A SHORT INTERVIEW WITH MYSELF
Reader: Your chapbook “Diaspora of Things” stems from the occasion of dismantling your mother’s house. In the commentary, I read that the speaker moves from inert mute grief and disorientation to a greater understanding of differences and similarities –moving towards a polyphony.
Author: Excellent reader. I wish I’d said that!
R: I’m thinking about the word polyphony. You use words that start with “poly” often.
A My neighbor has a booming voice, and my windows are open. Her name is Polly.
R: Right, no A/C. Polyphony. I keep tripping over my tongue. A rolly poly word. It seems to move a lot.
A: That’s its charm! There is no one way to nail it down. It’s defined by what it’s not – one thing. Much or many, from the Greek.
R: Say it again! First a dog was barking, now someone’s blaring “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”
A: What beautiful, understandable nonsense. Qua language. So polyvocal. If you clear your ears, you might hear trees talking too. You know, things talk. Not just birds at dawn or cooing doves or roving cats.
R: Hmm.
A: A web of languages; a talking universe. Communicating. The highwire act of cicadas. Burbling fountains. The wind that thumbs plush grass pale, then back to green. Things valued for their voices. Things freed of possession.
R: What, you hear voices of grass? I thought that’s what schizophrenics suffered.
A: Of course I hear voices. After my mother died, I carried her voice in my head, the running dialog we had, for at least two years. My brain was a loom strung with diverging lines about how to live. That aside, poets intuit deep into reality. We scrape away a lot of cliches to use our common language to speak a deeply webbed truth. It might sound chaos, but it’s our chaos.