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 14th 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
