The Wug Test: Poems

by Jennifer Kronovet

A collection of language-driven, imaginative poetry from the winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series Open Competition.

Jennifer Kronovet’s poetry is inflected by her fraught, ecstatic relationship with language—sentences, words, phonemes, punctuation—and how meaning is both gained and lost in the process of communicating. Having lived all over the world, both using her native tongue and finding it impossible to use, Kronovet approaches poems as tactile, foreign objects, as well as intimate, close utterances.

In The Wug Test, named for a method by which a linguist discovered how deeply imprinted the cognitive instinct toward acquiring language is in children, Kronovet questions whether words are objects we should escape from or embrace. Dispatches of text from that researcher, Walt Whitman, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the poet herself, among other voices, are mined for their futility as well as their beauty, in poems that are technically revealing and purely pleasurable. Throughout, a boy learns how to name and ask for those things that makes up his world.

Genres: Poetry, Linguistics, Nonfiction, Poetry Plays

98 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 11, 2016

About the author

Jennifer Kronovet is the author of the poetry collection AWAYWARD (BOA Editions, 2009). She is the co-founder and co-editor of CIRCUMFERENCE, the journal of poetry in translation. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Colorado Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, A Public Space, and other journals. She has lived in Beijing, Chicago, and St. Louis, and currently lives in New York City, where she was born and raised.

Reviews

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be the most specifically nerdy book I have ever read. It is the exact Venn diagram overlap of two things that have every right to overlap: poetry and linguistics. It treated both technically, with facts and theories from linguistics, and with delight and craft from poetry. Plus (and via) motherhood. I loved it. I would not recommend this to many people, but to those I would, it would be wholeheartedly.

[Idra · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a spectacular book investigating the radical act of learning words.

[Lies Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

paar bangers, paar flops
hield van de gedichten over vertalen en dode talen en al dat en was leuk dat ik bepaalde dingen beter snapte door ATW maar de gedichten over de boy konden mij echt niks schelen sorryyy

niet zeer sterk op poetisch vlak, maar wil imaginatief & creatief

[Idyll · Rating 1 out of 5]

For a book on language, and more specifically on syntax and semantics, it is highly oracular and esoteric. It's incomprehensible by design, like a love letter to Gertrude Stein.

Let's say this was a recipe book, and you picked it up to learn how to make a key lime pie, and the recipe starts with how to get rid of the rust on the key, measure pi by cutting into the lime while imagining what the lime thinks of the lemon. Now, this would still have been somewhat entertaining if the author didn't set out to tell us how to make a real key lime pie, and if you didn't need to make one. In fact, the author didn't even intend to entertain. She only meant to share her observation of the rust on a pi[ece] of līm that cut into a ˈlemən. Does that make sense? It does not!

[Nazmi Yaakub · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tidak syak lagi dalam konteks falsafah bahasa, kumpulan puisi pemenang Anugerah National Poetry Series 2015 ini paling sukar untuk dikunyah - bagaimana linguistik yang teknikal tetapi punya falsafah (kerana manusia itu sendiri adalah hidupan yang berbicara - bicara itu pula adalah tanda roh intelektual manusia) dibentuk dalam puisi yang menjadi genre paling minimal ucapannya tetapi luas ungkapannya.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This title immediately called to me. If you ever studied linguistics, you will know why. And if you ever studied linguistics, you will enjoy this slim little volume! The running theme of a boy learning language for the first time in adolescence is engaging, and the lyrical descriptions of various theories and linguistic skills made me feel right at home in a way I haven’t since college. Short and lovely.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delicate and personal. And perfectly curious: about words, about learning. I loved this view of motherhood (via language learning). A thin book I carried across the Atlantic and read while waiting for trains in Stockholm and Helsinki, places full of the confusion (for me) of words!

[Carley Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

She's a genius! I love this book so much!

[Jay Le · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3
Re-Read Factor: No

There is a window of time to make language how the mind works. Words as milk so the mind survives on language.

Jennifer Kronovet is clever in her spin on linguistics, but for laypeople like me, it was difficult to follow at times. Topics range from aphasia, to the history of romantic languages, and to individuals who made an impact on the field. Not to gatekeep, but some of the poems are reminiscent of Rupi Kaur in that the breaking up of sentences to form poems. For example:

The flowers by the lake seem to grow
other flowers out of each bloom

but I've never looked at flowers
for words. The boy thinks the world

is a world of flowers so what can be made
into more by saying this one, this flower.

It's a different style compared to traditional American poetry, but it was nonetheless a nice rendition of the author's theme and notions of the English language and beyond.

I'm sure that this collection of thoughts and poems is for people who already have background knowledge in linguistics, but it just wasn't for me.

[Andy Stallings · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy this book, and found nothing in it that I would pass along to other readers. It dealt with the problem of language acquisition without saying anything new or interesting about the subject. At the same time, it was uninteresting poetically. In fact, the poems were pretty slack. There was alternation in the book between poems descriptive of linguistics and poems about a child (apparently the poet's son) learning language, and while the latter poems have some potential in theory, in practice the poet introduces an odd distancing characteristic in the titles that makes the child seem like a specimen instead of a person, and that ultimately ruins the poems for me.

[Kacey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed this so much-

When I was younger I read or heard or was told that close readings of poetry can rewrite neural pathways of the brain- this excited me so much, and created a reverence of poetry beyond what it sometimes warranted-

I love this book because it takes linguistic theories and discusses these sorts of learnings and rewiring on an overt, conscious level. I can see how this book might appeal more or less depending on your interest in or existing concepts on language acquisition, but for me it was a joy to read

[c · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Letter" and "Ten Ways to Mourn a Dead Language" were standouts for me. could have done without the cutesy self-referential gestures. having some familiarity with the material this book draws from, I couldn't help thinking that more could have been drawn from more interesting linguistics that haven't been outdated for decades or else that the book could have dug more into the Sapir-whorf hypothesis, which is actually a crazy fucking cluster of hypotheses, which this book didn't, contrary to my first impression, actually appear to be super inserted in drawing out

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Conceptually interesting, and at its best when examining, in glorious obscurity, the minutiae of translation and what these acts of dis/replacement can reveal. That said, not all of it landed, and I sometimes felt like the text was trying a bit too hard to…. Fit in the conceptual puzzle piece that would move a statement from merely provocative to profound. Let the defamiliarity and linguistic estrangement be enough!!!

[cami .✶ฺﾟ｡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this, but not much more. As a linguistics nerd I found the references to particular theories that i understood enjoyable - it certainly covers most basic theorists, especially those in the domain of child language acquisition, but that's almost where it falls flat for me: it covers, explains. It felt less like a collection of poetry at times and more like an English Language A-Level flashback...

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, for poetry, this was very good. I loved the author’s choice of words. She really knows what she’s doing and she weaves phrases and sentences masterfully.

It’s nice to know that she is so in love with languages and words.

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fun collection of poems about language. Written by a linguist and a mother, it explores language acquisition: how we learn it, play with it, translate it, create it. Some of the poems felt almost like micro essays, explaining a specific concept. All in all a fun and focused collection.

[Sunil · Rating 1 out of 5]

Coming off a Seidel kick, it was just sort of boring.

[pilnok · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was painful to get through

[SR · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. This was confusing.

[Lecy Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the idea behind this collection of poetry - poems all focusing on the love of words and language. However, I didn't enjoy this book as much as I hoped to. None of the pieces spoke to me, and as a word nerd and language lover, this was so disappointing.

[Dani Kass · Rating 3 out of 5]

another poetry book that did something very cool and would probably recommend to others, but that just didn't really click for me.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know how to review poetry. I don't read much of it and what I have read was mostly in classes that provide a lot of context and directions for interpretation. I can tell you that, when I saw the description of this poet's work at Kramerbooks (an excellent indie bookstore in DC), I was very excited: poetry that draws and reflects on linguistics and language development. I bought the collection immediately.

It doesn't seem to me like many of these poems would stand well on their own. One or two, maybe, but the rest lean strongly on the collected format. There's a bit of a story, or at least a setting and some characters. A person watches as their child starts the journey of learning language. Insights from language science are scattered throughout, with references to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Saussure, Victor the 'feral child,' and other moments in the history of linguistics.

I can also tell you that I didn't love this. It was okay but not great or deeply moving and I struggled to interpret any deeper meaning in the poems. This is slim enough that I would probably re-read it soon in hopes of getting more out of it, and good enough that I would probably buy it for other literary-minded linguists.

[Brian Wasserman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Jean Berko Gleason

Gleason developed The Wug Test in 1958:

This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two _______.
This man zibs. A man who zibs is a _______.

The children made the pseudowords follow the rules that happen on the edge of knowing rule as she knew they would. Others believed that grownups merely handed down chunks of language—ice scattering down into the dark after sun hits the surface. But Gleason saw through the reflective glare of children’s speech to this:

We goed to the park.
He throwed the cup.
In the store, we put some oranges in the basket, and then greenages too.

Wrong made the grammar flesh. Grammar as the right of the brain to wrong meaning into patterns. Grammar: The smell of a fourth dimension. The verb form of proliferation. The second tallest hill1. The fence that became incorporated into the bark. It’s resilient as I bash it against the stones. It fits us to the rules that rule what can fit as we rule them.

Review:

Experimental, and intolerable. I cant tolerate the form of these poems, or even the conceit of these poems. These are nothing but varying permutations of insipid nonsense.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always find it difficult to get through an entire collection of poetry; to me, the best poems will always be stand-alones, the rest of the collection a blurring of ideas. Kronovet's poetry is intensely cerebral while trying to capture the absurdity and complexity of language and thought. Given how intellectual the poems are, my favourites were, unsurprisingly, related to my academic interests. Loved "The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis", "Metaphors We Live By: In". Also enjoyed "English Female Speech" for the whimsy.

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I can't blame
the language. I can blame
the low river or the thin trees.
But not the sky, which can't help
being what it hides. That
is how words fail."

A deeply intelligent, playful collection that subjects text to linguistic scrutiny while also managing to infuse it with existential angst and emotional urgency - and allows the words to reflect back on the author's own mental fortifications built in a territory occupied by several languages. Essential reading for the lovers of modern poetry.