Fran Magazine: Issue #61
An interview with poet and friend Walter Ancarrow
You’re reading Fran Magazine, the FOREMOST Substack for hanging out, talking culture, and this month, reading Middlemarch. Today’s issue of Fran Magazine is an INTERVIEW with an AUTHOR about A NEW BOOK, and it is free for everyone — subscriber or not — to read.
Talking Etymologies and etymology with Walter Ancarrow
I met Walter Ancarrow on a too-sunny day in the fall of 2019, my second year of grad school and his first. He cut an intimidating figure: stylish, soft-spoken, quick-witted. I admired his intellect and humor long before I ever read one of his poems, but the first time I saw Walter read at a school event, it was clear to me how brilliant and engaging his work is. This spring, Walter’s first book Etymologies was released by Omnidawn and distributed by University of Chicago Press. The book is wonderful, clever, moving, and often wry. For months leading up to the book’s release, I have been begging Walter to let me interview him for the magazine, to share what I love about his work to the Fran Magazine readership. Here is that interview!
Fran Magazine
Hi Walter!
Walter
Hey.
Fran Magazine
Where did Etymologies begin?
Walter
What a question for a book about the impossibility of beginnings.
Fran Magazine
Okay, sorry!!!!!!
Walter
The first poem in the book is the first I wrote for the book, around 2015 or so during my stack-similar-looking-words-on-top-of-each-other phase, which I think was a great phase (see also). There was no notion of book. I merely liked the way the words looked together:
Much later, towards the end of 2019, I was looking through my notes and found the poem. This time what had always been there became obvious: the poem was telling a story. But it was not telling a story through the meanings of the words—they all just refer to an avocado—but through how the languages the words come from relate to each other: Nahuatl to Spanish to English. What’s important is that this relation is not fixed to the language itself. What might be considered a language of colonialism in one context is a language vilified in another.
This raises all sorts of doubts about etymology—“study of truth” in Greek—and its ability to tell us anything, since so much of what informs meaning comes extralinguistically, from the relationality of language and its speakers, and not from a tracing of language back to an imagined beginning.
Fran Magazine
That your work is narrative, but not in a conventional sense — there’s little “and then, and then” or whatever — is something I really admire about your writing. When you’re writing and editing, how are you avoiding overstating what you want to show?
Walter
A huge influence on me has always been the soundtrack to Donkey Kong Country 2. For real. I guess because of technology at the time, the music relied on a limited sonic palette. Yet it evokes such expansive worlds: rainbows and sunken ruins, forests full of parrots, secret paths hidden behind fern-fronds.
I suppose that if you are going to write as little as possible and then less, what you write should be as lush as you can make it. Every line a terrarium. That’s what I learned from Donkey Kong.
Fran Magazine
Do you identify as a gamer?
Walter
No! But that game is so creative and so is its soundtrack.
Fran Magazine
Do you think the limitations of the time period and technology bolster that creativity? I don’t mean for this to become a Donkey Kong Country 2 interview; I’m just curious about the ways in which limitations provide opportunity in your own work as well.
Walter
I haven’t played in years. But yes. Always. A big challenge when writing Etymologies was writing around the constraint that gives the book its special quality—that every poem is based on an etymology. I tried to approach this differently each time, so that reading it is like reading a dictionary when you are a kid. Every entry is new and surprising and an adventure.
Fran Magazine
Are you reading other poets when you’re writing? What are you reading to guide this process?
Walter
I was reading a lot of nonfiction. My academic background is in linguistics, and I try to keep up with at least some of what is happening. John Yau wrote an amazing introduction to my book and he mentions Plato’s Cratylus. It just so happened that actually I was reading the Cratylus while writing the book.
In the middle of the Cratylus is a long and tedious section about etymology, although Plato never uses the term. Socrates asks: how, if we deem the truth or correctness of words to be based on how closely they relate to the words that come before them, do we determine the correctness of these earliest words, which would have no precursor?
His answer is what seems anterior to words: sound. Or linguistically, phonemes. Words are sounds put together. They come from inside us. They are our inner monologue, thought itself. They seem to be originary.
Maybe this is what Derrida is going on and on about in those wonderful early books of his. He notes that if language is a system of signs, at least in the Saussurean model, then part of it is always missing—a sign’s meaning comes from pointing to what it is not, and this thing it is not is also a sign, and so on. A phoneme is a sign. The seemingly foundational aspect of the phoneme is actually one of absence waiting to be filled, and so too is our inner mental space onto which we graft our sound-thought.
So I considered how we fill this absence foundational to language. We fill it with what comes outside language: identity of speaker, identity of the spoken to, gesture, tone, environment, and all the highly subjective connotations we bring to a language, informed by memory, and which we might associate with business, religion, family, love.
Or less philosophically, the furthest back we can track most English words is Proto-Indo-European. We know nothing about the language families before this, sometimes called Nostratic. Any claim to origin is an arbitrary stopping point.
Etymologies has a lot of fun with these ideas, but I think they are unpopular with poets, who like to believe that words and languages have essential properties.
Fran Magazine
Is there a pattern to your word choices? There’s a lot of food, for instance.
Walter
There’s a lot of food because food words are the first to come to us from other languages and from far away. This is also the history of commodity exchange.
But mostly I chose words randomly as I flipped through an etymological dictionary. When I had a bunch of poems written I thought about order. One thing that has been mentioned by every reviewer is the puzzle-like quality of the book. I like this because it speaks to the quasi-structuralist feel that I wanted in a book so influenced by linguistics. As in: if you think about how the poems relate to each other, some underlying form might suggest itself—or maybe it’s not there at all. Maybe it’s an illusion.
Accidents happened. I placed the etymology of onion next to bagel because then I’d have an onion bagel. Then I realized that they are topological opposites. A bagel has no center while an onion is all center. A lot of my writing is fooling around until something serious occurs.
Fran Magazine
On the topic of fooling around, I’m curious about how you deploy humor in your writing. Your poems aren’t jokes themselves, though they are often full of wordplay or punchlines.
Walter
With humor comes wonderment. I try to bring a lightness to everything I write. Rigo pointed out that even a poem like bagel, about such an innocuous object, becomes a point of conflict where cultures meet. The poems here deal with subjects that are too close to me: distance, migration, home. They are so heavy I can only speak of them lightly.
Fran Magazine
There are also puns throughout. Puns often summon to mind bad crossword puzzle clues. What do you like about puns?
Walter
They are an economical use of space. You can fold multiple meanings into one word and jolt the reader out of the complacencies of English. They don’t need to be comical; most of the ones in Etymologies aren’t. But maybe my favorites are.
Puns are also the start of our earliest writing systems because these writing systems emerged out of the rebus principle, which is a type of pun. Whoever made the first pun opened for all of us the book of the world.
Fran Magazine
Which poem came easiest, most naturally to you?
Walter
The easiest was the etymology of Allah. I was sitting in the Husayn Mosque in Cairo, where in legend Husayn’s head is buried, and thinking about the empty architectural space above me and how it relates to space in text and to the word Allah itself. The poem came to me fully formed. Actually, that mosque is rather low-ceilinged, but a few months prior I had spent a lot of time in the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque in downtown Beirut, which does place a lot of empty space above you. I guess it was a mix of memory and experience.
The poem has rich implications in English but there is added meaning in Arabic because of the special way Allah is written. Were you to write Allah like any other Arabic word, there would be a space between the letter aleph and the letter ha. But there isn’t. The word is written like a glyph in which what is normally kept apart comes together. These various ideas of space (and therefore closeness) united subconsciously.
I like how the poem can be interpreted in opposing ways.
Fran Magazine
Are there right and wrong ways to read poems?
Walter
Probably not. But no one has to pay any attention to your interpretation if it is not linked to something in the text.
Fran Magazine
OK, true. I wanna go back to your etymological dictionary. I’m curious if, when you flip through, there are words that inspire… nothing, that feel un-poetic by nature.
Walter
Yes. Most of them. At least at the time. Maybe I would feel differently now. There were a lot of deadends: words that I thought would lead somewhere but didn’t. There are no adjectives except for urbane. Nouns are poetic. Adjectives are not.
Fran Magazine
Do you know about this TikTok meme where people come up with words that would make good baby names if they were divorced from their definition? I was recently eavesdropping on a girl pitching her two friends on the names “Almond” and “Cemetery.” Where do you land on those?
Walter
They are nice but not as nice as Sciatica.
Fran Magazine
Are portmanteaus beautiful or cheap?
Walter
Often cheap. But when well-designed they hold more than their outward appearance suggests.
Fran Magazine
What is your favorite letter across any alphabet?
Walter
Such a great question. If I may give a favorite alphabetic script, because I don’t know the names of the actual letters—and I think the script is a syllabary anyway—then I choose Hanuno’o, native to Mindoro Island in the Philippines, because of how it looks and its materiality. The letters take their shape from having been originally incised in bamboo. They are squiggles and for some reason remind me of ants.
Traditionally the script was used only to write love songs. Imagine: a bamboo forest and on each stalk a love song. I think that’s what I mean by humor and wonderment.
Fran Magazine
What are you working on now?
Walter
I have many ideas for books and fewer ideas of which to write next. One thing I have been working on forever—actually, I thought it would be my first book until Etymologies surprised me—is a series of alphabet poems that use only a single letter. So the poem for M uses just the letter M in various ways, and so on. It seems impossible but it isn’t. I just have to use my imagination.
These alphabet poems have been rejected everywhere I’ve sent them, so I know they are very good and truly me.
Walter Ancarrow’s Etymologies is for sale from University of Chicago Press.
Donkey Country 2!!!!! Soundtrack is so good i should replay it. Those were my favorite games back in the day. Great interview fran!
This was so good; it felt like FranForum!!