Words

I can’t say enough about them. They are my paint and my instrument. They splash and sometimes they sing. In a recent dream I saw Peggy turn a typewriter into a piano.

The best words in the best order and voila, a poem. When asked about his style, John Coltrane said he starts in the middle of a sentence and works in both directions at once. I believe it. Words could also be those last drips Jackson Pollock allowed, which said everything he had to say and sensing just when to stop.

Knowing when to shut up is part of writing like the intervals in music without which it can die from excess. Hush, sound needs space, like a Japanese scroll. Lincoln seemed to know that. His Gettysburg Address of ten sentences may have been the greatest poem of the 19^th century.

An exhausted phrase feels dead on arrival, limp from misuse. Public discourse out of the mouth of a politician often reaches the ear like a discord of trumpets heralding its empty rhetoric. When Biden gives a speech, I generally turn it off. When Trump spoke, I never turned it on.

Oratory has become a form of political theater. In the aftermath of mass killings Republicans have been shown to be bought by the gun lobby. When they shamelessly call for prayers instead of meaningful legislation, each word is an added atrocity, an assault on common sense, a moral violence.

Add an “s” and words become swords piercing us awake. A poet casts a net to catch the butterfly of words as they flutter all around us. Butterfly is one of those words devoutly to be avoided in a poem ever since Hallmark cards have loved it to death. It belongs to a group of good words yearning to be revitalized.

There was a time when the well-shaped sentence on the page was regarded as a thing of beauty particularly when the subject and predicate were separated by a dozen commas. Even in spoken language, dinner guests had to sharpen their skills if they wanted to get reinvited.

After the first World War, limbs were shot off and sentences got clipped. Ornamentation along with monarchies were overthrown. The staccato of jazz, concision in poetry and the Bauhaus school in architecture more closely reflected urban discourse.

With our thumbs on the keyboard of life we have become practitioners of brevity. Me too, why not, got it, have replaced the elegant sentence. In contemporary literature adjectives are deemed saccharine or needlessly weighty and adverbs, really, very superfluous. Soon the rest of the letters may be replaced by a few emojis.

If we continue on this trajectory, we will end up from whence we came, fluent only in shrugs and grunts.