The 27th Letter

by Mairead Small Staid

Poetry magazine's Editors' Blog occasionally features online exclusives. This installment comes from Mairead Small Staid. Past exclusives can be found here.

In the alphabet recited by nineteenth-century schoolchildren, it followed Z. And per se and, they would say, and per se and. A logogram masquerading as a letter, a letter that is also a word--like a and I and even o, but no--a letter that is only a word, the plainest word of all. A word we could do without, to be honest, if we had to. We don't have to, and thank the language gods for that.

&

"This isn't the whole story," wrote Larry Levis in "In the City of Light." "The fact is, I was still in love. / My father died, & I was still in love." There it is, that Levisian ampersand, if I can coin a term to mean curled like the vines he plucked grapes from in the San Joaquin Valley of his youth, tractor-wrought under the dusty sun. Soft as the spilled eyes of horses, while the words on either side kick like hooves. Two loops inseparable and yet trying to be closer still, trying to enter each other like lovers, trying to draw all around them into their maw, a black hole, gasping and cosmic. Two loops like the "handcuffs that join / Each wrist in something that is not prayer, although / It is as urgent."

Read the full essay on the Poetry Foundation website.