Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Last year, I returned to a notebook I started some years ago. It had a few poems in it that made me wince in embarrassment. No one was around, but I laughed out loud. They were full of sappy lines about “Life,” capital L, meant to convey a deepness I’m sure I thought made me different from my friends.

When modernist poet T.S. Eliot suggested that poets give up all the mushy gushiness of feelings and find images to include in poems that correspond to felt emotion, poetry made a radical leap forward. Eliot and his generation possessed a distaste for poetry that was sentimental, too excessive, too, on the nose, as we say.

Plus, a bunch of linguistic scholars would later theorize that language almost always misses its mark. Inadequacy is built into the enterprise of speaking; we struggle to say exactly what we need to say — if we even know what we need to say. So critics believed poets might as well lean into indeterminacy, embrace the limitations of language. If you scratch your head in frustration at contemporary poetry you can start with Eliot.

That scratching could also begin your journey to a new understanding of your life. But it requires us to step away from poetry as merely a space where we reflect and share our feelings, and come to see poetry as a place of exploration and metaphoric possibilities.

Today’s shrewd poem materializes the rewards of speaking through symbol and imagery.

The Forgotten Dialect of The Heart
by Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people 
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what 
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands 
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they 
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. 
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, 
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred 
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what 
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" by Jack Gilbert from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF JACK GILBERT copyright © 2014 Jack Gilbert. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.