Bad Grammar, or Bad Times--or Both?

I’ve been loath to argue with peers who bewail the weakness of grammar and spelling “nowadays.” I used to fuss about it, too. It’s so understandable, the urge to have one’s own way of doing things universally approved. “There’s a right way [my way], and a wrong way [their way].” But—language changes. I imagine there was the same distress centuries ago when intimate “thou” and “thee” disappeared by becoming one with “you” – or when verbs stopped being conjugated more regularly, as when “thou sayest” started becoming “you say.”

There wouldn’t have been as much fuss about written English being "misspelled", because there was no “proper” way to spell until dictionaries became popular, culminating, of course, in the Eighteenth Century with Samuel Johnson’s renowned A Dictionary of the English Language. Shakespeare certainly used flexible spelling,  even for his surname. As far as we know, no one complained about it; those who could read knew who or what he meant, and that was what mattered.

As a person interested in writing, certainly I delight in elegant style, or wild-but-knowing rejection of the “norm,” but I also love writing that speaks truth from the soul of a life that wasn’t taught standard English from childhood. A resume likely needs to be correct according to current standards, as that’s an easy way for a company to reject an application, but I also suspect companies miss out on excellent employees by following that route.

Our society is in flux; why shouldn’t we expect the language that mediates and reflects our social world to reflect that? As Jan Zwicky said in the Fountain Lecture at the University of King's College this past February, “Language is the ghost of the grasping hand.”

Perhaps what we’re really distressed by is the disintegration of our social construct. Just as it’s pleasanter to judge “the other” rather than see our own darkness, being upset by people saying “I” when we believe they ought to be saying “me” is sheer joy compared to looking at the mess we’ve made of our world, the mess we’re passing on to the next generation to remediate – the same generation whose grammar and spelling we deplore.

Sweetland, by Michael Crummey. Doubleday Canada, 2014)

I heard Michael Crummey read last week at the Company House in Halifax, with Stan Dragland and Sara Tilley. They were – are – all remarkable.

I’ve just finished reading Michael Crummey’s novel, Sweetland. 

Sweetland is an end-of-days tale. Rather than a post-apocolyptic whimper, this one sings out in tenor, baritone and bass because of the government’s resettlement of Newfoundland outports. The protagonist, Moses Sweetland, whose family name the island carries, leads no one to the promised mainland. In fact, in the first half of the novel, “The King’s Seat,” he alone refuses to sign the agreement that will give him and every inhabitant of the island resettlement money. And everyone on the island must sign for that to happen.

The book’s second half is called “The Keeper’s House.” It’s difficult to say more without “telling,” and even that is too much.

As I was reading, I felt I was learning what it would be like to have everything known and loved taken from me, including my society, like one of Euripedes’ Trojan women. “A life was no goddamn thing in the end, he thought. Bits and pieces of make-believe cobbled together to look halfways human, like some stick-and-rag doll meant to scare crows out of the garden. No goddamn thing at all.” (141) Moses himself has a scarred face and body, the result of an accident in Toronto that changes his young life. Accidents. The story is full of them, true to life the way it is, rather than the way we try to see it. True to death.

The writing, as in the excerpt above, is splendid, tough poetry. “He took the long way around, past the south-end light on the Mackerel Cliffs where the day was still bright and cloudless. He steamed in close to the island, the rocks to starboard so sheer they looked like something CGId in a Hollywood studio. The sky above the boat confettied with wheeling seabirds, turrs and murrs and puffins and tinkers, their endless chatter echoing off the cliff face. The acrid stink of shit like a single fiddle note that held and held and held in the air.” (147)

Crummey made me believe I was a Sweetlander, as he will you, I suspect. Would we have signed? We seem willing to desert our planet's ecosystem, the only home we've known, for money. I wonder.

Dionne Brand

An open letter to Dionne Brand (See www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/brand/)

Re: Inventories, as selected by Leslie C. Sanders in Fierce Departures

The bodies piling up, the repeated small numbers: “two…five…two, two…one…two…five…five…” then a double-digit number, repeated: “twenty-seven…twenty-seven – again, twenty-seven…” The rhythm, the casual counting, is almost soothing, like counting sheep, so I almost forget we are counting human bodies, until you remind me these are the dead-by-violence, the bodies of real people in the middle of being alive, “beating dust from slippers…an idea in their head like figs will soon/ be in season…” and I feel one of them could be me. I could disappear this second because of the madness of human choices, or I could be the one to trigger the explosive device. Mine could be, or be the cause of, “the rain of small glittering teeth.” Who are we?  “We believed in nothing,” you say in the opening line of the complete poem, and so, it seems, violence finds its way into the empty space of that unbelief. “the black and white american movies/ buried themselves in our chests,/…lit in the drawing rooms,/ the suicides inside us.”

The image of a woman watching television, “one year…no reason,” tallying the victims of that violence is brilliant, Dionne. We all are that woman, though we don’t all weep with her. We push the violence on to “the other,” remove ourselves from cause, and see only effect. See it as distant from ourselves, see it as entertainment, unreal: “the news was advertisement for movies,/ the movies were the real killings.” Another advantage of the television metaphor is that it is global. This works best in the whole poem, which takes us to the Middle East, the United States, Europe. We have to say, this is human; I have to say, this is my problem, this is in me.

I especially like the way your narrative works. I’m never entirely certain who’s speaking – the woman watching, the speaker narrating, the television reporting. It’s like being in a room with others while the TV’s on. When I read, “all this became ordinary far from where it happened,” I’m pretty sure it’s the speaker commenting, but when I read, “we’re/ doing the best we can with these people,/ what undeniable hatred fuels them, what else/ can we do, nothing but maim them// we do not deserve it, it’s out of the blue,” I don’t know if it’s the woman’s naïve thinking, the speaker’s bitter irony, or the television’s slanted reporting. The impact on me is to make me examine my own value system. What do I think? Am I prepared to “maim” other humans because I judge them? If I am, then I am not apart from, but a part of, the violence of our era. Our era that is “like chaos.”

Perhaps a better, or clearer, way to explain how I see your narrative is that it seems like a three-way conversation between the woman, the television and the speaker, a conversation that I am privy to. When I become numb from the inventory of the dead, the speaker reminds me of the humanity of those listed, who are going about their simple human business, perhaps “threading a needle,” “reading,” or “fumbling for candles.” The effect is to bring me back from the place of desensitized emptiness, and allow me to weep with the woman. It is the speaker who tells me the woman is weeping, “one year.” Tells me she “sits devoted, the paring knife close/ to a harvest of veins,” and tells me of “the wine/ she makes sitting there/ pressing and pressing these bundles of dried blooms.” Her pain in the suffering she sees reminds me that this world is real, and that it matters, that there is reason to read your anthem, that my passionate attention to your words tells me I am a member of a species whose deaths “count,” even though I carry metal and fire in my chest.

Metal and fire are two of the images you repeat through this section of Inventories. Both serve literally and figuratively. There are the “twisted metal hulks of things that used to be” and there is “the metal, metal, metal of waiting” for the next deaths. There are “fires intense as black holes,” and there is the irony of “ reasonable suspicion… charred by home improvements,/ self-makeovers, what goes for conscience now.” The way you link beautiful or ordinary natural images with horrifying or sad human-made events and things grips me: “petals of nails;” “rain of small glittering teeth;” “she’ll gather the nerve endings/ spilled on the streets,/ she’ll count them like rice grains;" “the unemployment lines are runny/ like broken eggs.” I  move more and more deeply into grief because the vulnerable natural images contrast what might be, what ought to be, with what is.

Finally, your rhetoric brilliantly reflects your vision, too. It is as broken as our world. Disconnected events, famous names, personal experiences, allusions, quotations: all drop in, drop out. You begin almost no line with a capital letter, end no sentence with a period. Fragments pile up and up, like the bodies they adumbrate. Your stanzas are of no specific length, either, although in this section none is longer than five lines. The effect is like the rhythm of sound bites on television, or of the weeping of the watching woman. I find this very powerful, Dionne. I notice that each line also fluctuates in length, from two words to as many as fourteen. You take me into a place I don’t want to go, a place of insanity where “the centre cannot hold.”

You’ll notice, I’m guessing, that I’ve used the descriptor “brilliant” several times. Inventories is brilliant, in that it is a work of genius, but the word is not quite the word I’m looking for. It’s too hard, and this poem is not hard. It hurts, profoundly, but it engages the soul as much as it does the mind. Inventories involves me, makes me see myself in this time, in the same way I imagine Whitman’s Leaves of Grass reflected the people of the mid-Nineteenth Century back to themselves, or Ginsberg’s Howl told us truth in the last century. You, too, tell us the huge truth of ourselves. Somehow you contain the horror of our madness in “the atomic openings in [your] chest,” as you “revise and revise this bristling list,/ hourly.” Thank you. Thank you for your vision, your great soul, both shared so potently in Inventories.