I relish the tension that exists between certain verb pairs often used as roughly synonymous. This isn’t scientific, but here’s how I think of a couple of common verbs: “Look” describes the action of directing the eye to a focal point. “See” connotes cognitive reception of what the eye has detected. “Listen” describes the action of focusing the aural faculty on sound. “Hear” connotes cognitive extraction of definition from the noise.
Consider this exchange:
— Did you see the tiger?
— No, I thought it was a shadow.
Or this exchange:
— Did you hear the explosion?
— No, I thought it was thunder.
Of course in each case the second speaker could have prefaced his answer with “yes,” followed by the same wording. It’s still a statement that something was picked up by the sensing faculty, but was not made sense of by the cognitive faculty. It was “translated” erroneously.
I want to compel the meditation to encompass “read” versus “understand,” with specific application to poetry. At one time I thought that rhythm and rhyme, metaphor and simile, were meant to give more immediate effect to poetic discourse, to make it easier to remember by being memorable. “Wine-dark sea” registers and lodges.
But it’s more realistic, I think, to posit that the poet, often as not, injects friction into the reading experience, such that the payload carried by the text may not be readily apparent. My use of the term “payload” betrays a bias that the sense-making reflex of the human is indomitable. We look for meaning, within, beyond, beneath the wording, wherever we can extrapolate, imagine, concoct it. The doing so goes with language, which is what poetry is built from, on, with and around.
I scrounge for analogies with which to evoke how verses can feel:
X-ray language: A configuration of bone. Animal or human? A wrist? A wing?
Scaffolding language: Erected around an indistinct edifice. Bell tower? Skyscraper? Rocket?
Disarticulated language: A stream of lexemes with sparse intercalation of relators, no capitals, no punctuation, ragged lineation. What is its “story” when the dust has settled?
There’s a rhetorical much-making around “stories” in Poetry, March 2025.
stories span through time
alongside life, stories extend
with prayers, stories extend
with songs, stories extend
the stories are still moving
(Manny Loley, from “From the Mesa: A Reflection on Language, Poetics and Personhood”)
Go on, soi-disant poet, spin me a story. Make it short, tart, square, level and true.
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
A Bath of Warm Syrup Cooked from Stalk Cut in the ‘Family’ Canebrake
My car radio is newly parked on my local country-western music station. It’s giving me the opportunity to hear music tangled in my ranch roots. The music partakes of both the familiar and the strange. In certain respects I’ve changed and it hasn’t. Or maybe I thought I had, and it has — knowing what’s true is all but impossible these days.
The vocals seem weighted male, and have a strong-arming thrust to them. I suppress a reflex to run from these guys. Yet they’re telling me something I need to stand and hear, which is the voice of an America that elected MAGA.
Johnny-Cash-like baritones are rare in current country-western. In its classic conformation, the genre is the domain of the nasal tenor with a drawl. The celebration of women is jauntily sexual alternating with ostentatiously reverential. There’s many a gusty apology to a long-suffering woman for having strayed while liquored up. I’m changin’, honey!
The songs occupy a tightly defined range of key and chord sequence. The lyrics are comfortable with unabashed schmaltz. The fellas sing about their feelin’s with loquacious earnestness and stick-to-your-ribs wit. It has taken me aback how verbal the songs are. Almost every ballad leaves me doing an eye roll, yet singing its hook at the next stoplight. This is music running strong in deep fissures.
Vibes gleaned from the radio coalesce around a resounding affirmation of contentment with a personal and cultural status quo. The troubadour is profoundly proud of who he is, what and where he comes from, resolved to be none other. There’s an exaltation of, and exulting in, rural landscape, the old ways, talking damn straight, standing tall for the Protestant red-white-and-blue.
The paeans to we’uns (apologies — the pun is decadent) go with slaphappy scorn for the mincing modalities of the nabobs of knowledge, the prissy castrati, the preening city dwellers who haven’t a clue as to what it’s all about.
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved