usual speech

Poet, read aloud the way you talk.

brakes on perception

The language of poetry is difficult, laborious language, which puts the brakes on perception. In some particular cases the language of poetry approaches the language of prose, but this does not violate the law of difficulty.
[…]
Moreover, there is a strong tendency to create new language, specifically intended for poetry; as we know, Vladimir Khlebnikov is leading this school. Thus, we arrive at a definition of poetry as decelerated, contorted speech. Poetic speech is constructed speech.

—Viktor Shklovsky, Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader (Bloomsbury, 2017), edited and translated by Alexandra Berlina [94; 95]

three realms

The finest writing is for the voice. There are several good, not to say decisive, reasons for this. No word is a word by itself. Every word is multiple, and not simply because there are homonyms and homophones hanging around, pretending to be friends. A word is made of sounds. A word is made of marks. A word is made of little muscle movements in the throat which accompany our interior speech—that invisible, inaudible, yet clearly heard interior talk of which Samuel Beckett made himself the master. So there are two spoken tongues to set against the one we write. And if we allow the written word to stand for the spoken one, and the silent speech to precede both, then the written word works in three realms at once, not just one.

—William H. Gass, “Finding a Form,” Finding A Form: Essays (Knopf, 1996)

language cobbler

Louis Zukofsky, raised on the Lower East Side, was a cobbler of language. I don’t think he ever looked up or arose from his station to speak fully, freely. I see him with his head down over a bench (his desk), piecing various parts of language together.

speak from the eyes

Charles Reznikoff is a poet of the eye. To cross the threshold of his work is to penetrate the prehistory of matter, to find oneself exposed to a world in which language has not yet been invented. Seeing, in his poetry, always comes before speech. Each poetic utterance is an emancipation of the eye, a transcription of the visible into the brute, the undeciphered code of being. The act of writing, therefore, is not so much an ordering of the real as a discovery of it. It is a process by which one places oneself between things and the names of things, a way of standing watch in this interval of silence and allowing things to be seen—as if for the first time—and henceforth to be given their names. The poet, who is the first man to be born, is also the last. He is Adam, but he is also the end of all generations: the mute heir of the builders of Babel. For it is he who must learn to speak from his eyes—and cure himself of seeing with his mouth.

—Paul Auster. "The Decisive Moment", Talking to Strangers: Selected Essays (Picador, 2019)

stick figures

The alphabet: Those stick figures signaling us toward sound, then speech.

belongs neither

For [Luce] Irigaray, a philosophy that is also a wisdom of love requires a speech which is not ‘authoritarian’ or ‘pedagogical’. Instead, it should have as its aim the production of a ‘sharing’ between the speaker and the listener. When this occurs: ‘between the two something exists that belongs neither to the one nor to the other, nor moreover to any word. And this something must, in part, remain indeterminate’.

—Ben Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (Routledge, 2016) [quoted sections above come from Luce Irigaray’s The Way of Love (London and New York Continuum, 2002), translation by Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhàcek.]

putting poets aside

And so a gathering like this of ours, when it includes such men as most of us claim to be, requires no extraneous voices, not even of the poets, whom one cannot question on the sense of what they say; when they are adduced in discussion we are generally told by some that the poet thought so and so, and by others, something different, and they go on arguing about a matter which they are powerless to determine. No, this sort of meeting is avoided by men of culture, who prefer to converse directly with each other, and to use their own way of speech in putting one another by turns to the test. It is this sort of person that I think you and I ought rather to imitate; putting the poets aside, let us hold our discussion together in our own persons, making trial of the truth and of ourselves.

—Socrates in Plato’s Protagoras (Leob classical edition, W.R.M. Lamb translation)

empire poetry

Poetry, I’m afraid, is the apotheosis of lingual colonialism, as it colonizes all forms of literary output. No language poses impediment and whether elevated or common or neutral speech, it takes and remakes without pity or regret.

between two poles

Poetry pulled by the aesthetic poles of speech and song.

all of what she was

[Lorine Niedecker] wrote to Bob Nero, “I dream of an ease of speech that takes in the universe” (April 20, 1967). At the same time she recalled her beginnings: “Early in life I looked back of our buildings and said, ‘I am what I am because of all this’. “Lake Superior” negotiates the local and the global, the self and the species: we are what we are because of all this. Her point of access is the unselfconscious notations of geology and pre-history. There, through her own painstaking practice, she locates the solace of an immanent infinite.

—Jenny Penberthy, “Writing Lake Superior,” Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (U. of Iowa Press, 2008), edited by Elizabeth Willis.

three variants

There are three kinds of aphorists: The aphorist pure, who composes his/her brief utterances for effect. The aphorist embedded, whose aperçus arise here and there within prose or poetry. The aphorist accidental, who often uncorks a good one in casual speech recounted by others.

übersprache

The poem absolute, above all other human utterances.

freer speech

The poet is never strictly speaking.

first art

The joy to think that our art originates in the era of the earliest human speech.

only the work

OF POETRY

there is only the work.

The work is what speaks
and what is spoken
and what attends to hear
what is spoken

—William Bronk, Death is the Place (North Point Press, 1989)

carried far

The poet’s speech begins     a great way off.
The poet is     carried far away by speech

—Marina Tsvetayeva, opening of “The Poet,” Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva (E.P. Dutton, 1989), translated by Elaine Feinstein

only language to go on

The deep appeal of poetry as an art form comes from language (text/speech) being its only means.

not as an acrobat

Rexroth calls an "anthropological religion" the basis for his poetry. He has written that the anthropologist Edward Sapir was “the only person I have ever met who thoroughly understood what I dreamed of doing with poetry. Out of anthropology, psychology, and linguistics he had developed a kind of philosophy of interpersonal communion and communication.” Certainly there is a striking resemblance between Rexroth’s thought and that of Sapir, who, for example,…thought that the best poetic style “allows the artist’s personality to be as a presence, not as an acrobat,” because such artists fit “their deep intuition to the provincial accents of their daily speech” rather than weave “a private technical art fabric of their own.”

—Morgan Gibson, Kenneth Rexroth (Twayne Publishers, 1972)

(Edward Sapir’s words quoted from Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech, 1921)

kayak tongue

Let your kayak tongue drop into the rapids of speech.