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.