Contributor Series 6: A Currency of Words
Words
By Hugh Fox
Remembering back to obsessive Fox back
when I was in high school, everyone else
out base- and footballing it, me at home
in my cubbyhole bedroom in our apartment
on the far South Side (Chatham) in Chicago,
reading all of Aldous Huxley’s and James Joyce’s
fiction, St. Augustine’s Confessions, Jorge Luis
Borges (in Spanish) … when I’d find a word I didn’t
know, keeping notebooks, writing them down, then
dictionarying them, let’s try Hemingway and T.S.
Eliot, Ezra Pound … brain-notebook … writing sixty
years later, going into my usual word-trances and
here they come again … where did THAT come from,
or, or, or … memory gone for everything else, but
the word garden somehow still in bloom.
Hugh Fox’s poem News (July 2010) is his most recent appearance at vox poetica.
Hugh, This poem is interesting for many reasons, not the least of which is the manner in which you’ve verbed nouns–I love that–and the full circle of writing then, and now and how your word garden continues to bloom.
Thank you for this fascinating poem.
I can relate to this. Love the last two lines.
I agree with Jean and Bobbie and I love the word “dictionarying”!