Sid Gold | Crooked Speech / 2018

linguistic conundrums

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sid Gold Crooked Speech (Washington, D.C/North Truro, Massachusetts: Pond Road Press, 2018)

Maryland poet Sid Gold’s 2018 collection of poems, Crooked Speech, consists of 4 sections of alternating poems, on one side works quite narrative in their structures, although consisting of some rather remarkable metaphors, while across the page he places prose poems, written much in the manner of Seattle poet John Olson’s work, consisting of seemingly narrative sentences put together as a series of non-sequiturs, unrelated observations from history, from apparently personal experiences of which we cannot possibly have any knowledge, and linguistic/philosophical conundrums.

  

    At first reading the two pairings seem to have little connection. Take for example his short poem “Locusts” and the much longer prose-poem “Chimney”

 

                              Given time, every conversation

                              ceases: perhaps someone has grasped

                              the inevitable lurking beyond

 

                              the reach of our words. Rocking gently,

                              our heads nodding like branches

                              burdened with fruit, we practice

 

                              waiting for a reply. In the fields

                              the locusts grind on, sharpening

                              the small knives they’re made of.

 

“Chimney” begins:

 

      Sanctuaries for Amazonia’s native peoples are routinely violate.

      Daddy’s favorite direction was North by Northeast. Casatt burned

      Degas’ letters shortly before her death. The cocktail culture has no

      set agenda. He’s quite canine in some respects, concluded Joanna.

      Fire hydrants, however, do not inspire confidence. I myself had

      never been sufficiently chastened. Copper and tin ores are rarely

      found in the same locale. Crocodiles will ingest stones in order to

      remain low in the water….

 

The linguistic/philosophical conundrums of this poem occur several lines later:

 

       A chisel is not a tooth. A nose is not a mallet. Prunes or prudence?

       Hearsay or heresy?

 

And the ending of this poem:

  

       There is still time to bring in the adhesive removers. He had only a

       dish of pears to keep him company. From a neighbor’s chimney;

       the smoke rose straight & blue.

 

     If on first thought none of these things seem connected, we only have to move a bit into abstraction to perceive that the “Locusts” poem is actually talking about a lack of communication, a seeming assimilation of words that does not result in true meaning, and, most importantly, a refusal in our patterns of listening to hear the other person speaking.

     The second poem is about all about “violation,” of closing down things, as often happens in the cocktail hour, or even the crocodile’s attempt to further sink itself into the waters, a narrator’s fear that he should have been chastened more than he has been in the past—in short, all attempts to close off or hide from the world from the natural world or the natural reality of things. Prunes, a natural diuretic are opposed to prudence, a careful decision-making process which determines “cautiousness,” a tamping down of what might be released. A simple act of “hearsay” in Gold’s poem suddenly becomes a kind of “heresy.” The chimney of the poem’s title is itself a tamper, a control to remove the hot air and smoke from a building or house into the air as simple “blue smoke.”

    

Everything in these two poems, in other words, is about controlling situations that might have otherwise resulted in true communication or true empathy with the beings and world around. Yes, there is, in fact, something terribly “crooked” about this “speech.”

    I present another example, the pairing of “Old Europe” with Gold’s longer poem “Snow.” In the first poem, we are presented with what we might describe as post-World War II conditions in Europe:

 

                Off in one corner

                a small boy has turned

                his head to make certain

                on one sees him taking a pee

 

                & across the piazza a crowd

                of workers mills around while waiting

                for the day’s list of names

                to be posted on the post office door.

 

                Other than a few stray dogs

                baring their teeth at each other

 

                Only, somewhere off-canvas,

                an angel silently weeps.

 

This cinematic scene might be almost out of a De Sica film such as The Bicycle Thief, contraposed with the much darker series of images in his prose poem “Snow,” which begins:

 

      The harsh February, grave diggers were forced to use power

      drills to open the frozen ground. Slaves comprised one-third

      of the population in ancient Athens. You want to keep circling

      around, then keep circling around. I try to maintain my joints,

      Wally assured us. The heart remained in the body during

      mummification. Itinerant builders began calling themselves

      Freemasons as early as the 14^th century. Horses were unknown

      to the Incas until the Conquistadors arrived….

 

The linguistic/philosophical conundrums of this work appear further down:

 

      A mouth is not a match. A truck is not a trick. Story-tellers must

      be concerned with more than a story’s outcome.

 

Here, obviously, is a fragmented tale of power and servitude, encompassing the history of the world from ancient invasions to the Jewish Holocaust. The violence of its key words, matching up fire with the very ability to speak, and the notion of trucks—perhaps carrying immigrants to their destinations or Jewish citizens to their deaths instead of the usual forced train evacuations, is defined as something more serious than a “trick.”

     Gold summarizes at the end of the poem:

 

     …I’ve never felt the allure of automatic weapons. That slow, uncertain drive

     down Shadow Road. And shall we call her whiter than snow?

 

     Here he alludes obviously to the deaths that he has been subtly recounting throughout his poem, meeting death or, at least, the fear of death, down into a shadowland which terrorizes him—while also hinting of Snow White, the suffering slave of a daughter who, in order to find her prince, had to endure, somewhat like Wagner’s Brunhilda, to suffer death before she could briefly enjoy her life.

     These poems, filled also with numerous images of jazz—to which Gold is passionately committed—along with their amazing references to cultural history, make Gold’s poems come alive with a kind of ferocity I might never have expected.

     In full disclosure, I attended graduate school with Sid Gold at the University of Maryland in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where we shared the experience of so very many graduate teaching assistants of what was then described as the “pit”—a room with dozens and dozens of desks which allowed us a near impossibility of keeping any privacy, let alone helping to advise our students (I had over 30 in my “Experimental Literary Fictions” course). But I never truly got to know Sid very well. Now I feel I finally have.

 

Los Angeles, October 25, 2019