ENL 164: "Angels in angles and other observations." Response to Crystallography by C. Bok.

I just want to talk about a few interesting passages that caught my eye while reading these poems.

First, the dedication at the beginning of the book caught my eye. There is a simple ninety degree angle drawn out with a line, and inside that angle it reads: "for the angel in the angle." It reminded me of several things, immediately of people who misspell the word "angel" with its geometric rearrangement. After my initial reaction, I thought about what he could have meant by rearranging the letters this way. I realized that there is an 'angel' in 'angle,' that is discovered by a simple rearrangement of letters. It made me feel a little silly for criticizing people for their innocent misspellings, and also put me in a right frame of mind for what was to come.

The next passage that caught my eye was on page 12:

A crystal is nothing more

than a breeze blowing sand

into the form of a castle

or a film played backwards

of a window being smashed.

It immediately reminded me of our discussion in class on Thursday about Bergvall's poem. I had written about liquids as a comparison for her poem, and the "trickling" of the letters on the page to form words by accident. Bok's description of a crystal is opposite of that observation: the accident is so elaborate and obvious it seems hardly an accident at all. A "film played backwards" implies that this is an event that has been staged, and planned to formation, and yet the description of "a breeze blowing sand" seems to undermine that very idea. It is also violent, with the "window being smashed" but also regal in "the form of a castle." It is complicated, these crystals, and it is an interesting comparison to be made just in one very short passage.

The final passage I will discuss is on page 53:

amethyst teeth grow into the yolk

of a geode, each interior crystal

a rock song of thought, an engram

forgotten inside a stone cranium.

I read an article on memory formation a long time ago, and the word "engram" triggered a memory while reading. Interesting that the term engram is defined in Merriam Webster's online dictionary as "a hypothetical change in neural tissue postulated in order to account for the persistence of memory." How appropriate that this word should evoke such ideas. Returning to the poem, I enjoyed the comparison of an amethyst crystal in a geode to the deep thoughts of a "stone cranium." The implications of a miner digging out those precious memories that were all but forgotten is a beautiful and compelling visual, and even more priceless than jewels are those memories that were once lost. Even the use of the word "yolk" implies an egg, which, when broken, will show the rich interior birthed by the fusion of crystal and rock.