One poetry-reading habit I have is looking up words I don’t know and writing their meanings as marginalia. Yes, I used to avoid writing in my books, as if they were so many sacred Bibles, but then I thought, “Who am I kidding? They actually have more personality when one author makes room for another.”
As an example, thumbing through Dorianne Laux’s Only As the Day Is Long, which I just completed, I came across the unfamiliar words below. If you already know them, or most of them, or even some of them, forgive my ignorance and assume I know some words you don’t. It will feel more democratic (a vanishing feeling) that way.
Line: “Melmac dishes stacked on rag towels.”
Melmac: “Melmac is the name for plastic dinnerware that was created with the use of melamine.First developed in the 1940s, melamine resin is easily molded into a number of different shapes and is extremely durable.”
Line: “The warm days pass, gulls scree and pitch”
scree: (noun) an accumulation of loose stones or rocky debris lying on a slope or at the base of a hill or cliff. Nota bene: obviously not what Laux had in mind, so I’ll take it that the verb “scree” is onomatopoeia.
Line: “…beaks like keloid scars”
keloid: (noun) a thick scar resulting from excessive growth of fibrous tissue
Line: “…those glorious auroras, glassine gowns”
glassine: (noun) a thin dense transparent or semitransparent paper highly resistant to the passage of air and grease
Line: “…the deep scar a gnarl / along the scritch of your chin.”
scritch: dialectal variant of screech (and thus another Laux sound invention)
Line: “Rugose cheeks and beef / jerky jowls”
rugose: a.) full of wrinkles, b.) having the veinlets sunken and the spaces between elevated
Line: “…in a coracle boat”
coracle: (noun) a small boat used in Britain from ancient times and made of a frame (as of wicker) covered usually with hide or tarpaulin
Line: “…and rivers run through, scumbling up the rocks”
scumble: (verb) a.) to make (something, such as color or a painting) less brilliant by covering with a thin coat of opaque or semiopaque color applied with a nearly dry brush; b.) to apply (a color) in this manner
9 thoughts on “You Could Look It Up”
I’ve been known to write myself notes like that, too, especially if I’m going to a book discussion. I also love reading a book after my husband and seeing what he added. His comments are juicier than mine like, “Duh” or “What a jerk!”
Ha-ha to the “What a jerk!” comment! A lot of them in literature! I remember checking out a Thoreau book in college. He’d written a piece called “Walking” and someone had scribbled in after the word “to South Campus,” which was a section of the university where dorms stood. I liked that touch.
I was also amused to brush up using my high school French text and see that I wrote definitions for words like “croissant.” Hard to believe I hadn’t yet met one.
That’s like writing a definition to “le baseball.” Speaking of French, as part of my Covid Winter of Discontent, I restarted it on the free Duolingo site. I have no one to talk to (the only true way to learn), but it’s fun nonetheless in a “been-there, done this” kind of way.
Bonne chance! You can listen to lots of spoken French on YouTube, too.
Everything’s on YouTube, seems. Probably poetry readings by poets named Alarie, even. 😉
True! When I get a new book of poetry by a contemporary poet I don’t know, I often check YouTube. I really enjoy some of Ocean Vuong’s interviews.
I’ll check them out. I went to a reading of his in Salem, Mass. Thank god for the mic. He was difficult to hear.
Yes, he speaks very softly and sounds very vulnerable for a man who boldly lays his soul bare before his audience.