," but which moved into more general considerations of language before moving to poetry (which is almost a return to the poet). This essay is one of my more rambling aural essays, though also one of the shortest, but it is also one that can't be reproduced on the page. The sound of my voice, and the sound of my voiceless mouth, are essential to the essay.

Listen, if you will. The photograph above I snatched from the film, Wristcutters: A Love Story, while it was playing on my computer, and now the image is all mine. As I say. Appropriation is appropriate.



ecr. l'inf.