Adjectives of Order: What Point Is There in Poetry?

"Adjectives of Order"
By Alexandra Teague
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2007, at 7:23 AM ET (link in title is to Slate article)
Click here to listen to Alexandra Teague read this poem.

That summer, she had a student who was obsessed
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when

Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order
could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook
with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering

streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard,
she wrote: The mother took warm homemade bread
from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade

is essential to bread. He copied this down, but
he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before
older, if he worked security at a twenty-story modern

downtown bank or downtown twenty-story modern.
When he first arrived, he did not know enough English
to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part

of Lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic
leather Bible. Evaluation before size. Age before color.
Nationality before religion. Time before length. Adding

and, one could determine if two adjectives were equal.
After Saigon fell, he had survived nine long years
of torture. Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.

We, and of course I take some pride that my country was not part of the Coalition of Suck-ups but let us be honest: we, all of us in the West who are dependent on the faltering American economy and the oil economy, are murdering people in Iraq every day. We have destroyed a country. We have murdered hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, torn apart by bombs, by bullets, by destruction of a medical system, by limiting supplies, by sectarian violence that we did not care enough or want to spend enough money to try to stop, we thought we could destroy a country and rebuild it on the cheap, we did. We are murdering a country, children are dying every day because of us, and terrorists are being born. Because of us.

And what point is there is saying any of this prettily? It's happening, whatever we say. We are doing it, whatever we say. And this is a brilliant poem, but what does it matter?