These days, poetry as a written artform is consumed in two places: academia and Instagram. Academic poets, and many others besides, like to make fun of Instagram poetry because it is full of derivative ideas and cliché images (comparing an imminent breakup to a storm on the horizon, for example). Some poets lament the rise of Instagram poetry as an insult to the form. 

Nevertheless, the academic poet should remove the beam from his eye before he plucks the mote from the eye of the Insta-poet. Because poetry written in and consumed by academia has its own cliches, and its difficult to find a serious contemporary poet who doesn’t rely on them. This post will talk about one such cliché device and caution serious young poets from using it.

I’m talking now about the device of derivation. It usually occurs like this:

                Her mother knocked on the door—the daughter’s room

               was impeccable; impeccable, from the Latin peccare, to sin.

               And her daughter never sinned because she never had the chance.

I did not find these lines in the wild, but rather just made them up to show you what I’m talking about.

The phrase “from the Latin” is a particular offender. It is ubiquitous in contemporary poetry. The idea is clever—the poet suddenly takes on the voice of a dictionary, explains the roots of a word, and uses that word in a variety of contexts which reveal the hidden assumptions in the etymology and usage. It also gives the reader an opportunity to say, wow, I didn’t know that before. And if you love language, learning about the evolution of words and the residue of antique meaning is fascinating and rewarding.

The problem is, this device is used all over the place with little variety. I don’t have a full, detailed index of all the times I have encountered this device, but I will drop a few real-world examples on your head:

                “Isidoros is Greek for ‘gift from Isis’”

                “Pudenda, from the Latin pudor, or shame”

                “The root of travel means torture… from Medieval Latin…”

                “My name in Latin is light to carry & victorious”

I’m not saying I don’t find etymology and nuances of meaning interesting. I study Latin myself largely because I’m so delighted with etymology and nuance of meaning. But today, if you call attention to the derivation of a word in your poem, you’re basically reproducing a meme. It’s no more surprising than sharing how, in French, you don’t say “I miss you,” you say, “You are missing from me.” Yeah, that’s a cool fact, but it was only deep the first time someone noticed it and made it into a meme with like, a hand grasping at another hand’s shadow or something.                

Here’s another thing: isn’t it a bit boring for a poet to play the etymologist? Don’t we take it for granted that the poet is a lover of and student of language? It seems pretty on-the-nose for the poet to stop her poem to give you a lecture on what the words mean and where they came from. I guess it has something to do with the aesthetic of disruption, where we stop telling a story in order to interrogate what we are doing by telling a story. This idea too is tired.

It was interesting when the first person did it. At this point, I don’t want to know that you know that burrito is from the Latin-American Spanish for little donkey. Just tell me how it tastes.