Then this last one I'm going to read is a long poem.
And I feel compelled to read it because of something
that we've been talking about.
And that is that maybe dead words can be resurrected.
Maybe words that have been left gone from the language
can be resurrected.
I got into this poem when I was--
after my parents died.
My parents died very close together,
and I was in this state for a year or so,
and I wrote out of it.
And this is toward the end of that sequence of poems.
It's a poem called "New Words," and it's
about rifling through the OED, the Oxford English
Dictionary, the 13 volumes, sitting in a room,
a very naked room up in the fourth floor
of the English building in Georgia.
It's called a research room.
And it's just got a table there and the 13 volumes of the OED,
and I spent some time there.
Some of it was sort of hiding time, I think.
And I realized that I was hiding into my connoisseur
sense of the language just looking through
for words, old words that could be maybe used again.
I got into this-- but this will introduce Galway maybe.
By noticing that Galway goes ahead
and just used his own words.
He doesn't put the definitions in like I do.
The word that got me started was goaf.
And this is what I need these things for.
Galway wanted me to read this thing without these things
but I don't think I can.
Maybe I eventually.
Can you see this?
All right, this is--
[LAUGHTER]
So we're going to go on with it.
This is the word.
See, if I said goaf your mind wants
to make it into coat, or goat, or something,
and so but here you got it--
goaf.
This is hard.
At the end of this poem, a bunch of figures come in.
People come in from off the street sort of Rabalais
comes in and others from Missouri folklore.
It gets very, very populated crowded toward the end, which
I think is what it may be about as I write out of that solitude
into a more populated state of mind.
"New Words," like goaf--
"The Galway canal revives in the book of nightmares
for a storage bin in a barn or in a mine, the dark place
the ore's been taken from.
A name for my year long trance.
Whereas Coleman, he's back up in the goaf somewhere.
Rames, Rames: a skeleton or any kind of framework.
The rames of a new house seen through the trees.
The rames of an idea.
Just the rames of a man born on a night with no moon.
Some it's hard to say, like solander, a box
made in the form of a book used for holding botanical
specimens, papers, maps, for hiding
secret guns, shoplifting.
Saprophagous, sarcophagi-- so it is,
rifling the S volume of the OED, I come to satispassion.
It doesn't mean what it ought to.
[LAUGHTER]
Theological for enough agony to atone.
Deliver us not, oh Lord, this day from satispassion.
Sauvez qui peut or Sauvez qui peur, French for save yourself
whoever can.
[LAUGHTER]
Meaning a general stampede or complete route.
Cumberland College in Sauvez qui peut at Georgia Tech,
222 to nothing.
[LAUGHTER]
Sawney, foolishly sentimental, whiny
with false naive emotion."
See, now what I want you to do is to remember these words,
and we can start using them.
See, maybe words can come back.
"Sawney"-- write them down, see?
"Foolishly sentimental, whiny with false naive emotion.
The Scottish variant for the name Sandy.
Don't get in that sawney voice.
We won't be gone long.
[LAUGHTER]
Someone at a reading--
someone asked once at a reading where
are other people in your poems?
What if I had said each old word is breathing out
of someone's name, like Sawney?
The ear is the last face, says Emily, in one of her letters.
Seg, a callus of hard skin on the hand.
Segent describes a quadruped in a sitting position
with four legs upright.
[LAUGHTER]
Selachian, like a shark.
Selenelion, pertaining to the moon,
considered as a world within itself.
Selcouth, self known, known to the self.
Meaning marvelous, and wonderful, and rare.
A constant selcouth sound, like cicadas or the surf.
St. Elmo's Fire.
What am I looking for in dictionaries
but St. Elmo's Fire.
The glow of atmospheric electricity
that appears as a tip of light on pointed objects
in bad weather.
Corpus sancti, St. Elmo's breath.
The words protect us with their cold light.
The face does look like an ear eventually.
Words we're using now burn out.
What the point is I don't know.
There's not a word in English for that time
when the world will not exist.
The Maoris have one, both for when there wasn't life
and when there won't be--
po.
P-O in the OED means peacock and small devil.
Origin unknown.
Pollex, the innermost digit of the forelimb.
An air breathing vertebrates, the thumb.
Whales have thumbs.
Polrose the pit under a water wheel."
Pit under a water wheel.
They have a word for that now.
Pome as a verb, to form a compact head or heart.
As a cabbage that pome close to the ground.
Potamic, of rivers and things that
live there like turtles, moons, water wheels, cabbages,
and words that hold an image for a moment
before they turn to sand and silver paint.
Backwards from the center with the M volume,
musophobist, One who regards poetry with suspicious dislike.
[LAUGHTER]
Muskin, pretty face.
Sweetheart.
Mimp, to pass up one's mouth primly in silence.
[LAUGHTER]
She just sits there with her muskin all mimped up.
[LAUGHTER]
Melrose, a curative preparation made of powdered
rose leaves, honey, and alcohol.
When she looks like that give her some melrose.
[LAUGHTER]
Mees, the form that a rabbit leaves pressed in the grass
and comes home to."
[LAUGHTER]
Don't forget that.
"Maris, the womb.
[? Mali, ?] dotingly fond.
[? Mali ?] father maketh wicked child.
[? Massillon-- ?] no, Mahu, A name for the devil.
Mahu-- I mean, [? massillon, ?] thin
and shriveled from poverty.
Taking such small steps down the list.
Alphabetically disguising the way
I say the same thing over and over.
How this is where I hide in a room with 13
dictionaries and no windows.
Hide from women who love more than I can stand to be loved.
Who want me not to hide inside the breath of an old word
or inside their bodies like St. Elmo's Fire playing
under the shoulder blades.
Rabalais, St. Francois, help me out.
Fanfreluche-- this is one of Rabelais made up word.
To trifle, to act wantonly.
Fanfreluching it 30 times a day.
[LAUGHTER]
Grimp, to climb energetically using hands and feet.
How the little grimper made it, I'll never know.
[LAUGHTER]
Griggles, small apples left on the tree
by the gatherer for the children to have.
[? Grennans, ?] the whiskers of a cat.
Cut the [? grennans ?] off one side she'll walk in a circle.
[LAUGHTER]
Glore, loose fat.
Strange to see two eyes waking up
in the midst of all that glore.
Gillian, a flirty feisty girl, and right under,
Gillian a burnt tail, will of the wisp,
a little phosphorescence in the swamp.
Barnaby, the 11th of June, St. Barnabus' day,
the longest under the old calendar, hence anything
long and drawn out, like this poem.
Battologist, someone who repeats himself a lot,
from Battos, the stammering man, who
went to ask the Delphic oracle about his voice,
and all she said was, you shall become a king in Libya.
He kept asking, what about my voice?
Well, what about my voice?
Now, his name is the front half to a word nobody uses, and he,
one of the chief personalities in a list poem
of what we no longer have in common.
Ferdful, either awesome, inspiring fear,
or full of fear, or both.
Is anybody down there?
He shouted ferdfully.
Yes, came back the ferdful answer.
Feriation, a cessation of work, the act of keeping a holiday,
simple feriation was enough for the weekend.
No binges, no feasts.
Fernshaw, a thicket of ferns, secret places along creeks
around Chattanooga were fernshaws, and nobody knew it.
Fid, a small, but thick piece of anything,
as a fid of cheese or hamburger.
Fidibus, a paper, paper match for lighting pipes.
Fidicinal, of stringed instruments and those
that play them.
Suddenly, my fiddle was blew out in one long fidicinal gust.
Figgum, trickery, stop your wicked figgum
and play the game right.
Turning the pages with an ache, the spine
of an unopened volume in me, leafing the pages for I
don't know what.
Quatch, a word, a sound, not one quatch from you two.
Queachy, dense with undergrowth, the queachy woods
kept them from getting far.
Quisquilious, of the nature of rubbish or refuse,
quisquilious sculpture on display in the garden.
Quodlibetical, a quodlibet bit is any question, in philosophy
or theology, proposed solely as an exercise in argument.
Buckley is less effective for being so quodlibetical.
Granted these are for collectors,
whose lives are hidden, as mine is to me,
faced with definitions and loose ends,
moving over a big book like a kitchen match,
feeling for a rough place, May, a year ago,
the drive from midnight to 4:00, singing and crying too late,
they said, the nurses, but I talked and joked
inside the coma, how she sat up to a 5:00 AM
when I won best athlete at camp, too excited to sleep.
What have you won that we're staying up this late again?
Familiar moving around the mouth and about the eyes,
and she went back.
And I held that hand, holding her in the world, I thought,
but that's not so, or if it is, I let go the next morning
and slept myself.
Some words we have no record of.
Some get written down and last for centuries
before they lose their limits and come
to mean almost anything, nonsense words.
The best is sense nonsense both, child
and parent, earth and sky.
Each of us has a separate face, word,
and name until we look so long at a twin,
or down at the water, or up into night sky so long,
our face becomes an ear, listening to everything.
Three at random from the supplement--
killhag, a wooden trap to catch rabbits.
The killhags are out.
Watch your feet.
Gorpen, of anything that stares in a dumb way,
the gorpen crowd at the gate.
Huma, a fabulous bird and Persian myth,
so restless that it never lights,
and good fortune to anyone it hovers directly over."
Mixed blessing, I guess, but "the cemetery goes on and on
where words are buried, Killhags,
full of different gorpen beasts, above the huma floating.
Speaking dead words, there is a confused solitude
for each of us.
Think of translating this to another language,
trying to find similar terms.
Words exist somewhere between being and not, most of these
closer to not back in the gulf of compilations and folklore.
There's a terrifying legend in Missouri of a headless cobbler,
who has in place of a head, 20 or 30 unmatched shoes
in a great clump between his shoulders,
like an unsolvable puzzle.
When someone is about to die, he comes out
of his cave to take one of any pair he can find, like
dead words end up, one more empty shoe for some collectors
mind.
The living word though is like the god Janus, one face,
looking at meaning in the dictionary, the other looking
out the window at what is.
In death, they split apart at the back of the neck and fall,
one with great relief into water,
the other filled with itself, the other end of the cave,
no longer double.
Close the book and listen.
There's a man shouting in the middle of the street.
Get up for what it means.
If it's a dance, you must dance.
If it's death, you must die.
What a chill when it rains, what wind
comes the dance you must dance, comes death, you can't help it.
Get up.
There's a man calling in the middle of the street."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
There will be a short quiz after that.
[LAUGHTER]