"Your son Stephen is on the phone."
"Sea Gull?"
"No, mom, I am your son 'Stephen'."
"Oh, I guess I am in the wrong season."
Mix a little dementia with bad hearing,
the poetry keeps rolling on out.
Some will argue, and I tend to agree, that poets often suffer from aphasia.
In the dark gap between the object and its name, a certain kind of inventiveness must come in to play in which alternative words, even sounds, gather up to lay a language down on whatever it is. It's in that chemistry that we get fresh 'news' - rather than a repetition of cliches, conventional definitions, and what have you. Of course, such innovations provoke resistance or, if totally wrong headed, compassion or ridicule.
However, the lternative formations might produce new ways of saying something familiar. In this case of my mother, another level of applicable meaning may also emerge. At 93, she frequently says or implies that she is old, useless, etc. Indeed, she has come to a point in life where she perpetually finds herself "in the wrong season." Nevertheless, her imagination keeps pulling down those words and phrases, insistent on getting some accuracy on the condition of things. Until we go mute, I suspect most of us, as poets, word by word, will remain in the same grappling contest.
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
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