Words gather like flies above this carcass of meaning—
“Each writer/reader, pausing on the page before the poem begins, is a roar of mundanities. But then the words themselves, figured into syntax and line, bring quiet to the world.”
—Heather McHugh, from “Tiny Étude on the Poetic Line”
Source: proustitute
It is impossible to avoid meaning and if there is meaning and it says what it does there is grammar.
So long as the sky is recognized as an association
is recognized in its function of accessory to vague words whose meaning it is impossible to rediscover
its value can be nothing but mathematical certain limits of gravity and density of air
The farmer and the fisherman who read their own lives there have a practical corrective for—
they rediscover or replace demoded meanings to the religious terms
Among them, without expansion of the imagination, there is the residual contact between life and the imagination which is essential to freedom
The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfillment of his baby promises contends with the sky through layers of demoded words and shapes. Demoded, not because the essential vitality which begot them is laid waste—this cannot be so, a young man feels, since he feels it in himself—but because meanings have been lost through laziness or changes in the form of existence which have let words empty.
Crude symbolism is to associate emotions with natural phenomena such as anger with lightning, flowers with love it goes further and associates certain textures with
Such work is empty.
From William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All
I speak for the integrity of the soul and the greatness of life’s inanity; the formality of its boredom; the orthodoxy of its stupidity.
“I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word, and at this same time I found out very soon that there is no such thing as putting them together without sense. It is impossible to put them together without sense. I made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense and found it impossible.”
—Gertrude Stein in an interview with Robert Haas, 1946
“It is extraordinary how it is impossible that a vocabulary does not make sense.”
—Gertrude Stein in Lectures in America, “Poetry and Grammar”
A murmur of syllables,
air and water, words with no weight:
night unfolds and looks at me…
Your shadow covers this page.
—Octavio Paz, As One Listens to the Rain
(via tumbleword)
Source: sleepinginthesnow
“I have been spared the fate
of those who love words
more than what they mean”
-Franz Wright, from “University of One”
Source: mixmasterjeff
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
Source: mythologyofblue
