This American Amnesia...

I found this book, Specimens of Macaronic Poetry, by serendipity, purchased a first edition from 1831 in great condition for a remarkably low price, and then found a copy of it posted online (it's loooong been in public domain of course).

Thank you very much, University of California, for making this available to everybody in such a democratic fashion. I noted at this site that you can send this book to Lulu to print a physical copy for you if you prefer to hold your books. I thought that was really nifty, but I didn't price it. It's public domain so I imagine it should be less expensive than a book for which rights have to be purchased by the third party publisher. One would hope such books are produced with at least a minimal sense of design, but it might be a case where such considerations add considerable expense. Amenities generally cost more.

The author, William Sandys, was an Englishman who lived from 1792 to 1874. You can read his biography at Wikipedia.

This book is almost completely forgotten. The introduction deals with more than just macaronic poetry; it includes a catalogue and an overview of unusual poetic forms. The introduction will be particularly enlightening for those who think many of these poetic forms originated in the twentieth century as Oulipan innovations or early twentieth-century linguistic oddities.

One could make the argument that these forms were better known to anglophone writers and readers in the early nineteenth century, who also had a much stronger awareness that the true origins of these sublimely weird poetic forms lay in antiquity.

I was trying to think of contemporary poets who write in macaronic forms. It's odd, but I realized the ones of which I had knowledge were almost exclusively women. Here are the first names that came to mind as writers of macaronic poetry. Maybe you can add some, and some males? Among the dead, I guess Ezra Pound should be cited, and with Zukofsky (read the opening of "A" 15, to give one example) the case is even better. (I'm not sure Pound's interpolations are truly macaronic.)

1. Anne Tardos (trilingual macaronic poetry in one book.)
2. Susan Smith Nash (I couldn't find the original texts, but I remember them appearing in her magazine in the early nineties, and possibly some in Generator magazine around the same time.)
3. Nicole Brossard (French and English.)
4. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (her masterpiece Dictee is a nonpareil reinvention of the very concept.)
5. Joan Retallack (How to Do Things with Words is an excellent resource, although I'm sure this modality occurs in other books by her.)
6. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (There are beautiful examples of macaronic braidings of English and Esperanto in the "K" section of Rachel Blau DuPlessis' Draft X: Letters. I also remember this poet making a macaronic pun somewhere on Rimbaud's "Je est un autre," where she writes sarcastically "'I' ate another alright." I would wager many examples could be found throughout the nonpareil Drafts.)
7. Kathleen Fraser (often with Italian but in "Norchia" with Etruscan!).
8. Myung Mi Kim (In Commons--published by University of California Press!--and I am fairly certain in the earlier books, English and Korean. In Commons, Latin is often macaronically incorporated as well.)

Why are these all women writers? Coincidence? Are women statistically more often multilingual? Are women more likely to build bridges between languages for some reason?

I'm sure there are many others contemporary authors who have explored the possibilities of macaronic form, but these are the first few that came to mind. I thought I read somewhere that Pierre Guyotat's writing occasionally employs the macaronic, but I have not read enough to say. Maybe someone knows?

I suppose Susan Howe would also surely have written some "specimens of macaronic poetry," but I don't have easy access to my copies of her books at the moment.

It's interesting to note that the examples given in Sandys' work are often humorous examples of macaronic poetry, instances where the author's Latin "gives out" or fails him, and he jury-rigs artificial Latinate forms of English words. This sort of poetic slapstick is often amusing, and sometimes still funny even today.

But contemporary writers of the macaronic (at least the ones cited above) are not interested in crafting humorous lapsi calami. They are much more often interested in the way languages dream us; how we are the dreams of these various languages; how the various languages refract the world differently. In other words, the new macaronic poetry is a mutation of the lyric. Such authors exploit these different (optical, if you will) properties of the various languages by very closely juxtaposing them. Think of an optometrist switching lenses on you in a fast manner, and asking your perspective.

But that's just one interpretation and one possible result of the multilingual braiding of diverse languages in poetry. Even if one one doesn't have knowledge of the language or languages being braided with one's own in these lyrical strands, there is still aesthetic force and aesthetic reaction. Sometimes, this might even be a cleansing of hubristic monolingual thinking, the cathartic force that slams* the reader into an engagement with linguistic alterity.

And then there are the sounds of the other languages, of course. One possibility is looking at this as collage, and collage in poetry will have both visual and aural impact. This impact is anterior to, or simultaneous with, construction of "meaning(s)."

In any case, check out Specimens online. It will introduce you to a number of poets whose names and creations have been largely forgotten for many years. It's sad that Google only returns a scant two dozen or so references to this book, and most of these are either libraries or antiquarian booksellers. It should definitely by recognized by the "avant-guardians" who are interested in preserving the history of innovation in the English language. This book (1831!) reminds us of how longevous this tradition of linguistic innovation really is in our language, even if it has usually met with rebarbative interest at best.


They wuz playful even if they dropped daily like flies in ether...



http://www.archive.org/details/specimensofmacar00sandrich

* "VLAN!" the French say when Snoopy slams his dog dish down at Charlie Brown's feet.