Marie Ponsot. Image cited below.
Question 3:
In an interview piece appropriately named “Between Riddle and Charm,” Anna Ross quotes American poet Marie Ponsot as a connoisseur of poems that use “whatever we can find in our language to catch the world and offer it to each other.” Implicit in her poetic tableau of terrene transaction, is the implication that language has the capacity to weave another realm, or at least, create pockets of reality that is then shared. In an apt parallel, J. Edward Chamberlin in his introduction to If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground, writes that stories “bring us close to the world we live in by taking us into a world of words” (1). Although differing slightly in their descriptions of the power of language and exposition, both writers indicate a common thread: language as a vehicle for understanding the “wider world” (162) C.S. Lewis failed to consider.
Like Ross and Ponsot, Chamberlin narrows in on the topic of framing the world through the mystical lenses of rhyme (riddle) and charm. Rhymes adhere to a quizzical vein, artfully playing with language to court contradiction. However, charms seek to breathe new life into our realities, and provide platforms for a common blood for our experiences. As Chamberlin describes in regards to their differences: “either language or the world has to give—and in a riddle, language gives” (180). There is a reason why I’ve riddled my explanation of rhyme and charms with the language of vītālitās and of the sanguine. Words seem to harness of a life of their own, able to evolve if not metamorphose in contingency to the world of the speaker. And that world is often like the rhyme, a contradictory hodgepodge or gallimaufry of personal experience. These experiences will undoubtedly differ from orator to orator and culture to culture, and in an example Chamberlin illustrates through onions and roses, what may be a symbol of love for one society will incredibly differ for another. This is the “world of words” Chamberlin elaborates upon within his insightful tome.
As mentioned above, rhymes in particular reflect the contradiction of the multiplicity of human experience, and how we as inquisitive animals search for meaning through arbitrary sounds and alphabets in the vast expanse of our realities. There may be a clever coincidence as to why a single elimination of the letter ‘L’ from “world” transforms the term into “word.” With stories it may be safe to say that the world is not created through atomic assembly. Instead, the world is spoken into life through the fundamental units of language: words. Chamberlin depicts this in his explanation of early linguists:
Linguists used to say that every word was once a
metaphor, embodying the wonder of an encounter with some-
thing strange; this wonder was then represented in a word, and
when the word was repeated, the encounter was experienced
again in all its surprising strangeness. (163)
One rhyme may embody the startling representation of a concept or object to one generation, but for the next, may be rendered defunct. Likewise, rhymes often fail when passing cultural boundaries. However, they remain powerful for their respective orators, their apparent nonsense becomes “so familiar that it seems simply true” (162), reflecting Chamberlin’s observation that an education of reading and writing is akin to becoming “comfortable with a cat that is both there and not there” (132). Words may mean one thing for one person, but may be colored differently for another who has a completely different palette of experiences, while simultaneously representing something else entirely. And yet, these words bring us closer to our world by the hues of our personal, social, and cultural contexts thanks to their intimate reflection—or perhaps it would be better to say transformation—of our realities.
Unlike the rhyme, charms seem to have an easier time crossing borders. I believe that is due to their ability to resonate with core human values: “friendship, love and loyalty” (192). Stories and songs like Bony M’s “The Rivers of Babylon” re-frame the world in broader swathes, but with the same imagination of the rhyme. In regards to charms, Chamberlin more specifically writes that “it is only through the pressure of our imagination that we can resist the pressure of reality” (192), and these crafted words, sorted artfully into the soaring melodies of ballads, into the hums of Ponot’s poetry, or into compelling narratives both written and orated, tie us closer to the world we live in by attempting to orient us in response to the overwhelming vortex of human experience. When effective, these charms are canonized. Placed into tradition. We remember histories upon histories through the fabricated weave of story.
Perhaps, that is why it is so important to preserve the stories of the Indigenous. They represent whole other worlds. Worlds we may be oblivious to, but are homes to the voices of thousands. Stories, with their powerful words communicate to us, the outsider, the collective wealth of a culture’s traditions, way-of-life and reality. So, when we recall the horrendous severance of an entire people from their own language—the tools with which they create stories—by the cultural massacre committed by the residential school system or the injustice of the Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch‘s banning, we are also remembering the destruction of entire worlds.
While the Starkiller Base of Star Wars: The Force Awakens may destroy entire galaxies of planets, the death of languages destroys the ability to create and keep canonized, the stories of a culture’s world. To end, I hope that this course will inspire an awakening in me (and it already has), and help me discover Canadian literature like a Marie Ponsot, and find a little bit of world in every rhyme, every charm.
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Works Cited
“Between Riddle and Charm.” Interview by Ann Ross. Guernica 15 July 2010: n. pag. Web. 19 Jan. 2016. <https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/ponsot_7_15_10/>.
Bony M. “The Rivers of Babylon“. Lyrics. Metro Lyrics. Web. April 04 2013. <http://www.metrolyrics.com/rivers-of-babylon-lyrics-boney-m.html>.
Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.
Churchill, Sarah. “English: It’s a Neologism Thang, Innit.” The Guardian. N.p., 9 May 2011. Web. 20 Jan. 2016. <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/may/09/neologism-thang-
scrabble-abominations>.
Ross, Ann. Marie Ponsot. Digital image. Guernica / a Magazine of Art & Politics. N.p., 15 July 2010. Web. 19 Jan. 2016. <https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/ponsot_7_15_10/>.
“The Story of the Masks.” The Story of the Masks. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Jan. 2016. <http://www.umista.ca/masks_story/en/ht/potlatch01.html>.
