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In a Second Language

Mocco Wollert August 20

‘HEART is a perfectly good English word and so is SMART, so why can’t I use them to rhyme in my poem?’ I feel quite indignant but my mentor Barbara shakes her head and says: ‘That would be a cliché and banal, go and find better words to express the feelings of love and cleverness.’ And there you have it, the morass of words that are sort of OUT, especially when you put them together in a poem.

I am a German migrant and came to Australia as an adult with school English only. Really, do you remember what you learned in French class? I remembered a bit of school English and what I had learned from American record labels after the war, although ‘Strutting with Some Barbecue’ did not mean a thing. We did not have barbecues in Germany! Still, I am a quick learner but there is a big difference between the ‘street language’ learned on the job and a language soaked up with your mother’s milk.

My mother’s milk had definitely been spiked with German poets but now came the big job of soaking up English from somewhere. Luck was on my side because I lived in Darwin, where entertainment was nil in those years, the Sixties, and my entertainment was reading. Can one read a library up and down? I certainly did, frustrated with every book as I only understood half of it. Still, I was dealing with words and I was learning them.

I have always written poems and stories and my new country was so exciting, so full of new things and feelings and colours, which needed to be expressed. How? In a half-baked language? So I still wrote in German but words are written to be read, to be heard—a bit of a joke when nobody understands you. I had to learn to write in English. Everything was new and fresh and I was stringing words together and made them rhyme. Aha, here we are back to ‘heart and smart’ and the big NO-NO, the cliché. If only I could find a rule book, telling me what was cliché and what was not. That is the hard part, not only to learn a language but also to ‘feel’ the words and their meaning. I am a really feely-touchy sort of person, embracing stray dogs and cats and even stray humans, but how would I ever learn to ‘feel words’ so when I put them on paper they would not come from my head but from my soul? How would I know when my words would show my true and honest self?

Then there is that secretive—to me at least—difference between ‘poetic’ words and ‘non-poetic’ words. Some words just stifle a line in a poem or kill the poetic flow or are too specific. Nobody can really tell you which words they are, and again as a new poet one has to develop a feeling for this. It is another minefield to stumble through, and to tell the truth, literary mines blew up into my face more than once. I was lucky to have mentors who were stern but also guided me onto the right path, often with great patience.

Of course the English language is a devil for spelling too. ‘Head’ and ‘Hat’ sound very much the same, particularly when one has an accent and that wretched spell-check function on the computer does not pick up the difference, both words are ok with it. ‘I left my head behind’ has a very different meaning than ‘I left my hat behind.’ Silly mistakes like that often earned me rejections from magazines or denied me even the smallest prize in a competition.

However, I believed I was bringing something new to poems in the way I phrased my thoughts and feelings. My thesaurus became my best friend and I loved finding new words and would use them with gusto. However there was always the danger that I would use a word out of context and the poem would be a failure. I felt like an inexperienced gardener, faced with the task of planting seeds—whose names I did not know—into virgin soil. I hoped that some of these seeds would turn into wonderful flowers, but had to accept that some would be mediocre.

Today my English vocabulary is extensive and being widely published in magazines and anthologies has given me confidence in new words and phrases and trusting to a great extent to my feelings for, and understanding of, new words.


 

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