“Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough.”
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Source: mythologyofblue
“Now she is a good example of a sentence without words.”
—Gertrude Stein, from “More Grammar Genia Berman,” in Portraits and Prayers (1934)
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)
I’m a magpie for weird words.
Source: wwnorton
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.
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
Night is speaking
you say.
My poem without words.
My flight into wild country.
From Adrienne Rich’s “Melancholy Piano” (2004)
