Quotes About Language

Soit toujours poète, même en prose 

Manier savamment une langue, c'est pratiquer une espèce de sorcellerie évocatoire »

Sois toujours poète, même en prose

once said that the "Language Poets" take a private space on the public beach. My response to this is that it takes a private place within for the individual to find any comfort or freedom at all on the public beach – which, in fact, is the only beach for most of us.

Length and stress are both mutated in an open area where language mobilizes a network of meaning using the open space as a kind of time divided by an unquantified movement of the eye and breath while reading.

This is your poetry. Join the network to discover new ways of making meaning. Do not fixate on poem, voice, other striated and arbitrary meaning formations. We offer a processual, unbounded methodology that can be applied to any language and can include all languages.

and love is a word used too much and much too soon.

Why do we embroider everything we say with special emphasis when all we really need to do is simply say what needs to he said? Of course the fact is that there is very little that needs to be said.

that your power of command with simple language was one of the magnificent things of our century. (from the poem: result)

We use such big words to move nowhere.

All of which is to say, I didn't pay a hell of a lot of attention to grammar, and when I write it is for the love of the word, the color, like tossing paint on a canvas, and using a lot of ear and having read a bit here and there, I generally come out ok, but technically I don't know what's happening, nor do I care.

cunt and Kant and a happy home

The difference between being subtle and abstract is the difference between knowing and saying it in a gentler way and not knowing and saying it in a way that will let you off the hook. To be abstract with the word is all right if you use it like paint and seek the pure word, but it is difficult, in the language, to have near purity without near meaning.

by the way . . . I realize I switch from present to past tense, and if you don't like it . . . ram a nipple up your scrotum. -printer: leave this in.)

La poesía dice demasiado en demasiado poco tiempo; la prosa dice demasiado poco y se toma demasiado tiempo.

I had the dictionary at my elbow. Every now and then I would flip a page, find a large incomprehensible word and build a sentence or a paragraph out of the idea.

they would say 'he said this, he did that', but they would never say 'she said this, she did that'. So I would say, they are sick, and I am well. Pardon me.

I saw her walk in out of the corner of my eye. Why do they say "corner of the eye"? Eyes have no corners.

Wise son of a bitch, you're one of those sons of bitches with a vocabulary and you like to lay it around!

Che razza di investigatore sei? fece lui. Il migliore di L.A. Ah sì? E che cosa vuol dire L.A.? Leccatori d'Ano.

las palabras bonitas como las mujeres bonitas se arrugan y mueren.

Poetry says too much in too short a time; prose says too little and takes too long.

Poezia spune prea multe într-un timp prea scurt; proza spune prea puÅ£in ÅŸi dureaz? prea mult.

When the rivers receded, they exposed a wide strip of bottomland. Into this land a group of Indians coalesced sometime before 800 A.D. Nobody knows what these people called themselves or which language they spoke. They were not "Cahokians