In the Beginning Was the Word

“When I work with a word, any word, I feel its weight in my hands, in my heart, on the tip of my tongue. I taste its complex flavor and its temperament, which is more like a puzzle, and try to unleash its essential meaning.

“When I handle a word, I try to bring it joy and ignite its possibilities by putting it somewhere it loves, in a place that surprises and delights it.

“I always imagine that words grow sluggish and lifeless, that they get worn out and exhausted from overuse, and need to feel new and fresh, just born, emerging from the primordial fog into the world of meaning. On an adventure, like a mermaid in love.

“It’s hard to mention a word in a text without becoming ensnared in its history. Can you, for example, use the word ‘sky’ without dragging along with you a long line of words? Without summoning a tribe of relatives, a gang of friends: high, clear, pure, blue, paradise, the divine.

“When you work with a word like ‘sky,’ you bring its long history of relationships with you, but is this what the word really says? Is this what it suggests to you? What about its familiar whisper in your heart? Does it make sense that the word would say the same thing to all of us?

“I think that what a word says to me is different from what it says to you, and if for you the sky is clear and blue and so on, to me it suggests other things entirely, like distance and impossibility. Thinking about the sky makes me feel like an orphan, and this emptiness that exists between the sky and the earth fills me with loneliness to my core. But that’s just me. Let’s return to the word ‘sky.’

“You’ll see that it has started to conjure up different types of words, or a new tribe of relatives, and to forge new relationships that animate it and make it clearer and more agile in the body of the poem. And when you realize that, you feel that you’ve become lighter and freer to play with this word, the word ‘sky.’ It has become possible for you to throw it into your poem without being entangled in its ancient history and linguistic customs, and isn’t that your job as a poet?

“Let’s take another word. Think about the word ‘white.’ What does this word do in a text, or what does a text do with it?

“White is perhaps the color of milk and motherly love, purity and virtue. It’s the favored color of prophets, and it is also the color of knowledge and madness. We know that white is the origin of the seven colors, and that the rainbow is white stabbed by seven knives. White might be all this, but it is more. White is death, white is nonexistence.

“You, as a poet, must be terrified—or at least moved—by the oppressive whiteness of the page, you must feel its gleaming blank face with all the fear in your heart. It provokes your being.

“Now think about how these words balance against each other. White is madness, madness is purity. White is knowledge, knowledge is nonexistence. While pouring yourself a glass of milk early in the morning, you meet new relationships and chemical reactions that had never occurred to you.

“You cross over from poetry to philosophy from who knows where.

“What I’m trying to say is that words, like us, are burdened by their past, and they, like us, are freed of it through poetry.”