‘The little rabbits smiled sweetly in their sleep under the shower of grass; they did not awake because the lettuces had been so soporific.’
Soporific.
Precisely the right word.
That’s it, isn’t it? The right one, in the right place.
Soporific.
The fabulous and mysterious surprise of language, which in the ordinary way we use so lightly – merely for talking.
But when you find it fixed and free in a rhyme or simply placed without fuss exactly where it should go in the dark backward and abysm of time – well, the black bat night has flown, that’s what, and ringed with the azure world he stands.
The right word in the right place is the star to every wandering bark.
There is wildness and wet, wildness and wet, and then suddenly it’s long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. From wildness to wilderness, simply a syllable. But slipping ‘wilderness’ into the last line of ‘Inversnaid‘, as if it were inevitable, oh my!
I am working on two new pamphlets. They have provoked this excitement and woken up the wonder of words.
The two poets in question are especially good at putting the right word in the right place, and each time this happens, there’s that little shock of recognition. It feels like a miracle.
Maybe this is how clichés get to be clichés. Somebody puts the right word in the right place and the world falls in love with it. So a heart of gold loses its original beautiful self and belongs to everybody. Then the level playing field flattens. At the end of the day, we’re back to square one, which may or may not have something to do with hop-scotch.
A day job as a copy-writer has been an honorable trade for many poets and if I could write catch phrases for a living, why would I not? I throw you a phrase. You catch it and pass it on…
But there’s more to it than that inside a poem. You linger on the precise and delicious word, yes – but it’s precise and delicious because of where it is in the poem as a whole, which the sum of the parts is greater than. Another mystery: how a poem adds up to something that seems to make sense even if it doesn’t.
Here are two tasters from the poets who have stirred me to dithyrambs.
Ramona Herdman’s forthcoming pamphlet is called Bottle and actually it does contain ‘a taster of pink fizz’, but that’s nothing to what else is in there.
For example, there’s a ship in a bottle and its deck ‘flexes under your feet’. Flexes. Besides, how did you get inside the bottle?
There’s ‘a stumble of ice cubes’ and then ice ‘ticking’ in a glass. Ticking.
There’s a ‘quiver of whiskies’. Quiver.
It is a joyful job to be a poetry editor and linger over words. To set them onto a page one by one and marvel. And then to share them.
Lois Williams’s forthcoming debut may be called Like Other Animals. It’s a bargain. No, really. Read on. She wakes up words and sets them spinning.
There’s a cashier, in Poundland, for example. She’s ‘stuck there, furious, reliable.’ ‘What if our bargains are / our only words in common?’ Bargains.
At the town centre pond, there are ‘goldfish / shimmering their semaphore’. Shimmering. Semaphore.
And at home, there’s her father in the greenhouse ‘dusting off soil, bits of vermiculite’. Vermiculite. I don’t think I’ve ever said the word out loud till now. Vermiculite.
What a sensuous pleasure language is! What an amazing and humbling gift!
