Challenge

On Thursday, June 11^th I choose—foolishly, or fortuitously, only time will tell—to memorize Lisa Jarnot’s “Thricemost Field Mouse Song.”  According to cognitive scientists, music occupies more areas of our brain than language. Music, in other words, is more accessible than words. Music is more immediate, more global, more ecstatic. Because music processing is a more distributed network than language processing, music is even, in a sense “more meaningful.” 

& what about “difficult” works? What if I don’t “get” Jarnot’s poems? What if I can’t make my way through the mishmash of sonic & semantic sense? What if I give up before I discover the “key” to reading her work? & isn’t that the problem with so much of the work we variously label as “innovative,” “experimental,” “avant garde,” or “oppositional?” Despite our best intentions, we are well trained in the art of discovering the key, searching for the holy grail of lost meanings. We’re taught, from the moment we learn to read right up to the University classrooms in which we are ostensibly “liberated,” to “unlock” the text. We reach, instinctively, for the decoder. 

Visit the link and read Emily Carr's essay. She's an American poet living in Canada.

Thricemost Field Mouse Song

By Lisa Jarnot

Thricemost Field most fidelitous mice of men

mice most field toast rebellion riven gunned

of rice mice most field glow of the one

christ mass field task resting mice and run

run most field roast, mossy mice of one

arm’s length mouse flank, felicitious and sunned

tan glow field row mouse is underdone

cooked roe built of field greens overrun

run mouse field house tent inside the sun

love paste arm’s haste mouse toes moon and hum

shaped wave, spare pace, mouse face dusted on

under taken leaves all raken, golden fur begun

open out the field of mouse, the field of mouse begun