Q
A Phoenician letter the
Greeks discarded, having no use in their language for a Semitic sound. If the
soul has a qualm, the body shows it. The body queries what it means to be true.
Quilty! Humbert’s doppelgänger—a sack of feathers? Another name for the quill
of a feather is calamus, from Greek, kalamos, reed. Who first filled a quill?
The Phoenician Q meant qoph, monkey, its tail lingering in the language. I
propose introducing some English words that use Q, but not U, naming new
conditions that will kill Scrabble players, among others: qib, the eye disorder
that results from staring too long at a computer screen; qell, the nausea that
accompanies the mixing of incompatible therapeutic drugs; and qatch, the moment
before the articulation of a sound, that split second when the brain tells the
throat and tongue to speak.
I’m
fascinated by American poet Natasha Sajé’s third trade poetry collection, Vivarium (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press,
2014), a collection built as a kind of lyric abecedarian. As the back cover
informs, “A Vivarium is an enclosure for living things, which might likewise be
said of a poem.” There is something quite compelling in the playful way in
which Sajé’s poems stretch, bounce and lean, accumulating themselves into a
kind of map-making structure, opening into parts both familiar and unknown.
Poems are included alphabetically, titled either by single letters or phrases,
and left to accumulate towards a structure that is held together with ease; a
single unit that is playful, tight and almost bulletproof. As she writes in the
poem “S”: “we say one thing is not another thing / and in this language every
letter is pronounced [.]” One might say that terrain is all over the place, and
it includes the Phoenician alphabet, Greek history, philosophy, Herman
Melville, George Harrison, classical paintings and fairy tales, but she manages
to weave both a complex and simple tapestry across great distances. “Easily the
nicest bit I’ve read all evening,” she writes, to open the poem “Vanessa
Redgrave Marries / Franco Nero After Forty Years,” continuing: “fine piece of
frivolous / gossip that is also oddly gratifying.” This is a quietly smart,
thoughtful and even mischievous poetry collection, and one that manages to end
up in the most unexpected and playful places. The finest description I can
imagine for Natasha Sajé’s Vivarium
is that this is a book made up entirely of living things. And what wonderful
things they are.
HAPPY
AND SAD
come different way
through the brain—
in one a feather is
lofted on
warm currents. In the
other, lead talons
drag you around a
volcano’s rim.
One’s a beach resort
with sparkling pools
and attentive staff.
The other’s a town in
the interior,
hordes scratching dirt
with rakes.
That one’s a deck of
marked cards,
the other a blank book
of creamy pages. Back
and forth
between windows, fort/da,
the fear of losing or
the freedom of knowing
love remains. Two
spigots, one Chateau
d’Yquem,
the other piss, the
brain a bartender
trying to regulate
alternating or
sometimes even simultaneous
spurts. You never know
what
will fill your mouth.
I
don’t know how she does it, but reading the poems in this book makes me
enormously happy. And how often does that happen? Not often. I think of
Elizabeth Robinson and Sylvia Legris, of Cole Swensen and Pattie McCarthy, and
not too many others. And now: Natasha Sajé.
N
Normal: Latin, norma, a carpenter’s square
No, non, nein, na, no,
nah, näo, nee, ne, nei, nil, no, no, nu, nope, nej, nyet, nnyaa, no, non, nay,
never, nei, nie, nope, nou, negative, nenni, not on your life, nå, no, no, no …
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