NaPoWriMo Day 23: The Limits of Language

Did a friend forward you this email? Join our mailing list!

Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has …

• Divinations

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes. How does language fail you? What are some things you would like to express, but can’t find the words for? Don’t seek for the words just yet, but in your freewrite, contemplate the unsayable, and try to say it.

Poem: “Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan” by Robert Hass

August is dust here. Drought
stuns the road,
but juice gathers in the berries.

We pick them in the hot
slow-motion of midmorning.
Charlie is exclaiming:

for him it is twenty years ago
and raspberries and Vermont.
We have stopped talking

about L'Histoire de la vérité,
about subject and object
and the mediation of desire.

Our ears are stoppered
in the bee-hum. And Charlie,
laughing wonderfully,

beard stained purple
by the word juice,
goes to get a bigger pot.

Divinations

This poem is dabbling with Lacanian theories of language. I don’t have the space to say everything I can about Lacan—first I would need to talk about Saussure and Freud, then I would have to talk about post-Freudian movements in psychology and how Lacan rebelled against them, and, like, you have a poem to write.

What’s relevant for you to know is a central idea in Lacanian theory, which is that language is always approximating, but never capable of transmitting, Reality. Lacan says that the unconscious is structured like a language. Moreover, both the unconscious and language are composed of internal structures that prevent us from fully grasping capital-R Reality—the Absolute Truth of things.

Lacan also believed that human desire was impossible to satisfy. Since we always desire to express ourselves in language, he presents a Sisyphean conundrum: language will always try, and fail, to represent what it intends to represent. And we will, too. (I'm paraphrasing, of course, and Lacan's theories are rife with disagreement among his most ardent supporters.)

Hass’ gorgeous, lush poem interrogates not only beauty, but the ways language represents beauty. Let's just sit inside this wonderful piece for a moment. There is so much fantastic imagery: the opposition of drought and juice; the "hot / slow-motion" of an August morning; the juice-stained beard. And the line "Our ears are stoppered / in the bee-hum" is ridiculously beautiful.

Certain insertions in the poem comment on Lacan's theories. "subject and object / and the mediation of desire" are direct mentions of Lacanian ideas—specifically, what I just mentioned about the unreachability of desire.

But what I'm most drawn to is the last stanza, the image of Charlie's beard stained purple by the word "juice." Why might the speaker say Charlie's beard is stained by a word? Perhaps the day in this poem is so perfect that the subject and object are one—in this brief moment, a desire is met completely, and language fully speaks what it seeks to represent. Or perhaps the lines between word and meaning become hazy in the summertime heat.

And then that last line. How should we read it? On the literal level, Charlie is getting a bigger pot to carry more blackberries. But, on the symbolic level, a larger pot creates more space to fill—a new desire to meet. As a result, this poem is both telling a beautiful story, filled with simple, vibrant imagery, while also representing Lacan's theories in a fascinatingly subtle way.

As poets, we are constantly chasing after language. We want to push it, break it, even torture it to get close to what we mean. This might mean playing with form, writing in multiple languages, inventing impossible metaphors, or simply embodying theories of language themselves. In essence, we are not only writing words, we are trying to stain our readers with the words themselves.

Prompt

Write a poem about something you can’t yet put into words.

You don’t need to invoke Lacan or other theories of language, just try to bridge that asymptote between language and reality. And, since I am giving you a prompt that is fundamentally impossible to achieve, revel in your failure, and use this prompt to challenge the ways you experiment with language.