Jordan Scott

Language means things, but no language is only its meanings: any word, said aloud, has a sound, and every phrase is also, in physicists' terms, a set of waves moving through air, produced by tongue, pharynx, larynx, lungs, etc., as they act on the mix of gases we inhale or exhale. Since (at least) the heyday of Gertrude Stein, some poets have tried to focus on speech as physical event, on how brains make tongues create not meanings but sounds. These poets do not just complicate, but nearly sever, links between sound ('t' + 'r' + 'ee') and meaning (what happens when you think of a tree).

Try saying this 'lip off' three times fast: 'fresh nugs / mouse milking / NASCAR // wrist flex / snorkel mosh / dental furrow / ease Pantene.' These are lines taken from blert, Jordan Scott's first book of poetry. Scott, a Calgarian and lifelong stutterer, wrote the book as a 'spelunk into the mouth of a stutterer.' It is a text designed to be a stutterer's nightmare verse.

Canada's Jordan Scott does peculiar and funny things to language as well. Scott's poems and prose in Blert were, according to him, written to be as difficult as possible to read aloud. If you're expecting million-dollar-word workouts, note that Scott has dealt with a stutter since childhood so, for the author, a word as benign as 'mayonnaise' takes on a Herculean scale.

In blert, Jordan Scott gives us a kind of poetic abstraction of a completely different order than Karen Houle's (During). If abstraction is a disengagement from the familiar, then Houle's disengagement relies on the peculiarity of her syntax, so that we must ask ourselves what a word means given its position in a verse.

The ‘dribble of spit trapezes’

Jordan Scott’s grand, tongue-tied blert

by Derek Beaulieu

Jordan Scott's blert is a poetic engagement with the physicality of the author's own stutter, where 'every vowel and consonant must be traversed, claimed, made audible by non-stop bodily action.' Blert

moves from language's shorelines to the poundi