Virginia Woolf reading her own essay, “Craftmanship”.
”{…}Because words do not live in dictionaries. Words live in the mind.”
Part of a BBC radio broadcast from April 29th, 1937. The talk was called “Craftsmanship” and was part of a series entitled “Words Fail Me.”
(via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
Source: hidingheather
“Language is formed along two planes, the lexical plane where the word selection is made and the intersecting plane where the words contract relations with other signs. In the intersection of these planes we have the linguistic event of the poem.”
—David Porter, from Dickinson: The Modern Idiom (1981)
“Nothing is going to happen in this book. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.”
—Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Words gather like flies above this carcass of meaning—
Arguing About Language, by Gary Gutting
“Debates about linguistic norms typically set traditionalists against revisionists. The two sides are particularly entrenched because each is rooted in a fundamental truth: the traditionalists are right that the rules are the rules (for instance, pronouns do need to agree in number with their referents), and the revisionists are right that language does change over time (nouns can come to be used as verbs).
“… there will always be a tension between sticking to and violating linguistic rules. We can, however, often fruitfully discuss emerging linguistic innovations if we keep in mind three main goals of language use: effective communication, pleasing expression and moral solidarity.”
She is in search of a language that is tactile, palatial, and self-immolating—a language that will correspond to her latent desire to disintegrate and expand. To become the room.
(via mythologyofblue)
Source: deliryo
It is impossible to avoid meaning and if there is meaning and it says what it does there is grammar.
“Long After Stevens,” by Adrienne Rich (2005)
A locomotive pushing through snow in the mountains
more modern than the will
to be modern The mountains profile
in undefiled snow disdains
definitions of poetry It was always
indefinite, task and destruction
the laser eye of the poet her blind eye
her moment-stricken eye her unblinking eye
She had to get down from the blocked train
lick snow from bare cupped hands
taste what had soared into that air
—local cinders, steam of the fast machine
clear her palate with a breath distinguish
through tumbling whiteness figures
frozen figures advancing
weapons at the ready
for the new password
She had to feel her tongue
freeze and burn at once
instrument searching, probing
toward a foreign tongue
Octavio Paz: Proem
(transl. Eliot Weinberger)
At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death;
the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens;
the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments;
the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page;
the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses,
for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert;
the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self;
the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors; the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl;
the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought;
the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;
the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;
the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.
Syllables seeds.
(via ahuntersheart)
Source: lumpy-pudding
