Letter to The Editor

Dear Editor, 

It is true, as Ilya Kaminsky says [“Of Strangeness That Wakes Us,” January 2013], that wrecking language wakes us, but we cannot be satisfied with this as a means to an end. Poetry is nothing if not an act of meaning. Every poetic device is an act of accounting toward order. The creative, inquisitive mind impulsively and instinctively delights in the establishment of pattern, in thought and sound, and the resulting meaningfulness is the essence of our delight.

While it may be exotic to reverse the order of the words in Genesis, and it may delight us in a sensual way, it is perhaps akin to taking all of  Shakespeare’s words in a jar and agitating them like some snow globe. The Torah’s beauty lies in its exquisite, purposeful placement of words and thought.

For Celan, language was a way of re-connecting with post-
Holocaust reality, of delicately piecing together a shattered worldview. But too often we lose ourselves in the luxury of language, forgetting that poetry’s power lies in its meaningfulness. Too often we mistake “confusion” for “mystery.”