Still Glides the Stream (2013)

Still Glides the Stream is a distillation and examination of William Wordsworth’s ‘Duddon’ Sonnets, plumbing their depths for the presence of ancient ‘water-words’ in the Celtic and Germanic language families:

á [old norse] river
an [goidelic celtic] water
ar [goidelic celtic] water
ar [brittonic celtic] an ancient river-name element
as [goidelic celtic] cataract, waterfall
àth [goidelic celtic] ford
eá [anglo-saxon] river
ea [cumberland dialect] gap, outlet; found in river names
eas [goidelic celtic] cataract, waterfall, cascade
ey [cumberland dialect] island or river-side ground
òs [goidelic celtic] mouth of a river
óss [old norse] mouth or outlet of a river or lake

The ‘new’ poem can be thought of as a series of eddies within a river’s main stream. The first part collates all 33 original sonnets into a single text and erases each occurrence of a water-word. These gaps in the text, which in many cases renders it meaningless, enact the process of language loss — the poem appears to decay before our eyes. Language, like a river, is fluid, ever changing, and ‘meaning’ itself is uncertain; it cannot be guaranteed in perpetuity.

The second part of the new poem is a negative image of the first, reclaiming the lost water-words and presenting them extant. In so doing, it re-imagines Wordsworth’s text as a landscape through which the river Duddon itself flows — eroding the softer sediment to reveal fragments of older, obdurate material.

Still Glides the Stream is collected in Limnology.

[Limnology at Corbel Stone Press]