Reverse Poetry

Locke cites as a principal cause for the imperfection of words: "the ideas they stand for are very complex, and made up of a great number of ideas put together" (818). Several of the women I work with speak English as a second language, and when they bring me word they don't understand I often find myself telling a series of stories or giving a series of examples so that they can understand the essence of "profane" or "defy". I use this method (rather than the here's-a-dictionary-look-it-up method) because a word (or specifically, a complex mixed mode word) is rather like a poem.

Locke says mixed mode words are "assemblages of ideas put together at the pleasure of the mind, pursuing its own end of discourse, and suited to its own notions; whereby it designs not to copy anything really existing, but to denominate and rank things as they come to agree with those archetypes or forms it has made" (818). Similarly, I would describe a poem as a collection of images intended to impart the essence of one emotion/sensation/feeling. T. S. Eliot has said that "the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked" ("Hamlet and His Problems").

What makes the use of mixed mode words reverse poetry rather than simply poetry? I use the phrase reverse poetry simply because poetry is expounding the nature of a feeling there might not otherwise be words to describe, whereas mixed mode words are compounding a collection of images and ideas into a single word. We could invent a single word for the feeling we are imparting through the poem, but that would end in the poem's images being repeated over again anyway every time someone asked what the word meant. However, the poem and the single word are serving the same purpose. Audre Lorde defines poetry as "the way we... give name to the nameless so it can be thought" ("Poetry is Not a Luxury").

A poem is representative of an idea, just as a word is, and is in some ways a more perfect method of communication than a single word. One of the reasons Locke calls language imperfect is because "the way also wherein the names of mixed modes are ordinarily learned, does not a little contribute to the doubtfulness of their signification" because it may be learned differently by each person, and he says that "of limiting, distinguishing, [and] varying the signification of these moral words there is no end" (819). In this way the poem is truer than the single mixed mode word because the collection of images is the same every time. However, the poem is also as up-for-interpretation, because the images might be read or heard by each individual differently.

I feel like this post is already super long, but I'll follow up on it later and explain what I was talking about in class, having to do with language and agency.