BOROSODY---- IT'S A PLAY ON WORDS

Well, I have finally found something that I despise learning even more than music theory (my chosen major). It's called “prosody”. I don't even care for the word. It takes poetry and turns it into a formaldehyde soaked, spread eagle, frog in science class. The instructor stands in front of us with his literary scalpels, pins, and magnifying glass and doesn't even bother to ask if we abhor the idea of this ghastly dissection. What's the gag? Can't we just let the little rhetorical buggers loose in the swamp of incomprehension where they belong? Why subject them and us to the horror?.... or bore? What could we possibly get out of peering into the inner-workings of these egregious, lifeless, specimens?

I'm going to answer my own question. It seems that as my initial distaste for prosody wore off, my curiosity did kick in. I found myself gingerly taking the scalpel and doubtfully cutting into the thick, pulpous material. After the first incision (and once I wiped off the formaldehyde and other fluids that sprayed me when I started cutting... blick...), I began to marvel at the inner working of these tiny bits of prose. Poems are not just filled with a jumbled mess of random words, there is design, order, meaning, meanings and intelligence. After dissecting a few, my brain and eyes have found a new connection. I now find myself looking out at the poetry all around me. I even found the freedom to enjoy poetry that lacks rhyming and balanced rhythms! It's amazing how much more I enjoy the outside now that I've seen the inside.

No, you probably won't find me pouring over a book of poems intermittently oohing and awing over the intricacies of them (Probably... heck... no, there isn't a chance!), but, I am pleasantly surprised by the lack of trauma I sustained and the wealth of appreciation I have amassed. While I still think there should be a warning label placed at the beginning of any study of poetry, it's not nearly as horrible as its academic title (prosody) implies.

To mark this moment in history, I give you my “ebenezer” (chew on that). It's a poem that popped out when I was looking at the unfortunate painting “Two Chained Monkeys” by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. My goal was to prove that my poem was better than the poem matched with it, but after thoroughly studying the poem by Wislawa Szymborska I just appreciated it too darn much to even give that thesis a try.

Trapped in a machine
with a view
The cog takes, holds,
despises
They see every day
what
People pay dearly to
own
After a while there's
no
Reason to even
look.


Here's to you Wislawa and all your fellow wordsmiths!

Tuba City

I enjoyed the story “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” by Leslie Marmon Silko. She skillfully emoted the flavor of reservation life. The depiction of the stoic but steady progression of events was beautifully related. The story brought back my memories of Tuba City, Arizona. It took me to that little dusty town with pot holes bigger than our van, to the smell of fire and rotting carcasses, to the powdery 100 degree heat that produced random, meandering dust devils that weaved across the sparse landscape. It took me to the painted desert and the far off multi-colored jagged mesas . It took me to that place where capitalism was shaken off and the raw stuff of life sat unashamedly bare upon the dry, red soil that our forefathers so graciously gave them.
The summer of my Junior and Senior years in High School, I worked at a Navajo Reservation with my Christian youth group. Now, we didn't get in our Bible Bus with our Bible shoes and set out to go Bible thumpin'. We were invited by the Native Believers there in Tuba City. Once a year they have their “Camp Meetings”. It's a big deal and Navajos from towns all around the reservation show up for it. Our job was to occupy 70+ kids while there parents were in the camp meetings. It was the most, by far, profound experience I had ever had in my young life. At first the kids were quite wary of us, but after the first 100 or so horsey back rides... we started to bond. The memory of those kids is one of my most precious to this day. I also remember being taught by the women how to make fry bread and how they laughed at me like I was built upside down or something. I remember that I cried like I was being ripped apart when we left.
I can identify with the Priest in the story. He not only had to adjust to a different culture, he had to try to relate and make relationships. Silko did a good job pulling me into the Priest's discomfort and disconnect. When I first got to Tuba City, everything was just a notch different. Things were askew to my norm just enough to give me the fish in outer space kind of feeling. As the week progressed, I got to know the people there and really came to love them a lot. Still, I never completely lost that off kilter feeling. We spoke, but never with absolute ease. There was always something missing or missed. That's exactly what I felt when I read “The Man to Send Rain Clouds”.