“Poems allow language its inherent provisionality, uncertainty, and slippages. They also give space for its physicality – the way it sounds, looks, feels in the mouth – to itself make meaning.”
“Poetry takes this inherent limitation of the material of language – that words are imprecise in their relation to whatever it is they all-too-imperfectly denote – and turns it into a place of communion. Remarkably, impossibly, miraculously, we somehow manage to communicate and mean despite the imperfect instrument of language. In this way, the provisional, tenuous, exciting, fragile, imperfect, yet intensely pleasurable relationship of a poem to language, and to meaning, could be said to be a kind of metaphor for our own relation to language, the world, and each other.”
"Poems exist to create a space for the possibilities of language as material. This is what distinguishes them from all other forms of writing."
ReplyDelete“Poems allow language its inherent provisionality, uncertainty, and slippages. They also give space for its physicality – the way it sounds, looks, feels in the mouth – to itself make meaning.”
ReplyDelete“Poetry takes this inherent limitation of the material of language – that words are imprecise in their relation to whatever it is they all-too-imperfectly denote – and turns it into a place of communion. Remarkably, impossibly, miraculously, we somehow manage to communicate and mean despite the imperfect instrument of language. In this way, the provisional, tenuous, exciting, fragile, imperfect, yet intensely pleasurable relationship of a poem to language, and to meaning, could be said to be a kind of metaphor for our own relation to language, the world, and each other.”
ReplyDelete