Lexicographic Poetry and Its Visual Components

Fairfield Inn, Room 313, Clay, New York

My interests inhabit the margins. Even as a child, these areas of the natural world were most important to me. When I lived in Cedar Beach, Ontario, and Lake Erie was the edge of my backyard, I would walk from the beach right onto the lake, impressed at my ability to balance on the craggy ice forming the surface of that inland sea. Once, while crouching behind a giant block of ice, my body punctured through and I plunged into the lake, cold beneath the frozen waves. At one of our addresses in Barbados, the Caribbean was our backyard and I would spend hours snorkeling the waters and capturing the many different animals thriving there. I’d keep my booty imprisoned in an aluminum tub on the wide white beach, a practice I had to modify after an octopus escaped from the tub but could not continue forward on the dry sand too far from that narrow margin of sand and sea that the octopus needed to escape to the ocean. One of my favorite places in Barbados was an estuary that went almost dry during low tide, leaving fiddler crabs in the open and small fish trapped in shallow pockets of water. Nearby, there was another interface, one between the outdoors and the underground, a small cave from which tiny reremice would stream into the twilight.

Visual poetry itself is an artform on the border between literature and the visual arts, between letter and picture. There are all manner of other intermedial artforms extant and possible: one between music and visual arts, one between drama and typography, even one between lexicography and poetry. Lohren Green’s Poetical Dictionary Abridged is such a work, and an almost unique one at that.

This book of poems demonstrates the potential power of an artform I call the antidictionary. Antidictionaries provide entertainment or insight into the meanings that common or invented words may or may not have. Let’s take a few examples. Miekal And’s marvelous neolexicon Introgic Enclodiacy takes a number of the author’s invented words and defines them in outlandish ways. The Devil’s Dictionary, the most famous contradictionary, provides the real (that is, the cynical) definition of words so that we can finally learn that “black” is “white.” Josefa Heifetz Byrne created her pataglossary, Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words, by presenting strange but “real” words with deadpan definitions. All of these processes undercut the usual point of a dictionary (to help us understand the words we run across in our lives) and make lexicography an art.

Lohren Green’s own contradictionary incorporates most of the features of a modern dictionary (an introductory essay, pronunciations, etymologies, parts-of-speech identifiers, numbered definitions, illustrations), yet also supplies us with definitions in a wide variety of visual and verbal styles. The preface itself is one of the most densely and expressively poetic parts of the book. The peripatetic writing there guides us, now and then, to wonderful sentences like this one: “Here the lifeless, hueless insect is stretched and pinned in a Linnaean chart of Neo-Latinate relations, its slim body, big wings and clubbed antenna[e] the only points of contact between meaning and the being that we know to be the often brightly colored, clumsy joy that seems to hiccup in flight.” The preface is not so much illuminating as drily yet effectively emotive. It leads us to musings rather than to explanations, just as we should expect from an antidictionary.

This Poetical Dictionary uses the concept of a dictionary as a touchstone and source of inspiration. Standard lexicographic form serves as the general infrastructure of each poem, but Green twists and extends that form in many ways. The most obvious added feature is line breaks; a quick glance at a poem reveals a poem; without stopping to read the poem, a reader might overlook the lexicography that informs the poem. Green also plays with mise-en-page, sometimes forming modest visual poems. The poem “doodle” distributes words across the page in various mimetic clusters, suggesting the products of the wandering hand of a doodler; “bleak” appears as four flat lines at the very bottom of the page; “pixel” is but a tiny huddle in the corner of the page. Visually, some poems form simple blocks (almost identical to entries in a dictionary), others move down the page in a scalloping of lines, and a few divide themselves into separate stanzas. A handful of the poems include illustrations apparently by the author himself. These are quirky line drawings that are often quite effective, as in the case of the few thin horizontal lines that accompany “bleak” or the huge swoop that resembles a cursive r and appears in the entry for “salient.”

Many of these poems leave the reader in awe for a moment. For instance, each entry begins with a preliminary definition—which is a brief interim definition used in some dictionaries to summarize the general meaning of the headword before detailing each sense of the word. Some of these are epigrammatic marvels: tendril (“pulse of tresses”), room (“tunnel to a clasp”), contraption (“through plates push a piston”). The ekphrastic poem “Miró” beautifully renders the feel of a Miró painting verbally. Almost each poem has a turn of phrase that can make a heart race, such as “the/jutting spur of a bastion” in “salient” or “the stout/threat of a thorn” within “spine.” The poem “voluptuous” is an appropriately rich and dense definition beginning with

I. of the luxurious, intertwining steep of sense with pleasure.
The illustrative feast—plethoric chiasmus of rapture, candle
vision set vibrating in the velvet curtain’s electric maroon fuzz, . . .

Many of the poems (such as that for “acrobatics”) consist of a set of numbered definitions concatenated into one, so that each numbered sense runs semantically into the next yet suggests an additional meaning for the word. The technique, thereby, questions the idea of meaning and the concept that a single word has any truly separable meanings.

Yet the book has its weaknesses, most niggling lexicographic ones. Green calls headwords “subject words,” making me think he is more familiar with bibliographic description than lexicographic terminology. He inexplicably ends each headword with a hyphen, which I suspect is meant to be an en-dash, though there’s no reason for one of those either. Each etymology appears to be a simple copy of an existing attempt to uncover the etyma of the word in question; he doesn’t take the opportunity to slip poetry into derivations. A few of the illustrations are merely illustrative; they don’t play with the notion of illustration at all. The most significant weakness is that some of the poems devolve into apoetical discursiveness. Sometimes, the overwhelming influence of lexicography forces too much sense into the poems. Green finds himself sometimes trapped by the game of “definition” (a word that always should have quotation marks around it, a requirement Nabokov also claimed for the word “reality”).

Overall, though, the poems in this book surprise us with their inventiveness and wit. Rather than mildly denigrate these sly little visualized poems, I’d prefer to call for more. Let Green show us what else he can do. Let the rest of us try our hand at it as well. Let us not allow this hybrid form to pass unnoticed into the periphery of poetry; let’s see what it can do. Make the lexicographic poem the new Petrarchan sonnet, a form frozen and known and pushed to its limits until we know it so well that we must give it up. In some form of unfair criticism, homage, and reproduction of Green’s work Poetical Dictionary, I will end with a brief poem of mine that emulates Green’s accomplishments in this book and that gives a vague idea of the processes and techniques he uses.

succulent- to bursting a sap: "sə' kyə lənt" adj.
[from the Latin succulentus with the meaning succulent, fr. sucus juice, sap;
related to the Latin sugere to suck; see more at SUCK]
I. able to be full 2. of juice
not dribbling but expanding in a closed space:
a thumb hammered into flatness
SWELLS

3. as a wave floats upon water

slaps into facets
of sea or lake or river
merging up towards the next wave
wobbling
towards collision,

a splash of throbbing droplets
into your face until
you awake clammy
as a sea creature, wandering awake,
a wake turgid behind you, your one fat foot
dragging you forward
into the blind darkness
you just came out 4. of
a type of
plant bearing a juicy center
filled with moisture, a churning sea
of cells, sustaining itself
through drought
5. unless the sweat
dries out

Green, Lohren. Poetical Dictionary Abridged. Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos, 2003.

ecr. l'inf.

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