Posts Tagged Language

The feature Hugh’s Journals has appeared here on Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

As a preacher, Hugh learned two things that all preachers soon discover: you need to find inspiration where you can, and language changes with read-context.

For that reason, a preacher is always open to words and ideas and images that will help his/her congregation “connect” with the gospel. This is, after all, what Jesus did when he told parables.

A preacher is also keenly aware that some things are written to be read out-loud while others sound better read inwardly, in one’s inner voice. In both cases, language become a dance. Words need to fit reader and reader needs to fit language. This is a lesson poets learn also.

Here is an example of how Hugh knew that from the pulpit, lines he had seen once at a hotel in Aberfoyle, UK, excerpted from an Adam Lindsay Gordon poem, would by necessity need to be “tweaked” a bit to get Hugh’s spoken cadence right.

I will let you judge the result for yourself.

Enjoy!

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Here in the North Country we are still trying to adjust to days of limited light… dark mornings and short afternoons where the sun seems to just roll along the horizon.

This morning there are juncos again in the yard and under the feeders. Since I had not seen any for awhile, I assumed that they had moved on. But here they are, a pleasant surprise that lightens a gray day.

Gray days and little light leave us melancholy and introspective. Drawn inside our houses and ourselves we surround ourselves with books. Language has the power to protect, to comfort, and to give us hope.

Richard Wilbur’s “A Barred Owl” is one of the best poems I know about the power of language and imagination.

Enjoy!

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight

Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw

Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

 

These lines show you what is best about Wilbur as a poet, his ear. You could easily imagine Ted Hughes taking up the same theme but his lines would lack the musicality of these.

In my own poetry, I do not often use regular rhyme schemes, loose or otherwise. And yet many of the poets I most admire do. In this poem and these lines, Wilbur shows his ability to work within a rhyme structure and not be limited by it. In the end rhyme is not for him an external thing but a wholly organic one… as natural to him as leaves to a tree.

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Here in the North Country, like the country at large, the “Rational-Middle” are being held hostage by the small, but quite vocal, partisan minorities that inhabit the polar ends of reason. Ideological madness rules the day, the common good is trampled under the feet of Democratic and Republican flag wavers.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.  ~W.B. Yeats

While MontanaWriter usually tries to hold up and celebrate the best that language and reason can achieve – poetry, fiction, art, theology – today we highlight the lowest level that language can reach: political double-speak.

It has been said that in a democracy we get the politicians we deserve. And in 2012, the Great State of Minnesota has the House Speaker we richly deserve. We also have the governor we deserve (Mark Dayton, Democrat), an United States Senator we deserve (Al Franken, Democrat), and not one, but two United States Congresspersons we richly deserve (Keith Ellison, Democrat & Michelle Bachman, Republican). But for today we are concentrating on our Republican Speaker of the House, the “Honorable” though addled Kurt Zellers.

During the current debate over whether taxpayers should build a stadium for the Vikings to play 10 games a year in, Zellers has pushed double-speak and b.s. to a new level. Whether you are pro-stadium in this kind of debate or anti-stadium, you will be equally confused and angered by the pure, unadulterated b.s. coming out of this “leader’s” mouth.

Enjoy!

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In theology, philosophy, and academic writing in general, there is a tendency to use non-English words to talk about difficult and complex things. Obviously this is necessary some of the time. But usually it strikes me as: a crutch, a way to exclude outsiders, or a way to make the writer or speaker appear more authoritative than they really are.

Sometimes though it is pure laziness. Why bother wrestling with the concept when you know the shorthand Latinate or German word that someone has already given to you to sum the whole thing up?

In poetry we do the same thing with metaphors. You see this most often when a poet uses a “fresh metaphor” to talk about difficult and complex things. We are told that they are pushing the boundaries of language, or helping us to see things in a new way. To be ironic, it is usually prevarication.  Why bother wrestling with a difficult concept when you can make it all simply disappear with a little verbal sleight of hand?

Where the academic hides behind the big word, the poet hides behind the clever new metaphor. The result is the same: the writers or speakers appear more intelligent or creative than they really are and the readers are left unsatisfied or scratching their head.

“Suffering is Enough” is a small poem I wrote that touches on this point. It is part of Montana Poems, which is, of course, available in Kindle format at Amazon.com. Just follow this link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00480P44A

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