Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

When I was eleven years old, reading Robert K. Massie’s Nicolas and Alexandra, I encountered the longest word I had ever seen: counterrevolutionaries. It muscled out most other words in the line, squatting nigh unpronounceably, like an undigestible bolus or sedimentary rock, all prefix and suffix. Even though it had no sensuality or visual aspect to it at all — its physicality is coded into the etymology of volvere, to roll — it repudiated its own abstraction by taking up space, reflexively enacting a trochaic reversal of our customary iambics, and vibrating with the engine of its r’s. I was eleven and I was fascinated.  It strikes me as odd, this random memory of a single word, but children have a primal feeling for language that manifests in their perennial games — tongue-twisters, nursery rhymes, punning jokes — and in their penchant for naming. When he was nine or ten, my son told me that his favorite word was overwhelming. Then he decided it was lawless. It is a truism that kids pick up foreign languages more easily, and that adolescents drive new slang — that language lava. It is hardly unknown for adults to revel in wordplay, to create diminutives and invent limericks, but it isn’t endemic to American English. Not right now, at least. We are more likely to proscribe words, or swap them out for endless euphemism. (Some petty functionary, somewhere, really thinks “unhoused” is a meaningful improvement on “homeless.”) English is the lingua franca of commerce, with its bureaucratese and finance jargon: also not a good sign. And this impoverishment at the general level extends to the literary culture, where too often decisions about what kinds of writing get rewarded are determined by the grownups’ ideological commitment to plainness as a democratic value. Restriction and instrumentalism reign, not freedom and play.  I remember the wealth of adverbs that I absorbed from children’s books, how each had a different emotional shade as vivid as a box of Crayolas. “‘Okay,’ she said ruefully.” Or wistfully. Or sardonically. Or wryly. One could be convivial, or congenial, or amiable, or amicable: these radiated subtle differences. Joy, mirth, bliss. Desuetude, ennui, acedia. Looking back, it seemed I amassed these words like a toy army to deploy in those little booklets I made, folding drawing paper in half and stapling them to shelter my stories and drawings (inseparable concepts at that age, as Alice in Wonderland attests). Words were physical; they created physical sensations mimetically. What they provided, also, was an education in emotional nuance.  I told my students that we were going to read the saddest poem in twentieth-century American poetry. I thought it would perk them up, pique their curiosity, or even put on them on their guard. Sadness, especially “sad girl” sadness, is a staple of pop culture, a commodity. People go looking for extraneous sadness in songs and in poetry. Why? Why break your own heart on a normal day? Is it a release from boredom and numbness? Is there a secret pleasure in private pain? Of course I have done this too, but I recognize its perversion.  Yet even as I told my students that this is for me the saddest American poem of the twentieth century — leaning on the hyperbole — I knew that when they finally read the poem they would be baffled. And indeed one student did show up at my office hours to confess that this one defeated her. The poem was Amy Clampitt’s “The Kingfisher.” If you polled the MFA’s of America, this would probably not be the most obvious contender for the title.  THE KINGFISHER In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed by those eye- spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening. Months later, intermission in a pub on Fifty-fifth Street found one of them still breathless, the other quizzical, acting the philistine, puncturing Stravinsky — “Tell me, what was that racket in the orchestra about?”— hauling down the Firebird, harum-scarum, like a kite, a burnished, breathing wreck that didn’t hurt at all Among the Bronx Zoo’s exiled jungle fowl, they heard through headphones of a separating panic, the bellbird reiterate its single chong, a scream nobody answered. When he mourned, “The poetry is gone,” she quailed, seeing how his hands shook, sobered into feeling old. By midnight, yet another fifth would have been killed. A Sunday morning, the November of their cataclysm (Dylan Thomas brought in in extremis to St. Vincent’s, that same week, a symptomatic datum) found them wandering a downtown churchyard. Among its headstones, while from unruined choirs the noise of Christendom poured over Wall Street, a benison in vestments, a late thrush paused, in transit from some grizzled spruce bog to the humid equatorial fireside: berryeyed, bark-brown above, with dark hints of trauma in the stigmata of its underparts — or so, too bruised just then to have invented anything so fancy, later, re- embroidering a retrospect, she had supposed. In gray England, years of muted recrimination (then dead silence) later, she could not have said how many spoiled takeoffs, how many entanglements gone sodden, how many gaudy evenings made frantic by just one insomniac nightingale, how many liaisons gone down screaming in a stroll beside the ruined nunnery; a kingfisher’s burnished plunge, the color of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow through landscapes of untended memory: ardor illuminating with its terrifying currency now no mere glimpse, no porthole vista but, down on down, the uninhabitable sorrow. When Willard Spiegelman’s biography of Amy Clampitt, Nothing Stays Put, came out last year, the reception was muted. No review in the New York Times; a mere mention in the New Yorker’s “Briefly Reviewed,” despite Clampitt having been one of the magazine’s stars in the 1980s. (Harold Moss was the first to publish her.) But