the rhythms of their bodies together

When he is inside her, Irish words float up of their own accord. She utters things she has not thought of for so long, language inspired by the rhythms of their bodies together. Urgent and patient, by turns.

Leim an bhradain, the salmon’s leap, a phrase from a poem. O’a mhaighdean rocheansa, the beginning of a prayer.

As she moves toward rapture she remembers a canticle, cleitearnach sciathan, the flutter of wings, the words coming quick on her breath. She repeats them, each sound singeing the air.

Regina McBride – The Land of Women

events entwined with secrecies

So much of life is invisible, inscrutable: layers of thoughts, feelings, outward events entwined with secrecies, ambiguities, ambivalences, obscurities, darknesses strongly present even to the one who’s lived it – maybe especially to the one who’s lived it. I didn’t seek to find her, wandered instead within and among her fragments of language – notebooks, drafts, journals, fictions, letters, essays, and found there whole worlds like spinning planets, lived in their cold light and burning light, wondering where I was, where they might take me.

Laurie Sheck – A Monster’s Notes

wonder coupled with joy

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. In poetry, wonder is coupled with the joy of speech. In trying to sharpen the awareness of language at the level of poems, we get the impression that we are touching the man whose speech is new in that it is not limited to expressing ideas or sensations, but tries to have a future. One would say that poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language. 

Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos 

visual or aural representation…

To me, poems in some ways are wishes. They’re asking us to look at what our best possible situation could be, so that we have an actual visual or aural representation of what we can work toward. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s like that. It means that we wish it to be like that, and so if we can somehow make that alive in language, we can actually make it alive in reality. 

Dorianne Laux – A Conversation with Dorianne Laux: Interview in Willow Springs 64 

secret language

Poetry remakes and prolongs language; every poetic language begins by being a secret language, that is, the creation of a personal universe, of a completely closed world. The purest poetic act seems to re-create language from an inner experience that … reveals the essence of things.  

Mircea Eliade – Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy 

the rendering of the soul…

The modern poet is constantly experimenting with new verse-forms and poetic techniques. The use of slang and colloquialism has become common. The language and rhythm of poetry approximate more and more to those of common speech. The bonds of metre have been loosened. Rules of rhyme or metre are not followed. Stresses vary according to emotion. Verse-rhythm is replaced by sense-rhythm. The influence of modern psychologists, Freud, Jung and Bergson has become a commonplace. Emphasis has shifted from the externals to the rendering of the soul or Psyche. 

Literaturemini 

good sex and good poetry

I guess I’m interested in poems that explore the tension between formal procedure, craft, and mess. Because that’s my personal taste. Like, the confessional; you know, it’s a fraught term, but what do I love about Plath? I think it’s that line she walks between tight craft and mess: psychic mess, language mess, sprawl, unable-to-be-contained fucking mess. I’m not interested in a formal poem that follows its rules. That feels patriarchal to me […..]  

There’s something about the ephemeral and the ineffable in both good sex and good poetry. Both are trying to capture some kind of container that is destined to dissolve. I also think there’s something to the form of a poem that reminds me of edging, or orgasm denial or delay…. In any good literature, a good poem does withhold, so there is the thing about giving you just enough drip of pleasure to be like … stay with me. It’s good.  

I used to write a kink series for the Rumpus, where I’d ask writers to think about their writing practice in relation to their kink practice. I never wrote one about mine, but if I had, I would’ve written about objectification and the sort of worshipping of words that one does in a poem. I want to be reverently objectified. And I think that a poem reverently objectifies language. I think that’s part of why I’ve always loved poetry. The way it traffics in the concrete and in sound play and in just the dense material fact of language feels really fetishy to me. I guess because it’s like worshipping the power of this stuff. Like, leather, god, I just want to feel it and smell it, and I think a poem is like that. I want to just stay there and go deep with it. I want to ingest it. I want to pray to it. It’s the talismanic power of it. 

Arielle Greenberg – Country Kink  

sliding into figures of speech

I often think of a poem as a dialogue. Not just between reader and writer but a dialogue with its own history and with the history of its form. Because of the way language accrues meaning through usage, every word has some relation to a past, a record of its public and private usage, where you learned it, how you heard it used or misused, what the contexts were in which you tried it out. Where did you first say “love” or “come” or “here”? How did you arrive at “hunger”— and how did its meaning evolve?  

 
The English language is always sliding into figures of speech — and the complexity and resonance of our usage has to do with how we’ve heard these figures and how we try to shape or inflect them in order to echo those histories or to step away from them in order to mean something else. I want to do both of those things. I like generating and playing on top of echoes. With language the echoes are always there. What’s harder, I think, is when you want to set them aside to articulate a cleaner melody line — which might be closer to what I’m trying to work with in some of my shorter lyric poems, to intensify the line rather than embellish it, to use familiar materials from common usage to generate new patterns.   

Elizabeth Willis – interviewed by Sean Patrick Hill 

Silence

And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.

Hanif Kureishi – Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories

from the dream mind

Language is consciousness, and this is where fiction is made. Poetry springs from the dream mind, the unconscious. Poetry is never comfortable in language because the unconscious doesn’t know how to speak. All writing is storytelling. Fiction describes reality with words, poetry with images. I would guess in the history of literature fiction came first and taught poetry how to speak. The process I’m taking about, I call dreaming awake. Being fully conscious while still dreaming on the page.

Russell Edson – An Interview with Russell Edson by Mark Tursi in Double Room (no. 4 Spring/Summer 2004)