INTRODUCTION
âPhysical pain,â Elaine Scarry writes in The Body in Pain , her brilliant examination of the intersection of suffering, language, and power, âdoes not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.â
How does pain erase speech? First, of course, because the one doing the hurting is too englobed in the experience of hurt to make any words: hit your thumb with a hammer and itâs as if the bone-deep intensity of that experience hijacks all energy from the mind; nothing can be seen or felt but the throbbing, blinding âthis-nessâ of that experience. As if there were nothing in the world but ache.
Throbbing , blinding , ache : the relative paucity of the words themselves point to the second reason why pain eludes the saying. We donât have the vocabulary for it. English, which has an endless supply of terms for, say, getting drunk, offers the barest scraps to help us name the way weâre ailing. Pain can be throbbing, stabbing, shooting, piercing, or burning,
and thatâs about it. Is this because intoxication is primarily a social experience, whereas pain is the opposite, always experienced alone? Words exist for the realm of the shared. Our poverty of terms for pain may indicate that weâve given up on creating a lexicon, understanding that the solitary, suffering subject remains a solitary. When we are wordless, we tend to be world-less as well. What cannot be conveyed about the self and the body lodges stubbornly in either silence or âsounds and cries.â
But poetry is unlike other language, and its difference from daily speech lies in part in its relationship to those wordless utterances. Poetry bases itself in the sheer expressive power of vowel and consonant; rhythmic, bodily sound-making; moan and exhalation; the outcry that shades into song. Stanley Kunitz says that his poems begin in sound, and âsense has to fight its way in.â The music that lies beneath speech is a vehicle of feeling.
Perhaps itâs this grounding in the physicality of language that gives poetry its courage to wrestle with the difficult, if not downright impossible, work of getting the barely sayable onto the page. Poetryâs power exists in exact proportion to this attempt; the harder it tries to do what canât be done, the more beautiful and engaging its failure. Or perhaps better to say that its failureâthe inability of words to be commensurate with the power of experienceâbegins to come out the other side, and somehow or other, through some feat of linguistic legerdemain, a poem is made that does what speech shouldnât be able to do. A miraculous poem approximates the character of subjectivity, how it is to be in the world.
Alex Lemonâs âOther Goodâ seems to me a miraculous poem, one that locates a vocabulary for a near-unspeakable realm of experience. Here is its opening passage:
Anesthesia dumb, scalpel-paste
Rawing my tongue, I found
Myself star-fished in sky
Spinning days. I stared into my eyelidsâ
Â
Bustling magic, the black
Of my hands. Oh, how darkness
Swaggered, dealt fluorescent-blurs
& the choke of the sea. This is my everythingâ
Â
Bright shuddered my cheeks,
Shadows whistled through their teeth,
Hallways thrummed & snorted,
The surgeons in my brain
Â
Pissed with no hands.
The poemâs first and considerable accomplishment is to defamiliarize the hospital world: no familiar furniture here, no IV bottles and cranked-up beds with white-white sheets. Lemonâs unexpected image-world immediately evokes the speakerâs disorientation and ravishment, and the reader is swiftly destabilized and placed into a linguistic territory that is the result, at least metaphorically, of that ârawingâ of the tongue; it isnât possible to speak in
âPhysical pain,â Elaine Scarry writes in The Body in Pain , her brilliant examination of the intersection of suffering, language, and power, âdoes not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.â
How does pain erase speech? First, of course, because the one doing the hurting is too englobed in the experience of hurt to make any words: hit your thumb with a hammer and itâs as if the bone-deep intensity of that experience hijacks all energy from the mind; nothing can be seen or felt but the throbbing, blinding âthis-nessâ of that experience. As if there were nothing in the world but ache.
Throbbing , blinding , ache : the relative paucity of the words themselves point to the second reason why pain eludes the saying. We donât have the vocabulary for it. English, which has an endless supply of terms for, say, getting drunk, offers the barest scraps to help us name the way weâre ailing. Pain can be throbbing, stabbing, shooting, piercing, or burning,
and thatâs about it. Is this because intoxication is primarily a social experience, whereas pain is the opposite, always experienced alone? Words exist for the realm of the shared. Our poverty of terms for pain may indicate that weâve given up on creating a lexicon, understanding that the solitary, suffering subject remains a solitary. When we are wordless, we tend to be world-less as well. What cannot be conveyed about the self and the body lodges stubbornly in either silence or âsounds and cries.â
But poetry is unlike other language, and its difference from daily speech lies in part in its relationship to those wordless utterances. Poetry bases itself in the sheer expressive power of vowel and consonant; rhythmic, bodily sound-making; moan and exhalation; the outcry that shades into song. Stanley Kunitz says that his poems begin in sound, and âsense has to fight its way in.â The music that lies beneath speech is a vehicle of feeling.
Perhaps itâs this grounding in the physicality of language that gives poetry its courage to wrestle with the difficult, if not downright impossible, work of getting the barely sayable onto the page. Poetryâs power exists in exact proportion to this attempt; the harder it tries to do what canât be done, the more beautiful and engaging its failure. Or perhaps better to say that its failureâthe inability of words to be commensurate with the power of experienceâbegins to come out the other side, and somehow or other, through some feat of linguistic legerdemain, a poem is made that does what speech shouldnât be able to do. A miraculous poem approximates the character of subjectivity, how it is to be in the world.
Alex Lemonâs âOther Goodâ seems to me a miraculous poem, one that locates a vocabulary for a near-unspeakable realm of experience. Here is its opening passage:
Anesthesia dumb, scalpel-paste
Rawing my tongue, I found
Myself star-fished in sky
Spinning days. I stared into my eyelidsâ
Â
Bustling magic, the black
Of my hands. Oh, how darkness
Swaggered, dealt fluorescent-blurs
& the choke of the sea. This is my everythingâ
Â
Bright shuddered my cheeks,
Shadows whistled through their teeth,
Hallways thrummed & snorted,
The surgeons in my brain
Â
Pissed with no hands.
The poemâs first and considerable accomplishment is to defamiliarize the hospital world: no familiar furniture here, no IV bottles and cranked-up beds with white-white sheets. Lemonâs unexpected image-world immediately evokes the speakerâs disorientation and ravishment, and the reader is swiftly destabilized and placed into a linguistic territory that is the result, at least metaphorically, of that ârawingâ of the tongue; it isnât possible to speak in