"If the actor suffers from a slight vocal defect that cannot be eradicated, instead of forcing himself to conceal it, he should exploit it in different ways according to the roles he plays." (Jerzy Grotowski) In this case our actor is Vancouver poet Jordan Scott, exploring the poetics of the stutter in his first book, Silt. Disrupted line and fragmented word are more than mere device for Scott. They are an extension of his voice, his voice an extension of his experience, and his experience largely inherited from his family. In this way Scott's lyrical dislocutions are personal. Personal, mind you, not confessional. There is little "I" here; instead Scott often channels the various voices of his Polish forebears.

Just as Ondaatje imagines Billie the Kid through apocryphal notebooks and disjecta, so Scott begins each of the four chapters in Silt with excerpts from the "journals" of Wiesia Kujawa, a related elder, setting the stage for other familial voices to appear throughout the book. In "Chorus Like a Limp," for example, we hear an unnamed
relation — an old wife, I assume, full of tales: "she said:// left laughter right bloody if your left eye is itchy something wonderful will happen if it is your right eye awful stuff never have your bed under the window for if the light of the full moon shines on you you will become a lunatic if you sneeze ..." Scott goes on to transmute this run-on refrain in several variations, his protean poetics distilling and distorting the voice, reinventing it much as a stutter reshapes words.

she said:

right laughter left bloody

right blood

left eye

right

if it

moon

foodfoodfoodfood a cross

invitation

By handicapping the rambling voice and making it limp repeatedly, Scott teases out its essence until its final iteration offers the essence of Silt: "she said:// mud breath..."

To fuse mud with breath, earth with spirit, is Scott's extraordinary gift. He finds Whitman's divine afflatus under his boot soles and conveys it to us through his "thick soil mouth." Where other poets dig with pen, Scott employs tongue to unsettle himself in a song that is always moving, a song not of himself, but from himself, to other people and places. From the Fraser River to the Nile, Silt is in constant flow — kinetic, sporadic, at times violent: "water/ furious at its imprisonment/... bruised with eddies." This river, in the larger context of Silt, carries overtones of voice impeded by confining larynx and of harsh captivity, such as that suffered by Scott's grandparents in Nazi work camps. In a succinct simile that blends all three of these motifs—river, voice, family straits—we read in "Stuttering" that Wiesia Kujawa "once drew [her father's] throat as a long ravine."

In addition to the Kootenay School, Silt is reminiscent of Celan. Scott's voice may sometimes have a mind of its own ("to please the ear in spite of the brain") while Celan's is inextricably bound to consciousness, yet the similarity between the two is striking. Here's Celan, briefly, for comparison (as translated by Popov and McHugh in Glottal Stop, a title perfect for Scott!) "Voices, guttural, amid the
debris,/ where even infinity shovels,/ runnels of/ (cardio-) slime." Words flow and labour. In Silt they deposit fine stuff indeed.