Richard Merelman
Historically, letters have been a principal medium for the exchange of ideas between people who share interests. In particular, letters often foster dialogue in which the participants provide "accounts" of themselves: i. e., explanations for what they are doing. Letters also may request such accounts. My poem is of the latter variety. I had been reading a fair amount of "language" poetry, and I was conversant with the philosophical arguments used to support such poetry. I was sympathetic to the philosophical justifications--i. e., that words are best understood on their own terms, without reference to some underlying "reality",-- but I found the poetry tedious, pretentious, "cute," and wholly forgettable. The philosophy should have encouraged poems that were highly distinctive and novel; instead, at least to me, the poems were inventive enough, even brilliant, in their language manipulations, but soon became indistinguishable from one another. Was it me, or them? So it seemed to me that a letter to an imaginary language poet might raise this question, and ask for an account. Why did I write the letter as a poem rather than a piece of prose? Because I hoped a rather "conventional" poem like mine could ask my questions in a poetically pleasing way that could be readily understood. I doubt that the imaginary language poet could answer in the same way.
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Letter To A Language Poet
I have pondered your lines
about “curious spittle waltzking
fledger barbells.” They lead me to suspect
that once the alphabet implodes
and syntax fractures,
the impressions that remain
aren’t likely to resemble
celestial music.
Do you expect
a perfect sphere to appear
like a rabbit from a hat
or an ace
from the sleeve of the dealer?
Surely the curtain isn’t designed
to rise on a featureless form
that swoops to the stage
in a beam of blue light.
Is there a phantom so grand
it cannot be named?
All ways of navigating the language
without map or compass
could lure us back
to anagrams and similes,
basic permutations
of the path from a to z.
No road we walk would crest a mountain,
pierce the barricades of heaven,
evade the end
of days.
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Richard Merelman was born and raised in Washington, D. C., where he received a B.A. in Government from The George Washington University in 1960. After attending The University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, where he received an M. A., he moved to Yale University, from which he received a Ph.D. in Political Science in 1965. He taught political science at a number of universities, and from 1969 to 2001 he was a member of the political science faculty at The University of Wisconsin, Madison. In addition to his scholarly publications, he has published poems recently in VERSE WISCONSIN, MAIN STREET RAG, LOCH RAVEN REVIEW, and COMMON GROUND REVIEW. His sonnet, "Me At 93 In Assisted Living," was given "Special Recognition" in the 2011 Helen Schaible International Shakespearean/Petrarchan Sonnet Contest. He lives with his wife in Madison, Wisconsin.