Book Seventeen

Poetical Dictionary

Lohren Green

ISBN: 1-891190-17-2
Publication: 2003
Pages: 94

Lohren Green's Poetical Dictionary concludes with chaos and begins with acrobatics. In between these he presents us with "both a book of words and a cosmos;" a linguistic gas cloud bounded by the universal and the particular. Green's project departs from the traditional dictionary, a peculiar contraption of sense and order. In the preface, he reviews the architectures of these teetering, teeming, linguistic edifices. His attitude towards words is almost that of a material scientist, exploding an individual specimen of language — "bulwark" "heft" "oyster" "purple" "torpid" "foreplay" — in order to ascertain its "synthesis of body and concept." But the heterogeneity, desire, and tedium contained in such an enormous document as the conventional dictionary are equally curious to Green, as is the problem of how to accommodate the plasticity of each word's sense. Speaking of his Poetical Dictionary, Green says, "Here words are not so much defined as they are depicted in a kind of informed portraiture, a conceptual calligraphy, a combination of lexicography and poetry-a lexetry that knows the style of information, the viscosity of concepts, the atmospherics of these sonic cum tropic logics that we call words"(Preface, xiv). Organized into SUBJECT WORD, PRONUNCIATION, ETYMOLOGY, and DEFINITION, each entry in the Poetical Dictionary makes the traditional dictionary hiccup, divulging the stanza within the standard definition and the wiggle of wit in the pronunciation key.

Lohren Green was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1967, and has since lived in various cities including Pittsburgh, São Paulo, Los Angles, Berkeley and Barcelona. He holds a PhD. In Rhetoric from U.C. Berkeley, and an M. Phil. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. He is currently making his way as a sophist in San Francisco. This is his first book.