language power

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

—Adrienne Rich, introduction to The Work of a Common Woman: The Collected Poetry of Judy Grahn, 1964-1977

threadbare language

How threadbare the language of happiness!

—Osip Mandelstam, from poem “Tristia,” Osip Mandelstam: The Eyesight of Wasps (Ohio State U. Press, 1989), translated by James Greene

better than silence

I am working and trying to deserve the privilege of speaking, writing, and knowing perfectly well that the only words which really deserve to exist are words better than silence, but it’s not easy to find these words. Because language is such a word. The language of silence seems to be much more powerful. It’s a great challenge. That’s why I go on working and working, looking for words, chasing words.

—Eduardo Galeano, interview by Robert Birnbaum, published July 18, 2006 on Identity Theory

good soup

Je vis de bonne soupe, et non de beau langage.

Molière's Les Femmes Savantes (The Learned Ladies)

[I live on good soup, and not beautiful language.]

virtue of patience

LEVINE: I was unable to write any poetry about my working life while that was my working life. I tried a few times. And the poems were hysterical. I think they were just - you know, I couldn't control them. My anger was so overwhelming that I couldn't cope with it, just as I couldn't write about my boyhood very effectively until I was 40. It was still too powerful for me. But I'm patient, so I hung in there. And that's probably by chief virtue as a writer is my patience. So I waited, and I kept trying to write about factory work but I kept throwing the poems away. And the first poem I ever published about working in a factory, I was, I think, 31 or 2, but I don't like the poem anymore.

GROSS: Can you give me a sense of what was going wrong in the factory poems when you were still there? Is there anything...

LEVINE: Yes, I can. The language was overblown. You know, I wanted to use the word ‘eternity’ and - you know. I wanted to use a kind of Latin diction to - almost a Miltonic diction and a great chorus - build up a great chorus of sound and - to dramatize the horror show of some of the places I had worked. And I didn't have any - there was no tenderness in it for the people that I worked with. There was no - and that was a, you know - that was part of the reward that I got for those years was the people I was meeting, even though you didn't talk to them that much because places were often so loud. But you'd meet them afterwards or you'd make friends with them and spend time with them. And they weren't getting in the poems at all. The poems were, you know, my poor soul being hammered out of shape by General Motors. And they were a bit self-indulged.

—Philip Levine, in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air, 1991.

fewer blues

There are nine different words for the color blue in the Spanish Maya dictionary but just three Spanish translations, leaving six [blue] butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving that when a language dies six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.

—Earl Shorris, The Last Word: Can the World’s Small Languages Be Saved (Harpers, 2000)

dancing logos

But if it should turn out that music leads to language, rather than language to music, it helps us understand for the first time the otherwise baffling historical fact that poetry evolved before prose. Prose was at first known as pezos logos, literally 'pedestrian, or walking, logos', as opposed to the usual dancing logos of poetry. In fact early poetry was sung: so the evolution of literary skill progresses, if that is the correct word, from right-hemisphere music (words that are sung), to right-hemisphere language (the metaphorical language of poetry), to left hemisphere language (the referential language of prose)."

—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale U. Press, 2009)

get it right

Poetry is getting something right in language.

Howard Nemerov, “Poetry and Meaning,” A Howard Nemerov Reader (Columbia Univ. Press, 1991, p281)

last possible domain

[Poetry] is the last possible domain in which we could preserve by language what we commonly deem to be reliable cognitive commonplaces, and last to appeal to solid, everyday perceptions. Poetry does not seek to negate these props. But it uncovers the oppressions of naïve experience and the stale pool of confirming constancies.

—Justus Buchler, The Main of Light (Oxford Univ. Press, 1974, p. 49)

said with ease

As if the language suddenly, with ease,
Said things it had laboriously spoken.

—Wallace Stevens, from “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”

one more cosmos

Thought, which science has expelled from its place at the top of the spiral of evolution, reappears at the bottom of it: the physical structure of atoms and their particles is a mathematical structure, a relation. What is equally extraordinary is that this structure can be reduced to a system of signs—and is therefore a language. The power of speech is a particular manifestation of natural communication; human language is one more dialect in the linguistic system of the universe. We might add: the cosmos is a language of languages.

—Octavio Paz, "The Verbal Pact and Correspondence" Alternating Current (Arcade Publishing, 1991)

dialect defined

A sprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot.

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

—Max Weinreich (Yiddish linguist, in YIVO Bletter, Jan-Feb 1945)

not luxury

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

—Audre Lorde, “Mapping,” Lofty Dogmas (U. of Arkansas Press, 2005), edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxim Kumin

destiny of speech

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. In trying to sharpen the awareness of language at the level of poems, we get the impression that we are touching the man whose speech is new in that it is not limited to expressing ideas or sensations, but tries to have a future. One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (1969)

language game

Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Zettel”

clarity

Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.

--

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms… But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

—Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy 1963

poetry and philosophy

No man was ever yet a great poet who was not at the same time a great philosopher, for poetry is the blossom and fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge