Reading and Language
But I got the same painful pleasure out of writing prose that I did out of writing poetry—the pleasure of trying to put the right words in the right order. And I took away from my experience with poetry something else. I understood that the reason people write poems is the reason people write. They have something to say. ♦
Louis Menand • Can Poetry Change Your Life?
“We find genuine questions everywhere in poetry because they direct the language away from certainty and stasis,” Zapruder explains. “In the best poems, often the poet does not know the answer.”
Louis Menand • Can Poetry Change Your Life?
In “Why Poetry?” (Ecco), out this summer, Matthew Zapruder defines a poet as a writer who is prepared “to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility.” Where people who are puzzled by poetry go wrong, he thinks, is in expecting poems to say something straightforward about life, to be useful. Poems are... See more
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relatability—a logism so neo that it’s not even recognized by the 2008 iteration of Microsoft Word with which these words are being written—has become widely and unthinkingly accepted as a criterion of value, even by people who might be expected to have more sophisticated critical tools at their disposal.
The Scourge of "Relatability"
agree, when did relatability become required? why must we see ourselves in every story? But, is it possible not to, when we are all so similar?
ironically I’m annoyed by her choice of words. “a logism so neo”—is that necessary? Why go out of your way to be un-relatable, would you have lost any meaning if you had simply said “a word so new”?
if your words are so un-relatable that readers need a thesaurus to understand you, does that make you a better communicator? or is it just so you can feel special in your un-relatability? Is being unique “sophisticated” while being like other people “unsophisticated”? You claim readers are seeking relatability because they are selfish and self-centered. But in your own writing, you are so ungenerous
Cognition is how we make sense of the world. As you may have noticed, we don’t all see the world the same way. As a child, were you as equally obsessed as I was with knowing if we all saw the same green? How can we know?
T. L. Uglow • A Curiosity of Doubts: Penguin Special
Yes! And it felt like there was no way to explain what I was asking. Do you see the same red as I see? By definition, red is red, but that wasn’t what I was asking. I was asking if our souls swapped places and escaped the contextless silos of our individual experiences, what I would see through your eyes?
Just as most of what happens to us dissolves, becomes part of an inner compost known in generalized terms—“my high school years,” “boot camp,” and so on—so most of what we have read loses definition and becomes a blurry wash.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Even if you don’t understand words. Understand that they sometimes just need somewhere to go.
