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JOHN HORVATH Jr
Poet, Narrator, Readerf, and the Family
"I don't understand the words," my immigrant parents said to my sister who played Country and Western. She didn't understand the words when my brother played rock and roll. He didn't understand the words on my acid rock albums. "Um, I understand," I said the other day when my daughter played punk rock.
There's a sequence which one generation after another accepts. But, there's change too. When we think we're common, then we are unique; when we think "unique," we're not.
The immigrants in Northwest Indiana's industrial Calumet Region were a family in which Membership was defined by language. The more broken one's speech, the more real was one's affiliation. One's place in the world was marked by one's speech. There was no one language, no one pattern for verbs, nouns, modifiers. Except at school. Academic language (English) had no degree; it was, like sin at church, either good or bad. But on the streets, good and evil was like one's language--a question of degree: one might do or say something in English; but, that same act or word could be evil according to the old ones and their old ways.
Narrative is a traditional line of action as told by a character who is defined by the written word--what is said defines the unique or common perspective. In poetry unique perspective is applied to thought-to-be common events, and the common perspective shows that the unique event is not unique. In every such application of perspective there is implied a moral or ethical question, a challenge to the reader: "Is this truly what the world is like?" or "Have you noticed the difference?" (There is the omniscient narrator who sees all and knows all: all narration is somewhat vatic. The voice of prophecy decrying the old way, harking to the new, reviving the old, or castigating the new way is always implied in narrative.)
The social poem, the narrative, speaks to its reader as no other. If not directly, there's a hint of eavesdropping (somehow wrong, socially unacceptable) which the reader feels as dis-ease, dis-comfort. That is why so much protest is couched in narrative which makes one overhear another's words. Then the direct address when you know you've been caught listening--there's a shift to another language or to dead silence. Poets call this "closure": when the narrative ends, the reader must supply "what happens" as he must when an overheard conversation moves outside hearing or the conversants simply stop speaking. There's something moral and something dangerous in the "excuse me!", the direct address to the eavesdropper.
The voice of the narrator can invite or shame its listener. I knew I wasn't invited among elders when they shifted into Polish, Hungarian, or Slovak. There are words not meant for young ears; there are events unheard of. There are words and events shared by the poet speaking to the narrator. The narrative is to be overheard. When the end comes, the reader says, "I understand" or "I do not understand the words." The poet's pleasure is when the reader says, "I shouldn't have, but did" and "I did, but I shouldn't have."
Why ought my listener share in the shame of my poem's characters? Who is the listener that he should impose himself into the joy in this narrative? Understanding the words, not the hearing of them, defines membership in the family--when the words that describe events are understood, acceptance is there too. If you are a member what are your obligations, your responsibilities, your due and your dues? Discomfort. The narrator has trapped you in a family into which you entered unawares. You go off and say to another, "Have you read…"? Strangers, by means of the narrative, become relations. The family grows as the secrets of its language are revealed.
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