Since lockdown and now its loosening at the end of May, the governors declaring for good or ill their phases for opening stores and restaurants a sliver then halfsies then full-faced as the moon, I've been dreaming madly. Not just that, but the dreams come strangely, rarely sweetly, mostly horribly. Also deeply deeply deeply is how I sleep these nights. Note the big LY trailing behind so many words in these last two sentences, doing its job to connote and drum up meaning via a sideways glance.
To calm myself, I've looked into the adverb as institution, not mere linguistic flourish. This curious part of speech is defined in my Catholic grade school's Voyages in English as if we were on murky waters, staring up at dim stars, while any adverb worth its verb drives our boat of dreams, and fine-tunes. Whoever the author-guardians explaining away those voyages were, they got emphatic about one thing: adverbs answer questions. Of time –"when, how often?" (again, before, earlier, soon, now). Or "place" (above, away, below, down, overhead). Then "degree" comes into it, "how much or how little" (almost, quite, rather, very).
Most dramatically a world is nuanced by that polite but bullying ly tacked on as an ending syllable. "Adverbs of manner," my old textbook calls them in its "CLASSIFICATION OF ADVERBS" (easily, fervently, quickly, thoroughly). All happy states of being, more or less. But how about suspiciously, gruesomely, unbelievably, hopelessly? Or broken-heartedly? Who knew a book about the wiles and ways of English published in 1951 (and still hauled out when I hit 8th grade, 11 years later) would be all about dodging the full fate of young learners? And maybe that's good to do, upbeat as hope because it is hope. After all, the planet does keep spinning—to invoke a popular soap opera of the era, As the World Turns, loved by my mother who liked to watch it over a lunch of canned peaches and cottage cheese.
I think I must be thinking about poetry all the time now, given my mulling over such things through our day after day of rising then falling then rising death counts from Covid, an endless Ritual of the Unnerved to note those numbers. Meanwhile I keep dreaming, all this woven into and playing out in the wee hours of my unconscious to make terrible dreams. A friend, a writer in New York emails me that she should be writing but isn't. Two others admit that on Zoom. Another writes he cannot face poetry, his or anyone else's really. Take heart, I want to tell them—I don't know—something like: We have the rest of our lives, right?
No, not right. And never as easy as cliché would have it, to soothe despair.
Nevertheless, the little workaholic adverb is still at it framed and semi-fossilized in its full chapter (pages 348-58) in my Voyages in English, fifteen well-meaning numbered examples displaying its chops. The nuns said what mattered was usage, habit and its matter-of-fact how a crucial part of understanding anything, like a bicycle chain engaged, right foot down, then the left, to make that spare brilliant machine run and get you someplace. It's as common as sense could be, the adverb's shade and tweaking to charge even the fuzzy past and future into an edged right now:
2. Breathlessly she pushed the curtains aside.
3. This task will be rather difficult.
I walk into Kroger in a mad-dash hunting/gathering attempt—my turn this week to go out masked, with shopping list, suddenly uber-organized, no lollygagging, and trying to obey the arrows on the floor: up past flour and yeast, down past crackers and cocoa, shot like a shiny marble in a human-size pinball machine. My grand feat for the day. My poem for the day.
Decades ago, in college, I lived in a tiny upstairs room in a ramshackle house I shared with friends, a few I still know. My window looked down to the street. Once, I noticed a housemate talking to someone out there, nothing special until their gestures shifted unaccountably—cartoonish, impossible jerking angles of elbow and head and hand notched up, past full speed, gone haywire. That was when I realized in the dream itself that I was dreaming what I saw in the street, that this was still a nap, that I was only dreaming I was awake. Which shocked me. I tried to come to, for real. And could not. Tried again. Again. And got scared, then terrified: my god, would I never? Never again this life I sort of loved and sort of didn't? In weird moments like now, I wonder if any of that was my trapdoor into poetry. (Just open, and fall through.) The fact that the dream was realer than real time? That I woke relieved I hadn't lost my mind or at least hadn't checked-out for good? Or that mystery itself is both out there, and in here.
The pandemic threat is so alarmingly NOT visible, our fight with it officially imaginary. Except for shots of the ICUs on the news—the ventilators, the testing—and those small heartbreaking details of lives lived on the PBS News Hour, the faces and stilled gestures of beloveds lost to the virus each week, which bring home what is so central to poetry: the power of pure image to cherish and continue.
There are many mantras. I've been told they should be meaningless; the point is repetition into a certain mindlessness (read: timelessness) at the center of the world and the self. Back to Chapter Six of that textbook where my poor part of speech still spins through its final category: "Adverbs of affirmation and negation tell whether a fact is true or false" like yes, no, indeed, doubtless, not. Thus:
10. The bird was not in its cage.
There's also the adverb's home ground again, of manner and time, the last two examples on that startling, beloved list:
14. I shuddered excessively as I passed the haunted house.
15. The soul will live forever.
Poet and essayist Marianne Boruch grew up in Chicago. She is the author of collections including Bestiary…
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