Poem-A-Day: Reduction by Page Starzinger

Reduction   by Page Starzinger     Vestigial leavinges and fragmentes. These. However: whole--           like us a piecing together;                                                                Recovered --or a kind of gluing, like dinosaurs from Hell Creek Formation, with soft tissue and blood vessels inside           femurs.   Recursive is not the point, not even Chomsky's theory--embedding entities  within like entities--a tree structure.  Because the most powerful ancient   Amazon cultures, who resist change, have no stories for what came before. There, prosody--present tense: woman winding raw cotton, child at her feet, singing   a series of notes, like a muted horn (what sounds).           What   is not enough about this? Could we fall prey   to transcendence, and reduce, to a point that is fugitive; you are at the tip   of my tongue, then not. Just like a leaf drifting out of the picture. It's called   xibipio-- not simply gone, but out of experience. Of Christ they ask: Have you met           him?       Copyright © 2013 by Page Starzinger. Used with permission of the author.   About This Poem "I was inspired by an Amazonian tribe, the Pirahã, whose language is only of observable experience, and who speak in a kind of prosody, with variations of pitch, stress and rhythm. There are no fixed words for colors; instead they use descriptive phrases that change from one moment to the other. If someone walks around a bend in the river they are xibipio--gone out of experience. Their non-recursive language challenges the established linguistic theories on what is considered uniquely human, and I love that."    --Page Starzinger Most Recent Book by Starzinger Vestigial (Barrow Street Press, 2013)   August 13, 2013 Page Starzinger's debut collection of poetry is Vestigial (Barrow Street Press, 2013). Starzinger lives in New York City, where she works as Creative Director for Copy at Aveda. Related Poems Yes by Denise Duhamel Unfollowed Figment by Lyn Hejinian I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone by Rainer Maria Rilke Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the  Poem-A-Day Archive.     Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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