Monday, May 11, 2020

the inexplicable - what really goes on

"There is a room of walls which come alive with images and words... You'll have to decipher what's going on, as it happens. Just like I did... on a journey to another dimension to save Words from their demise... This poem goes pretty far, and terrifies me, but it should be read for pleasure. A story, with characters, and illustrations, and qualities of humor and tenderness... the Survivors have with them an Anthology of poetry which is quoted from: only poems can deal in the inexplicable – what really goes on..."
— Alice Notley, "Preface" (excerpts), For the Ride (2020)

Monday, May 4, 2020

a small revolution can transform the world

"...poetry is not at the margin of ordinary language; it is inside ordinary language. Its inner action renews a language... [and] emotion... is the transformative energy... renovating the social, and language itself. The [poetic]... unit within semantics... is not necessarily visual, although it is vehemently sensual. This is a great part of the pleasure of reading... The time of the poem is the time of an invention... elemental, it stands outside chronology. Through the presence in the poem of the desiring body... a small revolution is proposed.  ...the poem... an altered world... can transform the world... When language changes, life changes."
 
— Lisa Robertson (excerpts), from "Introduction to the Translation Feature", on Émile Benveniste's unpublished notes on the poetic language of Baudelaire. (ARC Poetry Magazine, n80, Summer 2016)

Friday, May 1, 2020

meaning parades through our brains

"I’m drawn to this idea of language as a stage that we all show up to see. First of all, it’s exciting to think there are objects in the field of language, that there are actually things to see... Language uses our memory of objects and our desire for meaning to world-build. So, if I’m inside your metaphor, and I’ve arrived at this stage upon which I will see language, I’m giddy, because I think I’m looking at nothing. Nothing is happening in my eyes. Though, somewhere else (perhaps through some other kind of seeing) shapes emerge. Signals go off and meaning parades through our brains. How fantastic is that?"
— Renee Gladman (speaking of her then forthcoming book Calamaties (in Bomb, Nov 2013)