Imperfect Tense

By Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

Imperfect Tense is a meditation on language, and the poems in this collection are grounded in teaching, learning, and living between languages and cultures. Much like the imported "dragon fruit," these poems grasp displacement as opportunity; they relish in perpetual outsider-ness as a way inside a fundamentally shared human condition. The first section of three, "Imperfect Tense" is a specific meditation on Americans' pursuits of Spanish as a second language. "Past Tense" revolves around experiences as an English language and poetry teacher working with immigrant communities. Finally, "Ever Present Tense" is a meditation on the language of family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Whitepoint Press
• Release date: Jul 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781944856014

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

Melisa Cahmann-Taylor is Professor of TESOL & World Language Education at the University of Georgia. She is the winner of Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, a Leeway Poetry Grant, and a Fulbright award and has co-authored two books, Teachers Act Up: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities Through Theatre and Arts-Based Research in Education. She has published numerous articles and poetry about language learning, sustainable or fragile states of bilingualism, and teacher education. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Women’s Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Barrow Street, Puerto Del Sol, Mom Egg, and many other literary homes. Cahnmann-Taylor judges the annual Anthropology & Humanism poetry contest and is the editor of the ethnographic poetry section.

Book preview

WHORFIAN HYPOTHESIS

I wouldn’t have thought rice particles

until reading them, unconditionally named,

subtitled from Tagalog,

or of measuring, as Cambodians do,

the length from elbow to tip of middle finger.

Any number of words builds a house of consciousness.

One rock [ahsin] in Ojibwe contains

bald eagle spirit just as la in la roca houses gender,

and to say "babka in Polish is to link grandmother"

with the loaf served at Easter,

counted differently from a Japanese slice.

Our idioms order he (third person, singular male subject)

before drives (verb) and her (the object) up

an inanimate wall whose blue chipped hue

can only be described in New Guinea

as either dark or cold.

Few of us learn to count in the language of mantis shrimps,

whose eyes see in 12 primary colors to our three,

linguistic systems of sight where whole spectrums go untranslated.

I’d like to lift the blinds, feel my blood stir as it once did,

catching faraway nouns by the tail.

WHEN YOU’RE A RETIRED AMERICAN STUDYING SPANISH IN MEXICO AND AFTER SIX MONTHS CAN BARELY ORDER SOMETHING OFF A MENU

Chances are you’ve said I’m pregnant when you meant

I’m embarrassed,

fuck a bus

when you wanted to catch it,

or vaginas

instead of páginas to describe an art book’s pages.

Odds are you’ve boozed these errors,

loosened the alveolar ridge,

that ineffable tongue flap

that probably made all the difference

when you lacked that packed poncho,

exact pesos

or translations for the dose, the punch line,

the bus route, the landlord, the speedy

vowels garbled into the phone you answered and fat

chance you sent the right words back,

misreading ingredients,

hunting for ATMs. Filthy footed, fed

up with it all, you tangled in a carnival of outlets,

sickened from taco cilantro,

broke human likenesses

with a stick. You risked time

reduced to mere numerals,

a few verbs that evaporated

like desert water. Raw

as the bed-frame wood that men

back-holstered up missing cobblestones,

you startled like patron saint firecrackers

outside a sleepy weeknight

wooden door. But when you creaked,

wide-awake, to blue mornings, you exposed

like a rare book’s ink sensitive pages, as if damage

mattered less to you than a small, braided fist of cheese.

Whey spilt, you inevitably unraveled, turned question marks

upside down until tart tamarind tasted sweet.

WIDOWED NYC TEACHER STUDIES GRAMMAR IN MEXICO

Imperfect means

incomplete, a bruised

pear reduced

in price, a cat

who purred for hours

while 501 verbs surfed

conjugations, continuous

waves of what was, what used

to be, what no longer exists.

Te amaba, me amabas, nos amabamos

Not a map’s stickpin to

Brooklyn, more highlighter

glide across an open workbook’s

spine, pesos doled out

per diem like guilt

from a pishke

cup, pouring ever-

present rain.

I was working. I used to be married.

Describe perfect’s

opposite:

a house cramped

with winter rooms,

fractured bones

percolating in

widowed franchises

until Spanish classes

sparked a pretense

of purpose:

reir [to laugh]; reíamos [we used to laugh],

She began with habitual

error, unceasing

fault: She

used to correct

high school

English—I been,

you been—until

she’d been

burned, bored,

bordered on sub-par,

parsing sense.

Now, she chooses

what to edit, attends

to contextual cues:

siempre, con frequencia, a veces, todos los días

usually the imperfect

follows, no—

she says, it always does.

FIRST GRADE

In dedication to Maxine Kumin

Two thousand three hundred nine words

rhyme with estar but my son can’t think

of any for his tarea en español, prefers

action figure distractions, spilling his drink,

breaking pencils, falling from his chair—

anything that’s not homework until

I offer "vomitar, to vomit and estornudar"

to sneeze. Pleased, he asks if to kill

in Spanish would rhyme, and to hit, and fart,

--smart boy, figuring out a second tongue

multiplies words that disconcert, courts

deep laughter in dark theatres. So strong

his will to be liked, to understand peers, offer

jokes, to translate butt and savor what comes after.

FRIJOLERO EX-PATS

Pancita soup, tasajo,

chuletas de cerdo, they

search pocket dictionaries

for cuts of meat,

Reviews for Imperfect Tense

[pensivecat · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A book of poems in three parts. It took me a while to realize it was all written by the same person - which I'm not sure is a good or bad thing. Part One, revolving around learning Spanish, was my favorite part, and what drew me to the book in the first place. The rest was okay; a few poems I liked quite a lot.

[rlevans723 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Writing this review is difficult, much like I found this collection of poetry was to read. It wasn't terrible, but I just couldn't get into it and found I had to force myself to read it. For me, it is not a book I plan to revisit nor is it one I would count as enjoyable. As with all books, i'm sure this one has it's audience, I'm just not part of that audience.

[kristykay22 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am horrible at articulating why I like some poems and don't really respond to others, but I really enjoyed this collection of poetry by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor. As you may guess from the title, the author is concerned with exploring language -- learning it (especially English-speaking Americans learning Spanish), teaching it, and using it to explore the interplay between being a mother and being a daughter. Cahnmann-Taylor has an inventive sense of form, which plays well with with the content of her poems. This was a strong and compelling collection, and one I'd recommend to any poetry-enjoyer or Spanish-language learner.

[raignn · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I received an early reviewer copy--which means I went in with no expectations. I tried with this book. And I do think there is a genuine impulse here, but unfortunately it just fell a flat. The grappling with language was real, but there was no urgency that I really felt behind virtually all these poems. The last part of the book was definitely the best, but alas--these were not only not memorable but never really affected me.I'd be very interested to see work from this author in 5-10 years and see how things have matured.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

She captures the poetry of being a foreigner imperfectly but expertly...[in progress]. Pre-edit take on it is that she really knows her stuff - even after teaching ESL myself I sometimes struggle with her allusions. I suppose this speaks to the fact that I taught it so long ago and taught it imperfectly. I especially enjoy the narrative quality to her poems - a story is priceless and she often turns a pithy phrase. I received an Uncorrected Proof from Whitepoint Press to whom a owe a big heap of thanks. The cover indicates that it will be published in July 2016. 5/12/2016_dbs_

[3lilreds · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this book of poetry so much! I studied linguistics in college, and have a fascination with foreign languages. Ms. Cahnmann-Taylor's poems made me laugh as she explored the crazy things you can say with a relatively minor error when speaking a language that isn't your own.

[donnamariemerritt · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book is made up of three sections. Nothing particularly struck me in the first part (Imperfect Tense) about learning to speak Spanish. In fact, some poems were just plain confusing. There are notes in the back explaining different poems, but if I have to rely on notes to understand or simply enjoy a poem (you don't always have to understand it to like it), it's not worth it—though those more academically minded might disagree. There were some astute observations in the second part (Past Tense) about teaching English and poetry to immigrants. "Undocumented Youth March for In-State Tuition" and "1750, Natural History of Barbados in Ten Books, Russell Special Collections" were both powerful pieces. I loved the language and images in "Dragon Fruit" and "Georgia Horizontal."The final part (Ever Present Tense) breaks from the language theme, though the back cover states that it is "a meditation on the languages of family" (a stretch).* It touches on her mother's addiction and the dysfunctional family in which she grew up, but it feels a bit jolting when she moves on to her own experiences as a mother. That should have been a natural transition, but it wasn't in this case. Near the end she goes back to the subject of her mother and then finishes with poems about language, trying to come full circle, but it doesn't quite achieve that effect.Opinions are subjective, especially when it comes to poetry, and many of the poems in this collection were previously published in reputable journals, but I'm sorry to say that most of them didn't do much for me. Still, there is a unique voice here and I look forward to seeing what Cahnmann-Taylor might do with that voice in the future.*Note: I received an uncorrected proof, so this may have changed.

[lauraenos · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am teaching on a middle school team next year with a high population of ELL students and students who are first and second generation immigrants. I was excited to receive a poetry collection that focuses on the immigrant community and the importance of diverse languages. The contemporary voice I think will be appealing to my teen reading audience as well since poetry is typically not what this age group will pick off of my shelves to read first.