‘All Things are Words of Some Strange Tongue’: Dictionary Definition Form in Contemporary American Poetry

Through close analysis of dictionary definition form in the poetry of Robert Pinsky, Mary Kinzie, and Solmaz Sharif, and with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1975), this chapter explores the ways in which the dictionary definition poem celebrates and also questions the dictionary’s authority through the dialogic juxtaposition of different forms, registers, and discourses. The analyses problematise binary distinctions between poem as sound-focused, subjective, and individually constructed, and dictionary definition as textual, objective, and communally constructed. Both the dictionary definition and the poem share an association with word as artefact, with cultural memory and history, preservation and loss. This chapter demonstrates how, by encouraging the reader to ‘dwell in possibility’, the dictionary definition poem offers a fertile space for the discussion and reconfiguration of cultural meaning.