Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
That's me.
I must be in the right place.
I wanted to begin, kind of, actually at the ending,
which is to tell you what I want you to leave thinking about
because what I'm going to say
is going to put some pressure on the words that I'm using
because what I'm going to be talking about briefly
is words themselves
and meaning and meaningfulness
and hopefully give you an idea
of what it means to listen to words the way poets do.
And I think this is not limited to, simply, people who write verse,
but it's something that we can all do.
So let me give you an example.
When the organizers of the conference came to me
and they told me that the theme was "exploring the footnotes,"
my immediate thought was,
"I have no idea what that means."
(Laughter)
I had no clue.
And that's not their fault;
that is something that happens to me, actually, a lot.
"How are you doing today?"
"What? What is that? Today?
Why today, not yesterday?"
(Laughter)
You get an idea of my home life.
But this isn't, really, like I said, is really, kidding aside,
it really is true that that is something that happens to me a lot,
and it's one of the reasons
that I turned to poetry and to philosophy early,
and it has been an abiding passion
because both poets and philosophers
do worry about the meaning of every possible word,
with the idea that what I say
doesn't necessarily match
with your understanding of the words that I'm using,
and vice versa,
that there is this gap that falls between what I say and what I mean
and what you hear and what you think my words mean.
So I began to think about what "exploring the footnotes" would mean.
And I thought, okay, what is a footnote?
And a footnote is not what we, I think, take it to mean,
which is sort of ancillary meaning that exists somewhere outside the text.
Actually, it reveals to us the inner life of a word or a phrase or an idea,
and it says that that idea, that footnote, isn't separate,
isn't somehow some added value - the way we say things these days -
but is, in fact, something ghostly,
that it is the meaning that haunts;
it's the text that travels alongside but often unseen -
the text of things that we mean.
Which then, if I thought of it that way,
called to mind this passage from one of my great heroes,
who is Ralph Waldo Emerson.
And Emerson writes this:
"The poets made all the words,
and therefore language is the archives of history,
and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses.
For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten,
each word was at first a stroke of genius,
and obtained currency,
because for the moment
it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer.
The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.
Language is fossil poetry."
The italics are my added emphasis
because I think that this is really an important thing
in any word that we say:
it has this entire history,
has ages and ages of meaning that are embedded in that word
that we're both conscious of and not conscious of.
But it's always part of its story.
And so this comes from a passage -
this passage comes from an Emerson essay
called "The Poet."
And for Emerson, the poet isn't, as I said at the beginning,
a person who simply writes verses
or rhymes or doesn't rhyme or writes limericks or whatever
but is in fact a person for whom language is an active proposition,
who can bring back to life the fossil, poetry,
and make it a living, breathing thing,
that it shapes us every day and every way.
Because this is the thing that's, I think, most important to think about
if you're thinking about the inner life of words:
is that we are, before and after and during anything else,
beings made of words.
Everything that you think,
everything that you say,
everything that you feel
appears in words.
And so our world, too, is a world of words.
And words are our way of being in the world
and is the world's way of being in us.
But it's not that simple,
because, as I said, if someone says "footnotes,"
or someone says, "How was your day?"
and I'm not quite sure what it means to say these things,
that I'm not sure that when I say what I'm going to say
that it will match up completely with all my intentions.
And then, of course, I'm not aware of the unintended things:
the fact that I had a bad day,
the fact that I'm thinking of something that happened months ago
or that I had a bad lunch or something like that.
All these things factor into the conscious and unconscious inner life of words:
they're footnotes.
If there is this slipperiness,
then what we need to do
is become more and more sensitive to the insides of words,
the language of words.
Emerson also said this:
"I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms,
is not the world I think.
I observe that difference and shall observe it.
One day, I shall know the value and law of this discrepance."
So, what I say is really a version of this,
which is the language that I'm using is at a distance from this experience,
from these words, these worlds,
that I'm trying to generate in other people.
And because of that, there are two possible responses.
One is to just give up and say,
"Well, none of this matters.
I can't get inside it; I can't be heard; I can't be understood."
If you doubt what I mean,
think about the last time you had a fight with a loved one:
"Did you mean to say ... ?"
"No, I didn't mean that at all.
This is what I meant to say."
That that slipperiness is not,
like I said, it's not part of just simply a philosophical or poetic problem,
but is in fact, something we deal with every day,
but also this idea that the world itself,
our ability to actually say it so it stays still,
so it is the thing that we want it to be,
the thing that we most believe it to be,
it doesn't stay still.
It recedes from us.
If you've ever had to talk to someone about someone who's died,
and you want to convey to them your grief, your feelings of loss,
you realize just how limited words are
to communicate the thing we most want to say.
Or if you've been deeply, deeply, utterly in love,
the idea that we can't quite express it,
that we can never express it completely,
falls into this idea as well.
So then, what comes upon us is this idea that I'm suggesting,
which is to listen and use words the way a poet does,
which I said is Emerson's idea.
So I give you an example,
this poem by William Carlos Williams,
another master, I think.
These are all really ordinary words.
It's a fairly ordinary scene, but think of it this way:
"To a Poor Old Woman"
"munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand.
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her"
Now, this is a poem, which, as I said, all the words are familiar to us.
They're ordinary words.
There's nothing that you'd have to look up.
And we could say that this is a poem about empathy,
about identifying with this woman that he sees eating these delicious plums.
But in the repetition, in the sense of the sort of torqued line breaks,
we see that Williams is actually trying to have his poem teach us something
alongside the idea of empathy,
the idea alongside the possibility
of seeing someone particularly and clearly.
What he's getting us to think about
is the language.
To hear how "They taste good to her"
is actually different from "They taste good / to her,"
"They taste / good to her."
Through the repetition and through the use of that line break,
what he allow for is the silence or the space to enter into language,
to enter into our experience of language,
to hear the gaps between words.
Why?
So that he can slow our thinking down,
so that he can slow our listening down.
Because too often what we do - and we're all guilty of this -
is that our minds race ahead.
Too often we try to figure out what the sentence is saying
before we've come to the end.
So even in the ways that I'm speaking now,
you don't know what I'm about to actually say,
but you do know,
because we share this idea of grammar,
that I will come to a period -
and with that period, comma -
or some other idea that I might throw in,
perhaps a semicolon - comma -
(Laughter)
that we will eventually come to the ending,
and it won't be surprising
in that the sense of the form allows you to race ahead.
That's why we can say,
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it. I got it. Right, right, right."
We cut people off.
And what Williams gets us to do
is to think about how the ways language appears to us
not as a block, not running ahead of us,
but happening one word at a time.
Meaning accrues in a sentence, and so he gets us to slow down,
to hear the spaces and the silence
between words and between lines
and between ideas.
And in doing that, the words mean more to us
because we sit with them, we test them out, we try out every idea,
every possible freighted meaning that comes to life
if we actually sit and think about that word.
Now, this happens in a poem, but imagine that we did this every day.
What if we did this with everything we said
or everything anyone else said to us?
What we'd find, I think, is that we'd talk a lot slower.
But I mean, beyond that,
what would be real
is that we would know what we meant when we said a word.
We would begin to know what other people are trying to say.
We would be sensitive to the textures, the possibilities and the potentialities
of those words that we use
so that they are replete with meaning,
so that they are as alive with meaning and possibility
as we want them to be.
Because if our world is a world of words,
if we are beings made of words,
then the more that we know any word that we use
as we use it,
the more we have of the world,
the better we know ourselves.
The better we know ourselves, the more we are alive
and conscious to the possibilities that this world exists to offer us
and the possibilities we can offer to this other world
if we stay with every word, one at a time.
Thank you.
(Applause)