‘Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
Language fails us every day, as human experience is absurdly too complex for any system of sounds and signifiers. But language gets pretty close most of the time. And sometimes the failure of language is itself a means to better represent the scale of our realities. This all may seem a little too heady, and you’re probably right. But these are the thoughts I’m left with after reading Kathy Fish’s ‘Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild.’
This a poem about language, and it’s a poem that ends with a surprise of sorts. Sometimes a surprise is a surprise not because it introduces us to something new, but because it reveals something we’ve known. Perhaps subconsciously. And so the surprise is inward; it’s less about seeing the world anew than it is about realizing what’s already been/being stored within your memory and your body. And this is all tied to language, somehow—through the mastery of Fish’s poem, grief and anger find another angle, somehow.