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

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)