Poème (#2018-29) : words and strokes



Référence pour l’artwork : Edmund Nagele, 2013

Sometimes I look down to my keyboard and wonder: is this what dyslexia is like? Is it my job, as a writer, to find order behind its disorder? I’m thinking: if there is an alphabetical order, there should be a lexical order, right? Or a ”sentential” order. I realize that I’ve always thought of the first stroke of a drawing to be the most mysterious thing: why there? Why this thick? Why this shape? Why this length? How is this one stroke going to be part of a full image? ”Words are different,” I thought. The word ”word” has four letters, you can’t rearrange them. Unless… ”word” → ”drow”? Ha, funny. But no. Words have to be placed correctly into sentences. There are ways of constructing phrases. They are bound to rules as the writer to his quill. There are patterns. Drawings don’t do patterns. But a drawing is a pattern. How can this be?

Tonight I look down to my keyboard and I know. Latin, Greek, Cyrillic: all these letters are not to writing what strokes are to drawing. A verse is the stroke of a poem. A line is the stroke of a novel. Why this word? Why this meaning? Why this punctuation? Why then and why there? And now I look back to the top of my sheet. There lie the answers. I chose these words because they were clear to me. I chose this meaning because it is what I had to say so that its posit would let go of me. But most of all, I chose these words because a stroke has to lead to another.

J'espère que mon travail vous plaît ; si oui, envisagez de me soutenir !

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Words don’t come (so) easy to me 😉
Good work anyway.

Ywan Cooper

They don’t always come that easy to me either. In novellas, they hardly do. Poems are different. And this thing here was powered by thoughts coming in naturally, so I wasn’t under the impression of having to WORK on it. I therefore direct your thanks to my inspiration, or its cause.


We should ask the Monty Python – this is the missing piece in the Meaning of Life: the meaning of words. Chinese people should wonder as you did in this chapter: why should I go up and down, in which order to identify a horse or my mum? It does clearly mean much for them, since drawing and writing are on the same page.

Ywan Cooper

Gee, I still know nothing about the Monty Python except that I would surely love them… Thanks for your comment and for reminding me of it!