31 January 2005: The other day Carlos Luis asked me for a brief essay he could translate for inclusion in a online Brazilian magazine whose editor he was in touch with. I sent him a few such essays a little while ago. They included this one. I thought I'd used it in one of my entries, but maybe not. If I did, here is is again:
On a Fragment of Latin, Ionized
some roman math, c ionz
Listen
l
is
ten
timez
5
iz
the
number
of
chanj
loose
and
klinking
pocket
full
of
pennyz
When in the poem above Karl Kempton repeats his first word in
steps distributed through three lines, a reader not familiar with
his work might be puzzled. Of course, the sentence that the poet
has converted his small word to should soon become apparent. But
that sentence makes no sense--the "1" that Kempton has punned
out of the letter,. "I," can't equal ten. Is his stunt only
clever, then? I say no, for to me it buoyantly shows, even as it
asserts, the multiplicative power of both "listen," the word, and
listen, the act: if only we listen, truly listen--not only to
text (on paper or elsewhere) but into it, down to its very
letters, and to the cracks between them--our world wil increase
tenfold.
No, wait. Not tenfold but fiftyfold! Or so the poem goes on to
state, whereupon the poetic rightness of Kempton's claim suddenly
marries the counter-poetic rightness of a roman numeral l's
equalling fifty.
Through this rich interplay of the intuitive and the rational,
the poem draws us into the concrete heard of "loose and klinking
chanj" (like the loose and clinking letters in Kempton's
repetition of "listen")--and at the same time into the high
generality of change, as a pocketful of pennies becomes a boy's
magico-economic version of the magico-aesthetic transformative
device that words and letters are in the pockets of poets. Thus
does Kempton's trinket deepen dozens of colors beyond mere
cleverness into a full-scale lyrical celebration o� boyhood,
coins, letters, Rome, mathematics, English--and the secret of
listening things into poetry.
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