voice

SunWinks! November 16, 2014: Making It Up As You Go Along

 ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

                   Lewis Carroll

 SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

Neologism. We all do it but nobody wants to talk about it. You’re searching for a word, and you can’t find the one you want, so you make one up. I once had a co-worker who frequently said, “I was flustrated.” I don’t know if he was aware he had made up a word, but to my mind, it’s a brilliant example of a portmanteau word. A portmanteau squishes together two ordinary words to form a third; in the best examples, the new word combines both meanings from each word in a natural “that really ought to be a word” way. (A portmanteau is a suitcase. So you throw two words into a suitcase, give it to your typical baggage handler, and a new word comes out.) So “flustrated” would be a combination of “flustered” and “frustrated.” And it can be readily intuited that that’s exactly what it ought to mean.

Jabberwock by John TennielI’ve read that “slithy” could be a portmanteau word combining “slimy” and “lithe.” “Absotively” (absolutely-positively) is another great example; I’ve heard it in common parlance and used it in my work, so I was delighted to hear it used in Steely Dan’s song “Two Against Nature.” Or maybe it was the other way around. (The neologism “grok” from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land also shows up in the same song.)

In my poem “If God Is the Answer, What Was the Question?” I throw in a portmanteau of my own:

 Browsing religion books at Goodwill,
a once-burly blue-collar fellow sidles up
and pompulates: “Can you believe people
actually think we descended from apes? Apes!”

 These things can be ambiguous, but I’m pretty sure I meant “pompously postulates.” In another, recent poem I have the line, “Rats scutter across my path…” Sounds like it ought to be a portmanteau. A combination of “scurry” and “scatter,” perhaps. Or maybe I was just being onomatopoeic. I needed a fresher alternative to “scurry.” Whole books have been devoted to portmanteau words, but we will leave them for now. Continue reading →

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SunWinks! November 9, 2014: I Went To Write My Column and a Manifesto Broke Out

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

You had [indigenous American] cultures on the Plains where each person discovered, through a vision quest, his or her own inner voice, and then came back after a week of isolation and told the rest of the tribe “who I am.” And nobody could argue with that because it came from within.

Michael Dorris

Tintern Abbey

Tintern Abbey

Poetry must come from within, or else it is superficial, dry, and remote. Paradoxically, it must come from emptiness, a place of nothingness, because if the poet doesn’t get herself out of the way, her poetry cannot be universal. Put the other way around, as the reader, the audience, if I am listening to you talk about what you think about yourself, then I become an observer, not a participant. It becomes a second-hand experience, like watching TV. If, however, you speak of what is, without judging, without inserting yourself, without nailing things down, then I can be drawn in, I can be involved in your vision and experience the universal, the resonant, in what you have to say.

Continue reading →

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