Daughter of the Ring of Fire » Blog Archive » One Poem Review: The letter i by Judith Copithorne

Jul

2009

One Poem Review: The letter i by Judith Copithorne

Posted on 17:14, July 4th, 2009 by EKSwitaj

Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

Of Judith Copithorne’s visual poems currently online at ditch, “The letter i” (at the bottom of the page) is my favorite. Viewed from a distance, it gives the impression of a millipede twisted and tangled up with itself. The letter i with its connotations of self and ego makes the perfect building block for such a creature: this is what the ego does, or the many egos that make up society do, to us.

That interpretation cannot be complete, however, as it does not take account of the use of lower case. Making the letter small suggests that minimizing—whether that means actually reducing or merely reducing the appearance of—the ego, rather than eliminating it, does not alter the way it functions. Specifically (and to get meta), the habit of using i instead of I does not fundamentally alter the function of the first person pronoun in poetry. I would even go so far as to argue that lowercase i because of its relative rarity can draw more attention to itself: trying to reduce or eliminate the ego or the role it plays is itself entangling.

A closer look shows that Copithorne’s i millipede is not whole. Gaps are created where the characters fall into each other. This is another sort of violence the ego does to itself or to other egos, what it drives us to do to each other. This is the incompleteness of the world of human society and of the ego itself. Tess Callahan writes:

The more ductile our outer surface, or ego, the more seamlessly we can flow with the subterranean shifts in our awareness and understanding. Poetry is one conduit. The poet accesses the deep, unseen currents and invites the reader to follow. Nature is another portal, as are music and art. But if our ego is too stiff and rigid, like the dense rock surface of the San Andreas Fault, we cannot make the tiny, ongoing adjustments to our own inward movement. The ego and the soul become disjointed, causing pressure to mount until the correction comes in one cataclysmic jolt.

These jolts leave cracks like the gaps in Copithorne’s i-chain, but it is these very gaps that lead to later flexibility, a loss of self that isn’t a loss, another twist in the twisty story of ego and self.