Learning to Speak, Part One

I.

     How might we read a novel that is also a dictionary? Or a dictionary that is also a novel? The reasonable answer: word by word. For although every novel may not demand this, and though a dictionary--unreasonably--might well, a hybrid of the two will at least invite unusually close attention from a reader. All right. But then what?

     Well, when read that way, one word at a time, a book spews volumes of small and large worlds, as each syllable tips or loads. What they tell me: We can create language again, with invisible rules, as a poetics of the possible never meant to be fully understood. The syllables tell me something different from the casually measured unburdening of ordinary...