Prologue to this national poetry month

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Bradford J. Senning

Spell check, I think to myself. Grammar check, newspaper editors and educational institutions. All of them types of decorum that arrest the pulse of language, separate the speech from the breath that exhales it, the words from the fingers that miscalculate key position. Edit this!

It is National Poetry Month. And since we are going to be exposed to an enormous amount of words that don't go all the way to the right margin, I want to reevaluate the importance we place on exactitude in writing. For we still suffer from something that Whitman accused us of: We "think too much of articulation." And it's about time we appreciate conspicuously bad jobs of writing for their instinctual accuracy.

Seventeenth century poet John Donne - one of the poets that inspired Shakespeare with a style that Samuel Johnson said "ransacked nature and art for comparisons" - sometimes couldn't spell his name right. A famous example every English major hears about is how he once spelled his name six different ways in a single letter.

Mark Twain, in many ways the father of the American idiom in our literature wrote, "I don't give a damn for a man that can spell a word only one way." And poet Robert Bly concurred during his reading in the recent Tucson Poetry Festival, that "bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas."

There's "Def Leppard" and they have nothing to do with "deaf leopards." At McDonald's, I "drive through" the "drive-thru." And to one person I am Brad (coyly spoken) and to another Brad (icily spoken). How exactly are we to say that there is an absolute way of writing the language when the language admits its own elasticity?

There's a signature in all things that simply can't be copied in words. How can we translate the concept of "clock" when so much depends on what time it says? And what if we are in competition with a clock maker to get the interpretation right? He understands it different than us even if we describe it at the same time.

Because there is no getting it right, we use language to celebrate our innovations toward a concerted and eternal process of getting it wrong.

Some of the best literature of our times is the result of appealing accidents. A famous example is when a blind James Joyce was dictating to his secretary a sentence in his last novel Finnegans Wake and heard a knock on the door. "Come in," he said, and his secretary took it down. It appears on page 238 of the novel.

Accenting the improvisatory nature of language, poet William Carlos Williams used a rhythm based on the his own breathing. Even the scripture tells us that chortles make a powerful statement. When we don't know what to pray for, the "spirit intercedes with groans that words can't express."

Because we live in a monetary democracy, where $3.49 gets you a Big Mac Meal regardless of the denomination of bills and coins, the expectation is that language rewards us the same way. I tell you that the left side is debit and the right side credit, you give me an A.

It's not like that. Language is one of the very lucky and few remaining modes of commerce in which you can short-pay someone with a yummy sound or a "hello handsome" and get massive rewards.

Poets have been proving for years that an indirect and often imperfect construction of words can speak volumes and contribute a message to your memory that will last for many years.

So consider this month your opportunity to use "belch" constructively in an essay. Write a paper that approximates the rhythm of your toaster. And dig into your soul for the perfect howl that will prick at the ears of the establishment. Language, like raising your hand in class, is a freedom. Exercise it liberally.