I’m not sure when Amazon.com stopped offering its “Concordance” feature for books, but I wish it was still around for our discussion of The Shadows of Sirius. Amazon’s concordance was a box towards the bottom of the page for each individual book that Amazon sold that listed the 100 most commonly used words in the book (not counting words like “and” or “the”). The most common words were printed in larger font, which created a telling (and oftentimes hilariously misleading) summary of what a book’s central concerns are. A few years ago, a poet friend with a book forthcoming was really looking forward to see what his concordance would tell him his most common words were, and was shocked and amused when the book came out that the largest word in his book’s box, in bold font, was “LIES.” While I am personally satisfied with Caryl’s mini-concordance for Sirius as “darkness,” “still,” “river” and “stars,” I think it would be revealing to see what words Merwin leans on the most.
All of us Merwin bloggers have commented on the circumscribed lexicon that Merwin uses, and what the effects this limited word bank has on us as readers.
To me this book at times feels like an epically long villanelle. In a villanelle, the language seems tethered–since each stanza has to accommodate a line that gets repeated numerous times, a poet can only stray so far away from those lines before it has to circle back. Sirius feels similarly constricted. In her last post, Caryl asked what I thought was an excellent question about this constriction: is Merwin’s environmentalism that I wrote about last week related to his insistent use of a limited core vocabulary?
I feel like the answer is no, but I would love to hear what others think about this. To me, this book feels so drenched in memory that the common words become touchstones around which specific memories constellate. Think of the mnemonic device of the memory palace, in which one constructs a building in one’s mind and fills it with objects that act as physical representations of memories or facts that one wants to remember. Sirius acts as a memory palace, but instead of encoding one single association into a certain image, Merwin is loading tons of associations into his small set of key words. Here is a brief tour of W.S. Merwin’s memory palace:
“Daylight” stands for joy, wet sand, the green carpet in a long gone building, his father’s voice, Athena’s iris.
“River” stands for the flash of an oriole, a broken glass, Su Tung-p’o, the sound alone without you in my hand.
“Darkness” stands for blueberries, the D&H Coal Company, the underworld, his mother’s almond scented hands, the Cimmerians, blindness.
“Autumn” stands for Miss Giles, the splintery unlit chemistry lab, Hopkin’s bones, small flocks of migrant birds that caught like strands of wool in the trees west of the village.
And so on. Rather than reflecting a loss of environments through human encroachment, I think Merwin’s choice of a limited vocabulary shows him trying to capture his life in a small set of talismanic images. But it does seem significant that most of Merwin’s key words are drawn from nature. Although Sirius is rarely overtly political, perhaps we can say that Merwin is indirectly making his environmentalism known by showing us that to write your life, all you need is darkness, sunlight, birdsong and a few rocks.
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I’ll throw out my own writing prompt, although it is more of a crutch for when you get stuck than a way to write something new. Create your own personal concordance. Write a list of fifty words that are important to you and your poems, either words that you like or words that have some meaningful associations attached to them. Whenever you are in the middle of drafting and stall out over a certain word choice, or if you just can’t seem to get anything started and your blinking cursor starts to seem like it’s tapping an infernal foot, bring out your list. I bet the answer is somewhere in it.