Visceral Visages

I've been thinking a lot about the way our visual interactions with the world inform/supplement/enhance/upset our language. Mostly, this comes from Martin Lammon's News From Where I Live, which was a surprising book. I usually like something meaty that both resists and invites interpretation, but this one wasn't very meaty, and I didn't mind. The transparency of the poems didn't matter because his rifts on the separation and marriage between language and the image were so damn good. I'm not talking about any Imagist mumbojumbo either. There is a disjunct between the thing and the word, and Lammon messes with that.

Example:

The Secret of the Platypus
What could this curious melange be,
beyond a divine test of faith and patience?
-Stephen Jay Gould, "To be a Platypus"

Outside my window, a hill
rises the same
as every morning this summer.
I sit in my chair and read Gould's argument
for the marvelous platypus, whose species
dull biologists have relegated
to a lesser rank within Mammalia,
or I write a new poem
about mothers or fathers, cows
or trout. I lift up my head to look at the hill,
how it slopes above our neighborhood's
houses. I do not know how high
but steeper and wilder, I think than I
could climb. I watch the dawn
fog dissolve into the haze of August.

The platypus swims across the river, lays
eggs in the mud, and does not love my poem.
The hill does not need me
wedging my boot against some tender
root. The shrub has its own life. One leaf
strains for a little sunlight. So what if I cannot
witness the way leaves work? I know they stretch and curl
for one day's glory all their own, even if I don't
know how. And if I did sink my boot into mud
where no one had ever walked before, no photographer
or archelogist would celebrate that I had
climbed this hill. The maple, if it noticed me at all,
would shrug and endure my hug around its trunk, a man's
simple panic against gravity.

This morning, I sit in my chair
and read about the platypus, whose strange wet fur
glistens in the moonlight, or I write a poem about a beautiful
woman. There are so many lives whose secrets
do not belong to me, lives besides my own
whose secrets are worth loving.



The bit about the beautiful woman grosses me out, but otherwise, solid.

Therefore (!) a new poetry assignment is here (that's right, I'm going to keep on doling them out and you can choose to accept my gifts of brilliant insight, or you can not):
Use an image in such a way that the image informs or warps or screws with language...or vice versa (language messing with an image). The image at hand? Why, our trusty black & white chicken. Go on, desconstruct, reconstruct, make language sound like an illegitmate foreign sibling & make that chicken one ridiculous mofo.




ps- I wrote this post in a sleep