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Singing us back to ourselves
Writers have this quaint idea that words matter.
“Quaint” because many people no longer seem to care about using language well. Words are simply advertising or political tools, used without precision or passion. Hearing the language that they love being violated sets writers’ teeth on edge. And no wonder – this is the age of media spin, non-stop doubletalk, and giant advertising campaigns. Our writers and teachers are the last defenders inwhat so many days seems like a lost battle.
What set me on this apocalyptic train of thought was a recent trip to my childhood home in South Georgia, during which The Atlanta Journal-Constitution devoted two pages to the rise of the state’s elder senator. After Sept. 11, 2001, he delivered to a group of law enforcement officials his suggestion that they arrest every “towel-head” who crossed the Georgia state line. When his comment hit the papers, he said, oh, he was only joking. Surely everybody knew his words didn’t really mean anything.
This response disturbed me more than the hateful term itself, as if one can say or write whatever one chooses and it doesn’t matter. But words do matter, and lobbing into the public sphere a term like “towel-head” to describe Muslim Americans diminishes all of us.
Growing up in the Deep South, I heard plenty of such language aimed at African-Americans, women, Yankees, and Jews. But I also heard another language, the kind that still nourishes my imagination, the stories and lyrical outbursts of family and neighbors, the poems memorized, the songs, the lore. My grandmother’s ghost stories, for example, that kept me and my cousins awake nearly all night. My father’s aunt telling me about my great-grandmother’s journey into the Black Hills of the Dakota’s after emigrating from Germany.
Moving to Cullowhee in 1968, I discovered a treasure of stories. They were gifts from friends who had grown up in Caney Fork and Weyahutta, and I soon came to realize the lifeline that these stories offer. This is the language that will save us, if anything will.
How does poetry matter in the current onslaught against the things that hold us together? The first Americans believed that words sang the world into being and helped keep its inhabitants in right relation to each other. Our American Indian poets and storytellers continue to remind us of this profound reality. Songs and stories guide us, enliven us, help keep us human. Our poets take the words they love and turn them into maps for walking into the lives we live.
“We go to poetry ... so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both,” says Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry Magazine.
The best defense against the abuse of language, whether coming from a neighbor or from the highest office of the land? Pick up a poem. Read it aloud. Remind yourself of what language used well, with passion and precision, sounds like and how it makes you feel. If we let them, our best words can sing us back to our better selves.
(Editor’s Note: Kay Byer has served as the North Carolina Poet Laureate, an ambassador of the state’s literature, since her appointment by Gov. Mike Easley in February 2005. Her columns on the importance of everyday language will appear monthly in The Sylva Herald. Byer and her husband, Jim, live in Cullowhee.
For more information on the poet laureate and the state’s literature programs, visit www.ncarts.org)
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