Jordan Scott
Biography
Jordan Scott lives in Toronto. His first book of poetry, Silt (New Star Books), was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Jordan’s second of poetry, titled blert, will be published with Coach House Books in the spring of 2008. blert explores the poetics of the stutter.
Poet's Note
On Avoidance
—lines altered from Bruno Shultz
It is part of my existence to be the parasite of metaphors, so easily am I carried away by the first simile that comes along. Having been carried away, I have to find my difficult way back, and slowly, return to the fact of my mouth.
blert represents a spelunk into the mouth of the stutterer, a trek across labial regions, a repel through the stalagmites of molars and canines, a lexical navigation into the cavernous poetics of what it means to stutter. To blert is to stutter. To disturb the breath of speaking. In blert, language is spelunked into for its specks, grunts and quaking heap. blert performs the stutter in and through language itself, enhancing the characteristics of the individual who stutters in his or her speech by invoking a stuttering in the language system as a whole. In blert, the unique symptoms of the stutter, both sonic and physical, are utilized in order to reveal language as a rolling gait of words hidden within words, leading to different rhythms and textures, all conducted by the mouth’s slight erosions.