Weekly Poem: From 'Fundamentals of Esperanto'

**By Srikanth Reddy** As we speak, Esperanto is being corrupted by upset languages such as Interlingua, Klingon, Java & various cryptophasic tongues. Our only hope of reversing this trend is to write the Esperanto epic. Through its grandeur & homegrown humility, it will spur men to freeze the mutating patios so the children of our children's children may dwell in this song & find comfort in its true texture & frame. It's worth a try. As I imagine it, it ends in the middle of things. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there's a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There's a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; men clapping in fields to scare away crows; an unending list of warships: _The Unternehmen, The Impresa,_ _The Muyarchi, Viec Lam, The Przedsiebiorstwo,_ _The Indarka, The Enterprise, L'Entreprise,_ _Entrepeno_... One could go on. But by now, all the characters have turned into swallows & bank as one flock in the sky-that is, all except one. That's how we finally learn who the hero was all along. Weary & old, he sits on a rock & watches his friends fly by one by one out of the song, then turns back to the journey they all began long ago, keeping the river to his right. _"Fundamentals of Esperanto" is from "Facts for Visitors" by Srikanth Reddy. Copyright 2005; the Regents of the University of California. Published by University of California Press. Reddy is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago._ "Fundamentals of Esperanto" is also included in "the Poetry Foundation's Chicago Poetry Tour":http://www.poetryfoundation.org/gallery/walking-tours/chicago/index.html, a multimedia tour of poetry written in and about Chicago. (Disclosure: The Poetry Foundation also funds "the NewsHour's poetry coverage":http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/entertainment/poetry/.) Featuring the work of a range of Chicago poets past and present and addressing a variety of neighborhoods and landmarks--for Reddy, that neighborhood is Bucktown--the tour includes archival and contemporary recordings of poets and scholars, local music and historic photographs. The tour can be taken online or downloaded at "www.poetryfoundation.org":http://www.poetryfoundation.org/gallery/walking-tours/chicago/index.html, and is available for download via iTunes. The tour will also be featured on the City of Chicago's official tourism Web site, "www.explorechicago.org":http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en.html. Click "here for last week's Chicago poem":http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2009/06/weekly-poem-luminous-great-mass.html.