


Language and expression, featuring poems by Stephen Cribari, Carolyn Moore, Laura D. Weeks and Keli Osborn.
8 minutes
TRANSCRIPT
Peter Mark Roget . . . Even though his name is French—that’s because his paternal grandfather was French—he was English, born Jan. 18, 1779 in London. He mainly grew up in Edinburgh Scotland. Legend has it that he suffered from depression and found that making lists helped him cope with it. He was a physician, but that’s not what he’s known for today. He started making lists of related words and then came up with a more complex way of grouping and categorizing them, and that eventually led to his book, Roget’s Thesaurus, which although it’s been updated and revised many times, is still a major reference work today.
To commemorate Roget’s birthday, some pieces about language.
Stephen Cribari said, “Even as a child, the meaning of words and the music of words
drew me inward. Here’s Stephen’s poem “The Grammar Lesson.”
The horizon behind recedes, diminishes,
Vanishes beyond your memory
Except you know it was. You feel it was.
Its fading seems to lengthen out your past
To a vanishing point behind which you were not.
As the horizon ahead (and never so far ahead
As you imagined) now looming in stark dimension
Draws in nearer, closes on your past,
You find yourself talking to yourself
In subjunctive metaphor and third person singular,
And not your own third person but someone else –
Someone Else – someone who did not matter –
AS IF a stranger met randomly on a train,
AS IF the person you had meant to be
If only you’d had the time. If only you’d had
The time of your life when it was there to have.
That hissing in your ear – escaping steam
From a log collapsing whispering to the hearth –
Is that someone else who you had meant to be,
That stranger you left unmet on the train
Whispering that the horizons behind and ahead
Are closing like a book upon themselves,
Collapsing your perspective to vanishing points
Beyond which you are not and never were.
From Passager’s 2021 Poetry Contest issue, “The Grammar Lesson,” Stephen Cribari.
The Latin phrase “ubi sunt” is usually translated as something like “where are those that went before us?” From Passager’s 2011 Poetry Contest Issue, here’s Carolyn Moore’s poem “Ubi Sunt on a Budget.”
Where are the nine my stitch once saved in time?
These days, the needle’s eye winks shut at mine.
The thread becomes a cloud-wisp I can’t coax
by will or spit through the stubborn, slitted hole
of my darning need. I squint – a harried mom
(seconds before the camera’s sole whir)
slicking down the child’s hair that won’t lean
to its task. Familiarity? It breeds
contempt? Then how can absence make the heart
grow fond of anything but solitude?
Tell me, please! Those adages we plucked
from old Aunt Barb like lint from woolen cuffs –
where have they gone? And where are our rewards
banked and accruing interest for a life
of thrift? Just where does hoarded virtue hide?
“Ubi Sunt on a Budget,” Carolyn Moore.
Laura D. Weeks said her poem “Passing through Customs” “. . . is based on an actual encounter, my first time in Russia as an adult. I had been there as a child, but this time I went as a graduate student fluent in the mother tongue.”
These phrases are not foreign.
They were my mother’s first, my second tongue.
Thickly palatable, they still taste of childhood.
Is it the form that smells of perfidy?
– What is the purpose of your visit?
To placate Chronos.
– Have you anything of value to declare?
A mouthful of myths my mother fed me.
Disconcerted, I confront the few
Remaining blanks, throw answers
Piecemeal at them, and in confusion
Use a nineteenth century word for “wedding ring.”
My turn to step into the twilit booth.
Glassed-in on every side, I turn
To face the starched young officer, his eyes
Full of distilled hostility. I know
My skin will not escape intact.
Laura D. Weeks, “Passing Through Customs,” from Passager Issue 50, the
2010 Poetry Contest issue.
Roget’s Thesaurus helps us find uncommon words to help us describe our world in more interesting ways. We’ll end with a poem that uses common words to describe the narrator in uncommon ways. “A Gesture Is a Signal,” Keli Osborn.
When I was kite, the ground was hard,
wide sky blowing terror and laughter,
the birds, trees, clouds whipping green
ribbons past my corners, around my tail.
When I was bowl, chipped lip and empty
well, my hunger asked for cold cereal, hot
soup, salad mixed with breath and blood.
When I was alphabet, my arms crossed
impressively, wandering eyes inky black.
Intricate stories told themselves, my voice
halting in a labyrinth. When I was bullet,
I lived inside a pistol locked into a cabinet
at the long end of a hallway, surrounded
by wedding faces, high-school smiles,
toddler curls. After she fell for the last
time, I nested in a cardboard box, waiting.
I was tobacco brown gloves worn soft, salted
with pleasure and sorrow. When my delicate
hands fluttered in air, I was soaring grenade,
vessel of words, a woman no one had heard.
Keli Osborn’s poem “A Gesture Is a Signal” from Passager Issue 64.
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For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
Not pictured: Carolyn Moore