Barely over two weeks old, be the first to read about Aaron Kunin's The Sore Throat and Other Poems from FENCE Books.English is one tricky language when it comes to sound and meaning. Poetry often profits by punning on twists of sound or taking it a step further and working with euphemisms and connotations. These techniques in literature can be as humorous as they are insightful; Aaron Kunin is sure of that.
His new book, The Sore Throat and Other Poems, fits right in this tract of linguistic pliability, but rather than simply punning or riffing or vamping as earlier beat style or jazz poets have, Kunin has taken to entirely reestablishing word usage by limiting this entire book to 200 different words or less. This has the potential to be repetitive in a book of poetry that is over 100 pages long, but Kunin has presented an effective form for handling the nuances of words, the implications of language as well as a tryst of poetic meditation, and genuine perception of human reality.
The real eye catcher of Kunin's book is his deliberately limited vocabulary. Referring to an approach which resembles "automatic writing," Kunin determined a basic subconscious vocabulary of under 200 words and set out from there to provide new "translation" of the poem "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" by Ezra Pound and the play Pellas et Melisande by Maurice Maeterlinck. It is not necessary to be familiar with either work to absorb the feel of Sore Throat as Kunin brings to it a style that is definitively his.
Beginning with the poem "A Word With You," Kunin lays the foundation of his work. He writes "The word is a fact, after all; / We can be sure of that / [...] the fact / of your narrow throat, ah! / Remember that your talking habits / Change the word, and change who you are," stating that, while we are dependent on language to communicate, language is also dependent on us to have value. The relationship between language and us is symbiotic in that we use it to change perceptions, and that it changes ours. Kunin employs this book is to explore the relationship of words to their expressions. These lines from the same poem indicate the importance of humanity and feeling to language: "My god! How the machine can gasp, / Sob, sigh, and weep. / And yet, it is not like us," Presses; typewriters; computers; all these can show words, but cannot express them, cannot feel them or make others feel them the way a human can. For everything they can do, they are still not as subtle or stern with language as we are with each other.
Kunin also works with various line forms that would be a disservice to try and reproduce here, but he portrays verbal dialectic interestingly with stanza breaks and word placements in some poems. Some of his poems actually look like a verbal dialog on the page. Above all, his insights to language, its flexibility and applications are what Kunin conveys most effectively through this book. There is not just a portrait of the confines of our language but also the confines of our minds, our interests and our deepest feelings and how all of these fight and struggle with each other to get out just who we are. This fight of words is undoubtedly the "sore throat" Kunin uses, referring to all the agitation that comes from such interwoven complications. One of his most poignant insights is also one of his most fantastic uses of his limited vocabulary from the series "The Sore Throat" he writes "I'm inventing a machine / for concealing my desire. / And I'm inventing another / machine for concealing the / machine. It's a two-machine / system, and it sounded like / laughter. And I'm inventing / a machine for concealing / the sound." Here Kunin expresses the limitation of language and the confines of humanity, we want so much, but at the same time we try to hide are wants, while trying to look like we are not hiding anything, and through it all we have no sound, no language but laughter, and even that becomes an enemy.
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