#on language

[feral-ballad]

Victoria Chang, from Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief; “Dear Teacher,”

[Text ID: “The language of poetry reminded me to stay alive. It reminded me that, when it felt like I had nothing, I was nothing, I still had words. I could ride language as if on a horseback, and it could take me anywhere, including deeply into myself.”]

[luthienne]

Most experiences are unsayable; they become real to us in a space no word has entered.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet (tr. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

[lonepower]

my dad and I just finished listening to a fascinating (and really pretty alarming) podcast about American literacy education recently—Sold a Story by Emily Hanford—and it got me wondering what my peers’ experience was, so here's my first poll! This pertains to people who learned to read in the U.S. specifically, so even if one of the other options matches your experience, I'd politely ask you to refrain from picking one (presumably you guys have better school districts than we do anyway). 

(the most horrifying part out of the entire thing was the fact that dubbya was the one to realize something was wrong. even a broken clock, I guess...?)

[stillorbitingu]

Vocabulary, Safia Elhillo

[nibelmundo]

You gave me a language to dwell in, a gift so perfect it seems my own invention. I have been thinking your spoken and written thoughts for so long I believed they were mine. I have been seeing the world through your eyes for so long, I believed that clear, clear view was my own.

Toni Morrison in her eulogy of James Baldwin in Lovalerie King and L. Scott, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays (2006, 2)

[stargir1z]

“When we lose linguistic diversity we suffer a consequent loss in the range of ways of experiencing the world.” - Beth Ann Fennelly, Fruits We'll Never Taste, Languages We'll Never Hear: The Need for Needless Complexity

[lookninjas]

Saw this opinion a couple times today (twitter thread about why the Baltics are independent countries and not just one Baltic megastate), and hadn't really noticed it before, so I'm curious how many of you might agree:

(I'm also curious how self-selecting my friend group and my mutual-in-laws group is on this topic, but we'll see.)

[bones-ivy-breath]

To the Word "Girl" by Anya Krugovoy Silver, from The Ninety-Third Name of God

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“When writing poetry one is always assisted and even carried away by the rhythm of all things outside, for the lyric cadence is that of nature: of the waters, the wind, the night. But in order to shape prose rhythmically, one has to immerse oneself deeply within oneself and detect the blood’s anonymous, multivaried rhythm. Prose is to be built like a cathedral: there one is truly without name, without ambition, without help: up in the scaffolding, alone with one’s conscience.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, from “On Language,” The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, ed. and trans. Ulrich Baer (Modern Library, 2005)

[Alive On All Channels]

[feral-ballad]

Rosario Castellanos, tr. by Magda Bogin, from The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos; "The splendor of being"

[Text ID: "A word is the taste / our tongue has of eternity; / that's why I speak."]

[luthienne]

Tony Hoagland, from Application for Release from the Dream; “The Complex Sentence”

[llovelymoonn]

on language

hayan charara something sinister: “usage” \\ carl sandburg languages \\ heather mchugh hinge & sign: poems, 1968-1993: “language lesson 1976″ \\ dannie abse of two languages \\ kimberly alidio my native language is noise \\ wendy barker taking a language \\ carl sandburg languages 

kofi

[evadwrites]

[nibelmundo]

Toni (Morrison)’s my ally and it’s really probably too complex to get into. She’s a black woman writer, which in the public domain makes it more difficult to talk about . . . Her gift is allegory. Tar Baby is an allegory. In fact all her novels are. But they’re hard to talk about in public. That’s where you get in trouble because her books and allegory are not always what they seem to be about. I was too occupied with my recent illness to deal with Beloved. But in general, she’s taken a myth, or she takes what seems to be a myth, and turns it into something else. I don’t know how to put this, Beloved could be the story of truth. She’s taken a whole lot of things and turned them upside down. Some of them you recognize the truth in it. I think that Toni’s very painful to read . . . Because it’s always, or most times, a horrifying allegory; but you recognize that it works. But you don’t really want to march through it. Sometimes people have a lot against Toni, but she’s got the most believing story of everybody, this rather elegant matron, whose intentions really are serious, and according to some people, lethal.

1987 interview of James Baldwin in Lovalerie King and L. Scott, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays (2006, 1)

[motifcollector]

If I hadn’t known her so well, I’m sure I would have read her books. But as I did know her, I was afraid to open them. What if I found myself described in them in a way that I couldn’t fathom? Or my favourite places, which for her are something completely different from what they are to me? In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones

[thismustbeso]

The River, Mary Oliver