Book spine poem: The Accidental Grammar

Every so often I make a poem by stacking books on top of one another so their titles line up felicitously. I call them book spine poems, or bookmashes for short. Here’s a new one.

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The Accidental Grammar

Voices in stone
breaking the rock:
the accidental grammar,
the loom of language,
the awakening of intelligence,
the mind’s eye reborn –
Renegade presence,
gifts of unknown things.

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Some of these are recent additions to the bookshelf; a few are old favourites. There’s a strong bias towards non-fiction here, with Ali Smith’s the only novel. In 2013 I found a close ratio of fiction to non-fiction in my bookmashes, but I’ll have to review the figures, maybe when I’ve done 40 or 50 (we’re at 37 now).

The Old Ways and the old words

Find beauty; be still. —W.H. Murray

On a visit to Galway City Library last week I happened upon Robert Macfarlane’s book The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Hamish Hamilton, 2012), and promptly whisked it from the shelf. A friend had lent me Macfarlane’s The Wild Places a few months ago (thanks, JC) and it proved a highlight of my reading year.

Macfarlane is an English academic and author who writes about nature, travel, landscape and literature and how one influences or nourishes the other. The Old Ways takes pathways as its primary motif: the tracks we find and make across land and sea and how they signify and affect our relationship to place.

A few language-related excerpts follow. First, an entertaining note on the polyglottism of George Borrow, ‘the most charismatic of modern walker-writers’, who Macfarlane says ‘inspired the surge in path-following and old-way romance that occurred in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and America’:

Book spine poem: Mice

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Mice

White jazz in a café:
Nocturnes, still life –
The mouse and his child
Loitering with intent.

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Book spine poem: A Quiet Life

Last weekend I read The Long Gaze Back, a wonderful anthology of short stories by Irish women writers, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. I felt the book’s title – borrowed from Maeve Brennan’s novella The Visitor – could work in a book spine poem. So here it is.

[click to enlarge]

A Quiet Life

A quiet life
on Chesil Beach,
loving and giving
bliss, breath, broken
words, the broken shore,
The long gaze back
under Milk Wood.
Johnny, I hardly
knew you.

A language so precise and secret

I recently read Margaret Atwood’s Poems 1976–1986, a collection published by Virago Press. While doing so I tweeted an excerpt on her birthday, before I knew it was her birthday: a happy synchronicity. Below are some lines that deal explicitly with language and words.

From ‘Four Small Elegies’:

A language is not words only,
it is the stories
that are told in it,
the stories that are never told.

This verse echoes something Muriel Rukeyser once wrote (‘The universe is made of stories, / not of atoms’), but with a lurch into loss. Atwood’s ‘Two-Headed Poems’ returns repeatedly to the subject of a language’s decline or supersession by another:

Book spine poem: Broken words spoken here

New books mean a new book spine poem, aka bookmash. This one has a language theme.

[Click to enlarge]

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A–Z of linguistics in rhyming couplets

Here’s a self-explanatory bit of silliness from Twitter yesterday. There were requests to assemble it somewhere, for convenience and posterity, so I thought I’d reproduce it on Sentence first.

I’ve replaced the quotation marks I used on Twitter with italics; other than that it’s identical. The tweets are all linked, so you can also read them by clicking on the date of this introductory one:

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An A–Z of linguistics, in rhyming couplets:

— Stan Carey (@StanCarey) July 1, 2015

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A is for ARBITRARY: a sound’s tie to meaning.
B is for BACK-FORMED, like dry-clean from dry-cleaning.