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Language for Literature |
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Word Research:Nothing illuminates of our understanding of a work of literature more than to thoroughly investigate its diction or words. That is why poets and readers of literature love dictionaries. Dictionaries help us simply by telling us about words we don't recognize or accept as appropriate for a give passage or context. When we look up words we discover the precision of a word we considered at first reading with vague familiarity, or we discover the rich ambiguity of a word which we thought meant precisely one thing. Of course, we sometimes have to reach out beyond the ordinary desk dictionary to discover what a word once meant to the writer who used it 200 years earlier. There are special dictionaries for that. Both precision and ambiguity often are discovered by savoring the language slowly rather than by marching through it right away.
We have several dictionaries on-line which can be helpful to you in studying the language of a given poem.
How many words does a writer need? Do you have a refrigerator full of little magnetic plastic words to write poems with? Most of us have seen or even own a Magnetic Poetry Kit of one sort or another. And the things have migrated on line. Here is the website devoted to one <http://www.magpo.com/> with many other Java scripted versions available elsewhere. Do you think anyone really uses them to write poetry? Now, I ask again, how many words does a poet need? On April 1 in 1998, Ray Suarez of NPR, Talk of the Nation (April 1, 1998) and his guests, Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States; Dave Kapell, Founder and creator, Magnetic Poetry, and Sally Steenland, Co-author, The Magnetic Poetry Book of Poetry [Workman Publishing, 1997] discuss just the issue of the merits of Magnetic Poetry . <http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/cmnps05fm.cfm?SegID=10316> This file is a RealAudio presentation of the entire program which lasted about an hour. Listening to the first twenty minutes or so will give you a taste of their ideas. You may be surprised to learn they do not regard the idea of composing poems with a limited number of words entirely ridiculous. Try going to one of the many Electronic Poetry Boards and compose poems you might want to keep or share. What does the limited vocabulary do for (or to) your efforts? The idea of a poet working with limitations is crucial in poetry, as Pinsky points out. If you take up the challenge of investigating the pleasures of a limited vocabulary, share your results with those at the site.
Similarly, metaphor, simile and other figures of speech are hard to sort out. Go to this page for more help on this Symbols in poetry are similar to symbols in fiction with some distinctions to be made. Go to this page for further work: symbols in poetry.
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