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— Lisa Robertson (excerpts), from "Introduction to the Translation Feature", on Émile Benveniste's unpublished notes on the poetic language of Baudelaire.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)