Elizabeth Willis

from

“I Cannot Describe Salt”: Elizabeth Willis, Poets in Exile, and the Church Invisible in the Age of Pandemic, by Jacob Bender. 

Dialogue 

 That is, she is inhabiting spaces that even the prophets cannot see—or at least, she doesn’t trust them to see. Her crisis of prophetic confidence is perhaps hinted at in her austere 2003 poem “Autographeme,” which contains the enigmatic line, nestled amidst all its other apparent non-sequiturs, “I was fluent in salamander.”^[11] It is a nonsense line to the uninitiated, but to anyone even passingly familiar with the world of late-twentieth-century Mormon intellectual history, any invocation of “salamander” can’t help but ring some pretty significant bells: of Mark Hofmann, the fraudulent Salamander letter he sold at a premium to Church leaders and historians in the 1980s, his ensuing cover-ups and car bombings, the homicide investigations, and, above all, the higher-level concerns about a prophetic inspiration and purported “gift of discernment” that failed to detect Hofmann’s forgery and fraud and murderous intentions before it was too late. Once one latches hold of the word “salamander,” all sorts of intriguing questions immediately arise: assuming (and this could all still be too big of an assumption) that “salamander” at least obliquely refers to the Hofmann scandal, what exactly does it mean for her to be fluent in salamander? Could it bluntly mean that she, too, is fluent in detecting supposedly failed inspiration among Church leaders? Or, rather, that she is adept in deceiving them herself? Or, instead, that she, too, is capable of “forging” artifices—not fraudulently, but through the artifice of her own poetry, her own poetic universe, perhaps even of her own faith. For that matter, can anything be classified as a “forgery” when all writings are inherently artifices to begin with? Or am I the one forging meaning ex nihilo where none was previously present—at least, not until I forged it myself (the raison d’être of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets)?