Weights of Words

Much to consider from the readings of stacks, from the reading by Shane Rhodes, the workshop with David O’Meara.
And meantime, body would like to have a lead-piped word with me about the upcoming one year anniversary of my dad’s stroke. Much sound inside and outside the ears to process.
But then there is this Jacob Polley poet who I’d not heard of until O’Meara’s mention of his Jar of Honey and the poem is a place to rest:

You hold it like a lit bulb,
a pound of light,
and swivel the stunned glow
around the fat glass sides:
it’s the sun, all flesh and no bones
but for the floating knuckle
of honeycomb
attesting to the nature of the struggle.

What a sweet piece for the ear.
Each word lands solidly and yet there are pivots of unexpected that can’t be anticipated yet fit, such as that pound of light, the heavy bulb of honey. There’s a natural language that has a grace to it. Like a dancer who also walks and you can infer the one from the other.
Its end testifies to something beyond the immediate and sees the honeycomb differently. Honey collected from so many bees and so many trips is like a national budget, the numbers involved to astronomical to hold in the head. And yet the suggestion of comb like knuckles, like a fight, like some part wrenched from the whole, which it is, the violence of the process of living.

I saw the comb inside in 2006 and thought, oh, neat. I held it to the light but for some reason took only one photo at night.
The presence of a piece of the honeycomb makes buying the homogenized honey like buying abstractions that cleave away any of the connection to the lives that went into the work that is the food. It’s an honesty and an an honoring. That’s a valuable sort of insight that Polley brought forward.
For all the attentiveness to being present with the object at hand and the sounds, there is the duality of the ugliness of the beauty and at the same time an allegiance with the bees like a nod to a fellow being and a tie between one’s own struggles and theirs.
It’s a thrust of a poem that adds a voice to the story of unity and interconnectedness while not doing so in a simplistic way by a refrain of exclusively beauty permitted on this flight, folks. It’s complex as it needs to be and is spoken in an economical way. All the L consonance ties it together but with the L at any position in the word so they are rather in camouflage. And some are a dark l and some clear l so they are different phonemes although to English mind they don’t make a difference in meaning in words (i.e. they are allophones) so are considered one sound. (For a Mandarin /t/ and (breathy) /tʰ/ are separate phonemes that are as different as /bit/ and /pit/.) There are all kinds of internal slant rhymes that cinch the poem tighter without being so overt that it draws attention to itself.
I had thought of consonance and assonance but I’d not tied together in framing of slant rhymes. Slant rhyme I’d framed as changed final consonant(s) only. The idea expands the tool box of there being consonantal rhyme (lit, light) or assonantal rhyme (light, sides or bones, glow).
Consonantal rhyme strikes me as something to watch for since I’d like to explore the idea of consonants as word base as exists in classical Arabic. For example, the root KTB relates to writing so Kaatib is writer, kitaab is book, maktabah is library, maktuub is written, mukaatabah is correspondance, kutayyib is booklet. Some part of our universal language machine automatically generates this as a salient feature in language, logical and intuitive to tie similar concepts together.
Each language must be itself of course and has its own innate qualities that resonate with the human brain, whether one speaks that dialect or language or not. It’s like, or it is, a kind of meat body language to use the tongue in certain ways. Something comes across viscerally whatever the “mother tongue”. Tale this poem in Scots by Bruce Lemming

Reid cluds lemin
at keek-o-day —refleckit
in the cray glaur

The effect of its weight of meter and sound is completely different when the writer translated his own to English as it is in How To Haiku edited by Bruce Ross in the appendix (p. 144),

Red clouds glowing
at sunrise —reflected
in the pigsty mud

The meaning is the same, even close with the heavy syllables of guttural mud and heaviness of the word pig. I wonder why he chose glowing instead of glow that would have less lilt. Why include the word at? What is that doing for rhythm? It lightens the line and slows it. And to slow down at a moment’s pause near dawn seems right even if one is within the pig stink of farm.
Sunrise is so flat to English ears against the delightful keek-o-day. Let’s start a movement to adopt that Scots word into English habit.
Reflected in both languages sit as a pivot word, the balance point in the seesaw, a bit of latin borrowed intellect between the sky and muck as one swings from the glorious exhibition on the cloud to presumably the practical task at hand.
It’s quite a workout of brevity.