BURT KIMMELMAN AT DICHTUNG YAMMER

Burt Kimmelman and Thomas Fink offer a deeply-satisfying conversation in the latest installment at DiCHTUNG YAMMER.  Here’s an excerpt:

I do want my poems to exude clarity and an affect of clarity as well, and to haunt the reader’s inner experience. I guess the single-syllable vocabulary—that makes for a clarity. But what is involved in that clarity? It’s difficult to find an abstraction signified in a single syllable word. And then again, in English, the specter of the language prior to 1066, the Norman Invasion, and the transforming of the language in most ways by French inclusion, is never really far from us, albeit we don’t always pay attention to that. The English (German-speaking) peasants did not suffer the pressure from their masters to abandon their German, to use French. (The French aristocrats didn’t see the peasants, really, as human beings, so while they brutally imposed their new language upon everyone but the peasants, in an attempt to expunge a cultural memory, the peasants, illiterate, kept right on with their lives.) Many of our words for basic everyday things (including the word thing) is an inheritance of much earlier incursions into the British Isles by German tribes like the Angles and Saxons, having origins in German, not French, Latin or Greek. I always think of Oppen’s reference, in an interview, to the “little words that I like so much.” I want to reduce language to the poem’s essence, which, you might say, could nearly exist without words—but of course the beauty of poetry starts with the words.