SWIFT PULLERY .TWAIL,
HOYA METHODS: SAXA ANGLAISE
SKEWERED SKULL INULA.‘A Lesson from the Cockerel’ (O’Sullivan 1996a, p. 74)This poem evokes nature, but it is very different from a conventional
nature poem. Words such as ‘gaudles’ and ‘julce’ will not be found in a dic-
tionary, they are constructed words which nevertheless bear the traces of
standard vocabulary (‘julce’ for example suggests juice), or transmit
echoes of a largely lost early Anglo-Celtic linguistic tradition. Obviously
there are other linguistic strategies at work here: the use of short staccato
phrases and sentences and the accumulation of phrase upon phrase. But
the creation of constructed words is central, and the overall effect is to
evoke nature, and yet defamiliarise our perception of it.
Charles Bernstein’s poem ‘A Defence of Poetry’ is a treatise on the rela-
tionship of sense and nonsense which encodes its own debate. The
following is a short extract:
Example 8.15
Nin-sene.sense is too binary
andoppostioin, too much oall or nithing
account with ninesense seeming by its
very meaing to equl no sense at all.We
have preshpas a blurrig of sense, whih
means not relying on convnetionally
methods of c onveying sense but whih may
aloow for dar greater sense-smakinh than
specisi9usforms of doinat disoucrse that
makes no sense at all by irute of thier
hyperconventionality (Bush’s speeches,
calssically).From ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (Bernstein 1999a, pp. 1–2)In this poem–essay Bernstein challenges the way society conceptualises
sense and nonsense. He implies that what might appear to be nonsense
(certain types of off-beat writing) may in reality be a lot more ‘sensible’
than discourses, such as political speeches, which claim to convey public
truths. To do this Bernstein plays with the lexicon. Most of the words here
are recognisably from the English language, but they are certainly
defamiliarised. At times the poem has a quasi-dyslexic feel to it which is
almost childlike: words appear with the letters jumbled in a different
180 The Writing Experiment