“Because so much of my poetry explores language itself—the ways we shape and are shaped by it—my creative practice often begins with collecting words.
My college mentor, appalled by the etymological dictionary I was using, introduced me to the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots edited by Calvert Watkins, which has been my constant companion ever since. It traces thousands of words from languages across the Western Hemisphere to their shared roots in a prehistoric language, Proto-Indo-European. The word ‘root,’ for instance, comes from wrād-, which means both branch and root. Variant forms of wrād yield the expected rutabaga, radish, and rhizome, but one also finds radical, eradicate, and ramify listed among its derivatives. When I have a kernel of something I want to investigate, I find its entry (or that of an associated term) and copy out any and all relevant material—from definitions, to cognates, to neighboring words. With these seeds scattered across the pages of my journal, I can often coax my hand to continue scribbling (or sowing). Seeing how language carries over from one place and time to another and hearing the way different words take root in the same soil often bears fruit for me, or, to push the metaphor too far, gives me branches on which to graft improbable cultivars (homophones, anagrams, puns, and other tongues). Most of the poems in Pomegranate Eater arose in part from this kind of etymological play, which felt fitting, since they consider the ways we fashion ourselves in language.”
—Amaranth Borsuk, author of Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press, 2016)
Photo credit: Brad Bouse