“Yes”—The Power of a Single Word, by Federico Roncoroni

This charming and thoughtful essay is an excerpt from the Italian writer Federico Roncoroni’s book Words: A Private Dictionary [Parole: Un dizionario privato]. Roncoroni talks about the word “Yes” and how many shades of meaning and emotion even a tiny word can express. Translated and adapted from the Italian by Zack Rogow. Thanks to Sabrina Orefici for bringing this essay to my attention.

Federico Roncoroni (1944–2021)

Yes is such a short word, but so dangerous. It should be used only with the utmost caution. 

It takes just an instant to pronounce the word Yes, but that little word can have disastrous effects.

 

In fact, when it’s not used merely to answer in the affirmative a question that is in itself innocent and innocuous (“Do you like pistachio ice cream?”—“Yes”) or to express assent to a specific proposal of limited scope (“We’re gonna go see that new action movie, you wanna come?”—“Yes”) there is the risk that the word will bind you to a solemn commitment, a promise or a choice with effects that can last a lifetime (“Do you take for your lawfully wedded spouse…”— “Yes”). Everyone knows that answering Yes to such a question has serious consequences, much heavier than being considered a pistachio ice cream lover or spending a bad evening sitting through a boring film in the company of boring friends.

 

The affirmative and binding force of this little word is reinforced by the fact that this one syllable is actually the equivalent of an entire sentence: “Did you buy the newspaper?” “Yes” (I bought the newspaper). So, if you really can’t use its opposite, which is just as short but disengages rather than engages (if you say Yes you’re definitely signing on for something, but if you say No you’re turning in the opposite direction), it’s advisable just to keep quiet and hide behind expressions like “Don’t know,” or “Lemme think about it,” or “We’ll see.”

 

This little word is no less dangerous on the level of significance, rich as it is in shades of meaning depending on your intonation, how you say it, and the pitch you use to release that phoneme, all of which communicate a vast array of sensations and emotions, not always easy to decipher.

 

In actuality, a simple Yes can be, depending on the situation, whispered murmured susurrated meowed stammered barked shouted screamed or muttered under your breath. It can be beseeched requested imposed extorted or demanded. A Yes can be spontaneous sudden impulsive hasty sincere frank blunt cordial false treacherous forced unexpected expected sarcastic providential advantageous or disadvantageous wrong useless absurd too late liberating enthusiastic formal warm festive passionate cold icy humiliating or servile. A Yes can be conclusive decisive determinant and even definitive.

 

It can open up new horizons and perspectives, or it can get you into deep trouble trap and ensnare.

 

Yes can also be used ironically to say that you really have no intention of doing what the other person requested: “Yes…sure, tomorrow,” or “Yes, in your dreams.”

 

When repeated, a Yes can mean forceful agreement, or more often doubt, depending on the tone: “Yes, yes… of course I believe you.”

 

Please avoid substituting for Yes the word Affirmative, which is best left to military personnel, and also avoid saying Absolutely, a highly ambiguous word at best.

 

If you just precede Yes with an article, which is, of all parts of speech the most attentive servant, the word Yes can also function as a noun:

“Was that a Yes?”

“All in favor? The Yeses have it.”

No less a writer than Dante immortalized the Yes as a noun in Canto XXXIII of The Inferno, using it to portray his homeland:

Italy “…that beautiful country where the Yes resounds.”

 

from Parole: Un dizionario privato, copyright 2015 by Federico Roncoroni, Marcello Sensini, and Mondadori Education S.p.A. All rights reserved by the copyright holders.

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Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

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Tribute to Jerome Rothenberg by Michael Palmer

Jerome “Jerry” Rothenberg, poet, translator, performance artist, and anthologist passed away at the age of 92 on April 21, 2024. He wrote ninety books of poetry and essays. Jerry’s groundbreaking anthologies include Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, and Poems for the Millennium. He created the field of ethnopoetics, the study and celebration of non-Western, non-canonical poetries, often coming from ancient and autochthonous cultures. 

Jerome “Jerry” Rothenberg (1931–2024)

At a celebration of Rothenberg’s life and work at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, poet Michael Palmer delivered a beautiful tribute to Jerry that I’m posting here in full:

Well, for Jerry, for Jerry and always for his wife, Diane Brodatz Rothenberg, where do we begin? When asked, Gertrude Stein once famously said, “We begin at the beginning, go on until the end, then stop,” or something close to that. Unfortunately, our limited time does not allow for such an approach, but I’ll try to briefly celebrate Jerry’s meaning to me personally across the years.

 

I remember that it was in the winter of 1963–64 that LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) and I went one evening to the Half Note on Spring Street in New York City to hear John Coltrane and his magnificent quartet during that period that Coltrane was first making his extended explorations on soprano sax. Two long sessions with one break, ending somewhere around 1:30 or 2 in the morning. Coltrane performing solos that went on forever but never too long. In an interview around that time, when asked about these solos, Coltrane said that he was “looking for the door.” It struck me that this was exactly what I was searching for, in an effort to find my way to an alternative life to that which had been proposed for me, a life in the company of poets and like-minded folk, a “new life” maybe such as Dante had once proposed in La Vita Nuova. And now I realize that LeRoi was searching as well, for a life beyond downtown bohemia that the Black Arts Movement would soon help make possible.

 

Which brings me to the many doors that Jerry opened for us in our effort to find a way toward something vital and new, some path not yet taken or even known. Jerry as neo-Dada performer, taking on the persona of Tristan Tzara, or Samy Rosenstock as he had been known before he too took an alternate path. Jerry as translator,  bringing parallel worlds into view, forging a dialogue between self and other, and self as other. Foregrounding cultures heretofore excluded by the usual institutional orthodoxies. Contact and multiple conversations, innovative and esoteric strains of song sounding across time. The project then continuing with his many groundbreaking and visionary anthologies that did no less than reconfigure the cultural map, redraw its vectors, and celebrate a range of poetic accomplishment that was at once atemporal and international, defying boundaries or limits or proscriptions, and erasing the conventional Anglo-American cultural timelines. These works by Jerry served and serve now as guides for those of us interested in erasing borders and eliminating border guards, and in coming to understand a visionary tradition in defiance of the warmongers and culture-mongers and profiteers.

 

And then I cannot help but emphasize the immediate, intense humanity that Jerry and Diane offered in their everyday lives, their generosity in countless matters and their commitment to deep fellow-feeling, what the arts fully committed to will bring to our sense of that company I mention above. A shared Cabaret Voltaire in the various ways we always try to reimagine it, ecstatic singers on the stage, good food and wine shared at table, yet never forgetful of the darker forces pulling us toward division and hatred of the other, that bigotry that never seems to wane throughout history, that war against the universal life of the imagination and creative growth.

 

Countless doors opened, no admission fee.

 

Michael Palmer was born into an Italian-American family in Manhattan in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969. He has taught at numerous universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and has published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian. Palmer has been involved in joint projects with many visual artists and composers in the United States and elsewhere and has also served as an artistic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for close to fifty years. His most recent poetry collection, Little Elegies for Sister Satan, from New Directions, was published in 2021. In 2023, Nightboat Books brought out a new edition of a prose work, The Danish Notebook.

Michael Palmer

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Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

The Influence of Islamic Poetry on Western Poetry

It is so common these days in the West to stigmatize and stereotype the culture of Islam that we don’t often think about the fact that much of what we identify as Western culture was actually borrowed from Muslim peoples. Poetry provides several good examples of this.

We often think of rhymed verse as being characteristic of Western classic poetry. Actually, the opposite is true. Neither ancient Greek nor Roman poetry rhymed. Homer’s Odyssey was chanted to a strummed lyre, but the lines did not end in rhyme. Catullus, Virgil, Horace—none of the classic Roman poets wrote in rhyme.

Rhyme actually came into European verse through the influence of Arabic literature and the Qur’an on medieval Provençal poetry. Almost all of the Qur’an is written in rhymed verse. The oldest Arabic poetic forms, such as the qasiyah and the ghazal, dating from the 7^th century C.E., use rhyme in their structure.

Rhymed Arabic poetic forms were sung and flourished in Spain during the Moorish period that began in the early 700s C.E. These forms influenced poetry in neighboring Provence, where the troubadours created and sang the first lively vernacular literature in Europe. There is more than one scholarly work that documents this legacy, including “The Impact of muwshah and zajal on troubadours poetry” by Ziad Ali Alharthi and Abdulhafeth Ali Khrisat, which claims that even the word “troubadour” derives from Arabic. These authors also maintain that the tradition of courtly love, so central to Provençal and modern Western poetry, came from previous traditions in Hispano-Arabic verse. They show that courtly love was originally a Sufi trope, equating the beloved with the divine. What could be more central to European literature than Dante’s love of Beatrice? And yet that too can be traced back to a Muslim tradition.

The influence of the rhyme schemes of Islamic poetry appears in some of the most unexpected places. What poem is more quintessentially American than Robert Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

Whose woods these are I think I know.  

His house is in the village though;  

He will not see me stopping here  

To watch his woods fill up with snow. 

My little horse must think it queer  

To stop without a farmhouse near  

Between the woods and frozen lake  

The darkest evening of the year.

Do you recognize the AABA BBCB rhyme scheme? It’s not at all a typical pattern for English-language verse. 

Omar Khayyam (1048–1131 C.E.)

This is the rhyming pattern that Omar Khayyam used for his famed Rubaiyat in twelfth-century Persia:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

This rhyme scheme is actually called the “Rubaiyat stanza” because it was most famously used in Khayyam’s poem. So, even in one of our most American poems, you can find the influence of Islamic poetry.

The fact is that all of global culture is as intricately interwoven as Omar Khayyam’s rhyme scheme. Every culture has evolved in dialogue with the others it has known. The world is as interconnected culturally as it is ecologically. To pretend otherwise is to miss the one of the most important points about the arts.  

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1

 

The best way to avoid becoming a literary dropout is to keep writing. As all of us know, that’s easier said than done. There are many elements to keeping the writing flowing. I’ll try to cover several in this series of blogs.

To begin with, I’ll start with factors that relate just to the writing itself, and not to circumstances peripherally connected to, or outside of the writing.

The first suggestion I’d make is to choose projects that you can complete successfully. I had a terrific student several years ago, a guy who had a remarkable facility for spontaneous writing. Our class was studying the surrealist movement at the time. I asked the students to attempt automatic writing as a learning exercise. Automatic writing is a type of writing devised by the surrealist group in Paris in the early 1920s as a way of liberating the subconscious. In automatic writing you don’t edit or look back at what you’ve already written but compose spontaneously, as if dreaming onto the page. It’s a great exercise if you’re suffering from writer’s block or just want to warm up. The student I’m referring to was one of the few I’ve ever encountered who could create a finished piece of work using automatic writing. The whole class was amazed at what he created during that in-class exercise, without editing. If he had lived in Paris in the 1920s, he’d be a legend.

Surrealist group in Paris practices automatic writing

Now, you would think that a person who can compose literature so fluently would have absolutely no trouble finishing a longer work. Poof! You sit down, you write, it’s done. But that wasn’t the case. For his MFA thesis, he attempted to write a sort of modern-day Dante’s Inferno. A worthy project. The task was almost impossible, though, since the way he set it up, not one of the characters interacted with anyone but the narrator. Not only that, but we knew that each story ended with the death of the person recounting it, since all the characters besides the narrator were ghosts. And there was a talking-head aspect to the format that killed almost all of the drama.

You should be extremely ambitious in the projects you pick for yourself as a writer, but don’t choose a project that you can never finish, or that won’t interest many people even if you do finish it. Stretch yourself, be daring in your aesthetic choices, do things that no one has attempted before, but don’t try to climb Mount Denali on rollerskates.

Other recent posts about writing topics:

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer