A special episode of Burning Bright, featuring an interview with 2024 Henry Morgenthau III Prize Winner Winifred Hughes.
11 minutes
TRANSCRIPT
“I have always been fascinated by language. My medium isn’t paint; it isn’t musical notes; it isn’t stone for a sculpture. It’s words!”
That was poet Winifred Hughes. Winnie’s book The Village of New Ghosts won the 2024 Henry Morgenthau III Poetry Prize. On this longer-than-usual episode of Burning Bright, we’ll listen to excerpts of Passager’s interview with Winnie—and a couple of her poems, too.
One of the things that fascinates Winnie is language.
“Language is a completely arbitrary thing. Spelling is a completely arbitrary thing. There’s nothing intrinsic that makes d-o-g “dog.” It’s solidified by history and usage. But it’s all just made up.”
The arbitrariness of language. Of course, we ALL know that on some level. But for Winnie, that concept isn’t just an intellectual fact; it’s very real.
“You realize that when you have a dyslexic kid. It’s like why does this mean this? and you’re right, this doesn’t make any sense to somebody who doesn’t process language the way most people do.”
And when she wrote a poem about it, she wanted the reader to understand that difficulty of processing language not just on an intellectual level, but on a more visceral level, as well.
“I said, ‘I want a little bit of the confusion and unease that a dyslexic person has.’ I want a little bit of that in the reader of this poem.”
Here’s Winifred Hughes’s poem “Dyslexic.”
Eye won’t track
the pencil in the doctor’s
hand or on the spread page.
Look where d is tumbling into p,
f and g bait each other
with barbed hooks, look
what means the same
right to left, slantwise, upside
down. How did sounds get
flattened, round world into
black scratches, jugglers’
dropped oranges and apples
still spinning on the blank
sheet, all the pith
pounded out of them,
eye stammering for something
real to look at, hand no
thing to grip. Words dance.
Sith this pot is top, but may
be tub. Toom is moot.
We might not die as
palindrome. So call it
spelling, cast that spell
on the misspoken
ones, some of us born
that way, some
headed there.
“That poem is about all the tricks that language plays: spelling and trying to, y’know, what’s the difference between a d and a b!”
“Dyslexic,” Winifred Hughes from her book The Village of New Ghosts.
At some point, it occurred to Winnie that maybe poets and dyslexics aren’t that far apart.
“The left brain for most people is logic, language, all that. The right brain is poetry, language association, emotion. And most reading and language is processed on the right side of the brain if you have dyslexia. So that makes it very different. And in a way, poets have to be a little bit dyslexic because one of the most important things in poetry is that you just don’t use words the same way that you use words in ordinary life. You don’t take words at face value in poetry. Your whole approach to words and the action of words is very different. And so you do have to be a little bit dyslexic; you do have to look at things, not take things as a given as received . Look at the set of holes in language, opportunities for it to do something different or slip around. Look at ways that language can go beyond itself, somehow say what wasn’t said or what was unsayable; it somehow suggests more than it denotes. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but I do feel as though writers need to be a little bit dyslexic.”
Winnie also talked about her writing process, how she finds that balance that all artists strive for between subject, craft, and emotion.
“Usually for me, a line or a couple lines will come into my head, and that brings with it a rhythm; it brings kind of like a take on the material. That’s often what happens. It has to be on some kind of verbal or rhythmic level. I will sometimes think, ‘Well, I should write a poem about dyslexia,’ but it doesn’t happen until some kind of line comes that tells me what form it’s going to take. Sometimes, I just feel some kind of rhythm, and I’m not sure what it’s about. But then again, you need the feeling. Sometimes you start with the feeling and you need to find the rhythm. But usually for me, a poem starts when enough of it comes together, when I have a line or a phrase or some kind of rhythmic beginning, even if it’s just a few words that I like together and I go from there. And often, I have no idea where I’m going to go; usually, the best poems, you sort of know where you are, but you don’t know where you’re going to get.
As I said at the beginning of this episode, Passager recently published Winnie’s book The Village of New Ghosts. In her interview, she talked about the book’s title poem.
“’The village of new ghosts’ is a phrase in a poem by the T’ang poet Meng Chiao called ‘Mourning Lu Yin,’ and I found this quite moving, that people who died recently wouldn’t be used to not being alive; there’s a special place in some Chinese tradition for people who have just died. His friend had just died, and he said, ‘Now you’re in the village of new ghosts.’ So I just went with that in my own imagination, how I thought about it. And it sort of works both ways: if the person who died is a new ghost, the person who survived also has new ghosts.”
“For me, this book is really about time and the passage of time and what the heck is time, anyway? And how do we feel it and experience it as temporal and temporary creatures, which we are? I feel that time leaves these blurry ghosts. My backyard ends at a little stream called Harry’s Brook. And I’ve always felt like this brook, as it was passing, was taking time with it. And in that poem called ‘In the Village of New Ghosts,’ there is this kind of weird double time of reliving memories of the past, but being superimposed on it is some kind of new thing that you don’t even know what it is.”
Here’s “In the Village of New Ghosts,” the title attributed to Chinese poet Meng Chiao.
Have you lost your way there, so new
and unfamiliar without me?
Does it have streets and houses?
Are there streetlights or is light forbidden?
Are you lonely or is it overcrowded?
Is it strange to you as this place
is to me—the lanes we walked together
not really noticing how narrow they were,
how they blurred into a maze,
or how many doors there were to open
with nothing behind them,
buildings with nothing inside.
I walk them now in a sort of daze, astonished
to discover the present amid the past,
seasons blurring into one long seasonless tunnel,
twilight indistinct, though nothing much has changed.
Sometimes I feel superimposed on someplace else, exactly the same.
Sometimes I hear footsteps, hesitant as mine.
Will you follow at whatever distance
if I don’t look back?
Winifred Hughes’s poem “In the Village of New Ghosts.”
We’ve been listening to excerpts from Ruby Taylor’s interview with Passager author Winifred Hughes. We’ll listen to more of that interview another time. To buy Winnie’s book The Village of New Ghosts, subscribe to or learn more about Passager and its commitment to writers over 50, go to passagerbooks.com. You can download Burning Bright from Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts, and various other podcast apps. Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.
Special thanks to Passager’s Middlebury College intern Ruby Taylor for interviewing Winnie.
For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.
