Poetry Friday: ¡Viva la inesperada!

Inspiration lurks in unexpected places. A single red leaf in a forest of green. A bit of tamarind sharpness in the middle of a sugary sweet. I recall the Yoruban chicken poem M.T. Anderson discovered while doing the painful and often depressing research for Octavian Nothing — an unexpected little something that made him smile. I imagine that same smile was present when translators found the riddles in The Exeter Book.

For those of you who think Exeter is a place near Irvine (and it is!) The Exeter Book has nothing to do with L.A., but is a 10th century codex of Old English poetry. Copied in about the year 975 and gifted to the Exeter Cathedral by its first bishop, it’s a book that was closely guarded and carefully kept, so that most of it survives to this day. It’s considered a “large” manuscript at 123 pages.

Imagine the whole Benedictine monk thing — tonsures, hair shirts, the works — and …poetry? Okay, yeah. Religious poetry. But, riddles? …Why?

Books were rare in the tenth century — a whole city’s “library” could be bound up in a single collection of illuminated pages, bound together between thin leaves of birch (which in German apparently is very close to the English word “book,” thus the name). Obviously the people of great learning had them — monks — and people of great wealth owned and shared them — the bishops, and the works included were meant to be representative of the people. It’s balanced, when you think of it that way. A little religious instruction, and then a bit of riddling, to keep the mind sharp.

See if you can solve this one:

A moth, I thought, munching a word.
How marvellously weird! a worm
Digesting a man’s sayings –
A sneakthief nibbling in the shadows
At the shape of a poet’s thunderous phrases –
How unutterably strange!
And the pilfering parasite none the wiser
For the words he has swallowed.

They didn’t write really deep riddles back then… you know the answer!

Happy Poetry Friday! poet and author, Laura Purdie Salas, whose birthday was yesterday, is hosting other little gems of poetic inspiration this week. And for the deliciously unexpected, don’t miss Denise Doyen at 7 Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Happy Autumn.