Two Poets and Two Cultures :: Culture Poetry Literature Essays

Two Poets and Two Cultures Two poets from two different sides of the planet whose cultures are just as far apart exchange letters that are themed on single words. The first trick, the word, is based on a memorized arbitrary pairing between a sound and a meaning. [S. Pinker pg.2] A word is a simple concept when thought about at first. A word is an arbitrary sound used to represent some random thing. Memorize what each arbitrary sound and the random thing it stands for and that should be all there is to fill your mental lexical database. Words are the building blocks to sentences, but before you're ready to build a sentence there are few rules you must memorize. Then the movie "Letters not about love" should have been simple. State a word then state its meaning. For example, 'Dog' four-legged mammal that barks (incessantly if it lives next to me) and chases cats. End of statement, well except there is so much more. These poets and poets in general act like scavengers in a dark corner of a basement rummaging around in the clutter and finding treasure buried there. The treasure they are finding is some stray meaning for a thought. Bakhtin's statement "Language does not move through uncluttered space." is a true representation of this. Each time someone utters something it must move past your lexical database of meanings. This stray representation can add a dimension to a word like the strokes of paint from a paintbrush. Poets use this clutter like clay to mold an image of something in our minds; some of the things they overturn in this basement of clutter will mean nothing to some and everything to others. When Arkadii Dragomoshchenko wrote of his Grandmother and how he felt free of fear about her tight lips, her dark eyes, all of the different ways he described her, were words that really filled in the picture of who his grandmother was. Some of these 'words' weren't so far out of the ordinary but free of fear, there is some clutter overturned here. I immediately get the feeling of safety when I think free of free. My feelings of being free of fear came from somewhere else, I remember as a child, late at night I would have scary thoughts before falling asleep, then I could hear my father walking around downstairs, this filled me with a feeling of safety, free of fear, the scary thoughts wouldn't be so scary anymore.