The inner voice

Reading poetry requires some suspension of disbelief. I’ve been reading Lyn Hejinian’s long poem The Fatalist; I think I love it. But to even know it I’ve had to be willing to believe that all of the words on the page are right, that they are purposeful and will make beautiful sense if I just trust that the connotative and expressive value of the words tell a story that hangs like a mist around the print. Consequently, I’ve mostly read it on the bus where it’s more difficult to wield a pen.

The best words get said frequently – they are like fertile pips.
Apples fall heavily to the ground and lie in the sun, their scent
abandoning them as a philosophy which cannot be further perfected. Love
releases playful sensations even from serious things providing a life
to think about. . .

So pretty. There are many sections of this poem in which I saw myself, or my lover, or other people we know. I folded down the corners of pages that seemed to equate language with eating (for my project) but also the ones that seemed portraitlike, as nonspecific as they are.

When I read poetry aloud, my tone is very serious – not too heavy, but purposeful and grave. It feels like carrying something very fragile in your hands: you want to have a good grip on it, but not so firm you crush it. My subvocalization sounds the same way. Try reading those few lines – how do they sound in your brain?

Then read these few lines:

The eating of one’s own progeny at a royal feast is a powerful image to be contained in a work of literature and is how Ovid’s story of Philomel and Tereus culminates in his Metamorphoses. The device is common and many revenge plays draw upon the same story from Aeschylus’s Oresteia to William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. The physical act of eating one’s offspring signifies both the cycle of revenge present within the play as well as consuming forces that drive both the protagonists and antagonists of the play.

Those are the first few sentences from one of the senior seminar papers I’m assessing (not from my own class, which does discuss cannibalism but not in Greek tragedies). I picked up this paper to read immediately after I finished The Fatalist in a coffee shop this afternoon. . . but my brain was still subvocalizing in the poem-voice. Reader, I could not find anything wrong with those sentences. It’s like I was hynotized: that paper presented itself to me in the voice of Lyn Hejinian’s long poem and I was unable to read it as anything other than authoritative and graceful.

Once I figured out what was happening, I cracked right up. Brains – so weird!