Dispatch from the Archives is a regular column about work previously published in Southwest Review. The magazine is the third-longest-running literary quarterly in the United States, and its archives date back to 1915. This edition looks at a poem by Annie Dillard from vol. 71, no. 4.
I open things. I peel away packing tape. I pull out magazines, and I tuck stories and poems onto a shelf in the basement of a life sciences building on a college campus in Dallas. It’s a peculiar little office. Southwest Review shares a hallway with the undergraduate psychology studies and a paleontology lab. Our office mascot is a skeleton who reads one of our back issues (there could be worse coworkers). I spend most days with dinosaur bones, my cadaverous friend, and the whispers of literary giants. Ten decades of writing sit on a shelf behind my desk: Arthur Miller and D. H. Lawrence and Anne Carson breathing down my neck. It’s a group haunting I can really get behind.
I’m writing to you here, from this upside-down office of piled-up boxes, to open up our rich history at Southwest Review. To breathe new life into old work. This is your first dispatch from the archives.
Where else to begin than with a familiar name? And the origin of language?
Annie Dillard shows up in the Autumn 1986 issue of Southwest Review. I knew she’d appeared in the magazine—hell, she’s referenced on the “About” page of our website—but I hadn’t yet read her contribution.
I was thrilled to find her name nestled under “Poetry” in the table of contents. I love lit mags because they function in the literary in-between. They provide outlets where artists can take risks: where established writers can play with new genres and where new writers can push the boundaries of form. Clearly Southwest Review has been dedicated to publishing the playful and the offbeat for decades, because Dillard’s poem “Language for Everyone” is one such piece. It’s got serious quirk.
Beautifully strange and sardonically crafted, the poem draws from a seminal linguistics text published in 1933, Language by Leonard Bloomfield. Besides the section titles, all of the words in the poem are borrowed from Bloomfield. Dillard collages a fractured narrative about origins—the attempt to fill in gaps of meaning, the ways we reach for a sense of self through our beginnings.
The language is an off-kilter balance of singsongy and utterly bizarre. A nursery rhyme becomes a Biblical creation story becomes a gendered reckoning:
Somewhere in Jack’s body
there was a sense-organ which told him,
“Jill is hungry and sees an apple up there.”
And later:
Since lips, tongue, and uvula are elastic,
they can be placed so that the breath
sets them into vibration:
Here are some apples; take one.
Every time a narrative seems to become clear, it’s subverted. A “two steps forward, one step back” movement. The progress is nonlinear. The gaping holes in the story lead to twisting lines of questioning: “Who? With whom? Who / ran away? With whom was he talking?” In the poem’s third section, we’re left with a lonely Jill “in much the same position as the speechless animal. / Bow-wow, whip-poor-will, gnaf-gnaf”—she’s befuddled by her own want. Jill’s singular desire for the apple is followed by a section questioning the communal impact of repeated speech. But this is not just a move from the microscopic to the expansive; it’s a gesture to the space that exists between.
I’ve sat with this poem for a few weeks. Moved through its eight sections. Tried to make sense of its senselessness. It’s exactly the sort of piece that gets me fired up as a reader. I can’t stop thinking about its elusive qualities, the playfulness of the form, the strangeness of language. This poem draws you in, then spits you back out—like a bright thought mutated into nonsensical speech.
Take the apple. Then question its shape: gut the core, hold the seeds on your tongue, transform the fruit and learn it anew. Discover fresh modalities from tired language. Find meaning in the start of things. Relish the mysteries of our origins. And check back next issue to dig up, unbox, and revive another Southwest Review archive. I’ll let Dillard’s poem cue me out:
Choo-choo, bye-bye, goody-good
goodness gracious! dear me! lickspittle,
dreadnought, snub-nosed, red-bearded,
chortle, kodak, and blurb.
Hannah Smith is a poet from Dallas. Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.
Illustration: Jonas Kalmbach
