take heart; i have not let anyone in

this is not the second waldrep poem i’ve read – just the second waldrep poem i’ve been able to make bare minimum sense of. as mentioned before, i’m actually very much in love with his poetry … i just don’t understand a lot of it. in any case, this post needs a purpose, so here for you is an analysis of waldrep’s disclamor poem entitled, “wildwood.”

the poem itself is an uneven 29 lines long – go figure – and begins by questioning why we assume that a thing’s given name indicates what that thing means; shutters are not necessarily for shutting. he goes on further to argue that we treat words like accessories. we do them shame by spurting them out without thought; do them harm by mixing them improperly and breaking ribbons of speech “like ribbons of water.” but “dialect is the truest gift,” it allows the true self to speak for itself (if we allow it) similarly to trees. trees cannot lie about their own stories or tell it in a way that is not truthful because trees grow in rings – they cannot hide any part of themselves because to do so would inhibit growth. people are the same way.

a sentence in this poem reminds me of ideas from waldrep’s “battery o’rorke;” there is a clear reference to the idea that a person cannot be effective or cause change if they are not in movement, if they do not grow. here waldrep remembers, “There was a time I could not hear / because my ears were stopped with pure honey. / I was standing still.” waldrep then asks when thieves will stop trying to steal our words from us. we color our lives with language, yet he suggests that imitators with wicked intentions might twist our proverbs into jokes. it is then that waldrep proposes his own potential solution to such a dilemma – “Carefully I copy the image / of empire’s currency, / abstraction of the leader, abstraction from the mode: / thus sex as artifact.” this seems like the idea of fighting fire with fire (minus the actual fighting, of course). if his words are to be stolen from him and mistreated, then he will plagiarize images that are of value to whatever larger, more corporate body he sees as being damaging to his craft (*sidenote: i think it’s really interesting that in philosophy, a “mode” is considered to be one of the nonessential qualifications of God). thus, he says, something as God-given as sex is “plagiarized” and the credit of its invention is given to humankind instead; mass-produced and inexpensive.

waldrep goes on to encourage an individual named “lilith,” assuring her that he has “not let anyone in.” i assume that this is in effort to reassure another person – a writer, perhaps? – that he has not taken risks that would endanger the words they write. “If,” he says, “I refuse to remove my hand from the guiding thread,” it is only because he has not chosen to devote himself to “foreskin, shent villa, / sweet crystal psalm.” to shent is to destroy, scold or put to shame; villas are often seen as rather pretentious dwelling places. the crystal psalm he mentions could symbolize purity, innocence, or virginity – considering his just having mentioned sex, i find that tremendously interesting. he will not accept words that have been twisted or wrung by the wrong hands – he will not accept “pledging allegiance” to a hypocritical use of language.