Aurhor-Reader-Words: A Conversation

When we read, small cilia in our throats move as if to pronounce the words we encounter. In this way, we are mimetically engaged in the pages that are “cavernous places, white at entrance, black in absorption” (61). We, the readers, are the echo. We trace the words with our throats and digest them with our minds. We become a participant in our reflection. I think that in this way, reading is a real, literal conversation between bodies that might not even be in the room.

And for the most part, conversations follow a typical pattern. The speaker says something, and the listener might say something back. I doubt this is revelational. However, what you might not know is this: when a conversation does not follow common neural protocol, areas of the brain light up that are reserved for the experience of physical pain. Actual. Physical. Pain. So when we are interrupted or a conversation does not go as expected, our bodies feel this pain.

If reading is a conversation, and a conversation can make our brain sizzle with pleasure or crumple with pain, what, then, am I saying in my blog post about Layli Long Soldier?

This whole dance between language (text) and reader is what I thought about as I read Whereas. It’s a theory I want to trace with one poem in particular: “Vaporative,” the section on page 28.

“I’m chewing at a funeral and. I’m nibbling my pulp knuckles. I’m watching a man with a stain on his. Pants.”

To me, this feels interrupted. It also feels highly authentic to the way we converse with ourselves (or should I keep it close and say, how I speak to myself?). I am constantly interrupting myself and chopping up my own rhythms. Maybe if a team of scientists attached electrodes to my throat and measured the impulses as I thought things, it would measure as choppy. I can’t recall a moment in my life where I’ve thought in a beautiful and complete sentence. Most of the time it’s floating words, emotions, colors or memories.

What am I saying? I’m saying that in a lot of ways, Long Soldier’s written text feels like thought, like internal conversation. And this conversation extends to the body of the reader, forming a dance between author-reader-words more so than something that was uninterrupted... because it is so relatable, so felt.

Long Soldier uses these expansive and vast registers of language to create a “be with me for this ride” atmosphere within these poems; there is so much trust involved. There are 20+ connected poems that create one sentence in the section “Whereas”. What more evidence do we need that this is a conversation -- at least the kind that goes on and on and you're not allowed to interrupt? Furthermore, Long Soldier writes “comma” and urges the reader to pronounce “comma” instead of hearing a pause. Pauses are not opportunities to interject (so would this cause physical pain in the listener?).

All of this is to say, I felt Long Soldier’s work to be more intimate and embodied than any work we’ve seen so far, and I think this is because of her incredible command of not only language itself, but the patterns of speech that stitch language together to form conversations.