Sounds From a Black Square
An Orange, A Syllable, Gillian Sze. ECW Press, 2025.
The mouth is where it all begins. The mouth is where we are nourished as infants and where we cry for more. Words may form in our heads, but they become real when they are sounded. Yet it is easy to take speaking for granted. Babies may say “ga-ga” before “mama” or “dada” because the “g” sound is easier to make. It takes time to learn how to form the right words, to properly shape the lips and the tongue to get our meanings across.
Words come primarily from our mouths, but most of the words we consume are now written down and eaten with our eyes. There is an interplay between the word as sound and the word as sight, the word heard, and the word seen. Children start with sounds for words and move to written language only later. Words too are the source of our intimacies. To be loved is not just to perform loving actions, but also to hear the words “I love you.” Gillian Sze, in her new book of poems An Orange, A Syllable, explores this interplay between the auditory and the visual in forming words. She writes about the slippages and misunderstandings that happen when we speak, and how words as visual marks can represent, obliquely, the words we mean to say.
Sze marks off the sections of her book with a small black square: ⬛. This dingbat serves not only as a visual break, but also as a metaphor for the book as a whole. As she explains in one of her poems, “The earliest Chinese pictograph found on oracle bones of the word mouth was a semi-circle with a line through it. It appears to be an open-mouthed smile.” As an image, the black square opens a door of possibilities, of mouths as dark places shaping the unknown. When we talk, we don’t announce the subject of our discussion: I don’t say to my friend, “Now I will be discussing Wordsworth,” I simply start talking about his poems. Sze, in a similar way, chooses not to title the works in this collection. Rather, the black square beckons us to the possibilities of conversation. The door to the unknown is open — we can enter if we wish. As we begin, it’s clear we’ve suddenly arrived somewhere because we are seeing and hearing words.
Sze’s first poem begins with a play on the double meaning of the word “fit” as both temper tantrum and something properly sized for someone or something. The child’s cry arises from their dark mouth, and the mouth must assume a particular shape to form that cry. In effect, the mouth must fit the feeling. Yet when the feeling is a fit — a wail of sound — it overflows all boundaries and limits; the feeling can no longer fit into the mouth as words. The wails and cries of the infant are also its first words, its bare attempt at communication;the syllables it utters before it learns to associate particular sounds with particular meanings.
Much of the early part of Sze’s book is about how we acquire language. One of the most telling examples of this is a poem that describes a child who “pointed to the cracks in the floorboards [and] would say Hole followed by Ow . . . Point to the circles in the rug and say Hole. Ow.” The child is perhaps working at saying “hollow,” but in the child’s mind, which is often much more creative and inventive than the adult mind, the “hole” causes “ow.” For the child, holes in wood and carpets are sources of pain. To the child, wood and wool are alive, feeling the same hurts as the child herself. The charge of catachresis — that the neologism “hole-ow” is merely the child’s mistaken attempt at saying “hollow” rings, well, hollow; “hole-ow” isn’t just a sequence of two meaningless syllables, but, in fact, a fundamentally poetic utterance, resonating with hello and howl.
Beyond the acquisition of language there is also comprehension, and Sze uses another metaphor from Chinese culture to bring this process to poetic life:
Dougong is an ancient Chinese method of interlocking wood. Watchtowers and temples and dynasties have been built completely without bolts, screws, or nails. All the wooden parts — beams, brackets, pillars — fit with precise carpentry. A dialogue, too, is putting a picture together, closing all the gaps. When one speaks and the other replies, words snap together. Meanings are understood and there is a satisfying “click.”
There is that word “fit” again, right in the middle of the poem, rhyming with the last word, “click,” such that fit and click describe themselves, fitting together like dialogue, but also like poetry.
I like the way Sze picks up the theme about words and their meaning through incorporating moments of dialogue about both the apparently important and the seemingly banal. In a poem that speaks about folding laundry, Sze’s speaker quotes another person saying: We divide the clean from the dirty, and then, There is only order and chaos. The speaker’s mind jumps from there to the poetry of John Donne: I am a little world made cunningly. The line seems out of context, but this is the way conversations happen — we start somewhere and the talk trips along from laundry to Donne and his “My world’s both parts, and oh both parts must die.” Clean/dirty, order/chaos, both parts of us, potentially snuffed out in the necessary tedium of folding laundry.
Squares and words, words and squares. Painters paint squares, and painters’ canvases are often nearly square. The painter Kazimir Malevich, we learn in one poem, made a painting called “Black Square,” and the painter Joseph Albers spent twenty-five years painting squares. Sze’s poem then makes the link: the black square is visual — a shape that shapes the unknown, but also the space in which sound resonates. The visual and the auditory cannot be separated, since each shapes the other.
The richness of this collection lies in Sze’s deep curiosity. Much great poetry begins this way, with an image or a word. In this case, it appears to be both. An Orange, A Syllable moves from the black squares and inarticulate cries of children, to syllables that make poetry, to conversation, to the ways in which painters have tried to paint the shape of silence.
— Charles Carroll teaches literature and philosophy at University Canada West in Vancouver, BC.
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