by Ben Lerner
““To derive your understanding of a word by watching others adjust to your use of it: Do you remember the feeling that sense was provisional and that two people could build around an utterance a world in which any usage signified? I think that's poetry. And when I felt I finally mastered a word, when I could slide it into a sentence with a satisfying click, that wasn't poetry anymore--that was something else, something functional within a world, not the liquefaction of its limits.”
“To derive your understanding of a word by watching others adjust to your use of it: Do you remember the feeling that sense was provisional and that two people could build around an utterance a world in which any usage signified? I think that's poetry. And when I felt I finally mastered a word, when I could slide it into a sentence with a satisfying click, that wasn't poetry anymore--that was something else, something functional within a world, not the liquefaction of its limits.”
““Great poets confront the limits of actual poems, defeat or at least suspend that actuality, sometimes quit writing altogether, becoming celebrated for their silence; truly horrible poets unwittingly provide a glimmer of virtual possibility via the extremity of their failure”
“Great poets confront the limits of actual poems, defeat or at least suspend that actuality, sometimes quit writing altogether, becoming celebrated for their silence; truly horrible poets unwittingly provide a glimmer of virtual possibility via the extremity of their failure”
““Poets are liars not because, as Socrates says, they can fool us with the power of their imitations, but because identifying yourself as a poet implies you might overcome the bitter logic of the poetic principle, and you can't. You can only compose poems that, when read with perfect contempt, clear a place for the genuine Poem that never appears.”
“Poets are liars not because, as Socrates says, they can fool us with the power of their imitations, but because identifying yourself as a poet implies you might overcome the bitter logic of the poetic principle, and you can't. You can only compose poems that, when read with perfect contempt, clear a place for the genuine Poem that never appears.”
““You're a poet, however, whether or not you know it, because to be part of a linguistic community--to be hailed as a 'you' at all--is to be endowed with poetic capacity.”
“You're a poet, however, whether or not you know it, because to be part of a linguistic community--to be hailed as a 'you' at all--is to be endowed with poetic capacity.”
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 10: 0865478201
ISBN 13: 9780865478206
