Reading and Language
What a beautiful quote by James Baldwin: (Life Magazine 1963)
threads.comJust 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
Words are an attempt to condense the electricity of one mind into the shared/stagnant/dead medium of language, so that another mind can hold it and reenact the electricity that created it.
Even if you don’t understand words. Understand that they sometimes just need somewhere to go.
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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“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?
I don’t think I read enough to justify writing. But I am tired of consuming. I think I have something to say.
But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing.
Terry Pratchett • Equal Rites: (Discworld Novel 3) (Discworld series)
