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Freedom in the use of symbolism comes from the capacity to experience loss.

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

A friend of mine is a photographer or, as he puts it, an artist who uses photography. He’s also a professor, and I asked him recently if he finds it difficult to teach undergraduates. “Yes,” he said, “because photography doesn’t have to be art.” Unlike easel painting or classical ballet, photography is a fixture of the everyday world. It is ubiquitous: we see photographs on billboards, at bus stops, on social media. The photograph, in other words, is so closely linked to advertising that the ad seems not just to appropriate the image but to preempt it. Every picture wants to be worth a thousand clicks.

Compare that observation to something the poet Eileen Myles said in 2015 in The Paris Review: “It’s really hard to figure out what’s poetry and what’s a tweet at this time.” Photography doesn’t have to be art, and words—even those that, as Myles says, “notate a vivid, fleeting experience”—don’t have to be poetry. But how to tell the difference? If the Web-based explosion of images has depleted our ability to distinguish visual art from marketing or promotion, the Internet’s hunger for content in the form of first-person narrative—highly condensed, written in an oblique yet evocative style, anchored in feeling, and built on a fiction of intimacy between authors and their audiences—has surely affected how we evaluate poems.

Anahid Nersessian, “Transmissions from Another World”

A light, just now living, that has
never been, in its mortal life, turned off—

ON, it has never been, in its mortal
life, not ON,—

…when you ask what it is like

suddenly for what was always there
not to be there

for what had to be endured by those before you
to have to be endured now by you

LIKE, what in the world are such pervasive
vanishings LIKE,—

…no words it knows apply, and it is silent.

Silent. This is “the eternal silence of the dead.”

Frank Bidart, “Why the Dead Cannot Answer”, in Against Silence

Without clarity about what we need to make, and the choices that underlie it, the need to make is a curse, a misfortune.

Frank Bidart, “Advice to the Players”, in Star Dust

Breath is primary insofar as the spoken word is. The conception has a solid psychological and sensual basis in the daily experience of [people in an oral environment]. For the inhabitants of an oral society live much more intimately blended with their surroundings than we do. Space and the distances between things are not of first importance; these are aspects emphasized by the visual sense. What is vital, in a world of sound, is to maintain continuity. This attitude pervades archaic poetry and is strikingly present as well in the perceptual basis of the ancient physiologoi. […] A listener listening to an oral recitation is, as Hermann Fränkel puts it, “an open force-field” […] into whom sounds are being breathed in a continuous stream from the poet’s mouth. Written words, on the other hand, do not present such an all-persuasive sensual phenomenon. Literacy desensorializes words and reader. A reader must disconnect himself from the influx of sense impressions transmitted by nose, ear, tongue and skin if he is to concentrate upon his reading. A written text separates words from one another, separates words from the environment, separates words from the reader (or writer) and separates the reader (or writer) from his environment. Separation is painful. The evidence of epigraphy shows how long it takes people to systematize word-division in writing, indicating the novelty and difficulty of this concept. As separable, controllable units of meaning, each with its own visible boundary, each with its own fixed and independent use, written words project their user into isolation.

That words have edges is an insight most vivid, then, for the reader or writer of them. Heard words may have no edges, or varying edges; oral traditions may have no concept of ‘word’ as a fixed and bounded vocable, or may employ a flexible concept. Homer’s word for ‘word’ (epos) includes the meanings ‘speech,’ ‘tale,’ ‘song,’ ‘line of verse’ or ‘epic poetry as a whole.’ All are breathable. The edges are irrelevant.

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

[E]pic diction has the same verb (mnaomai) for ‘to be mindful, to have in mind, to direct one’s attention to’ and ‘to woo, court, be a suitor.’ Stationed at the edge of itself, or of its present knowledge, the thinking mind launches a suit for understanding into the unknown. So too the wooer stands at the edge of his value as a person and asserts a claim across the boundaries of another. Both mind and wooer reach out from what is known and actual to something different, possibly better, desired. Something else. Think about what that feels like.

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

we used our words we used what words we had
to weld, what words we had we wielded, kneeled,
we knelt. & wept we wrung the wet the sweat
we wracked our lips we rang for words to ward
off sleep to warn to want ourselves. to want
the earth we mouthed it wound our vowels until
it fit, in fits the earth we mounted roused
& rocked we harped we yawned & tried to yawp
& tried to fix, affixed, we facted, felt.
we fattened fanfared anthemed hammered, felt
the words’ worth stagnate, snap in half in heat
the wane the melt what words we’d hoarded halved
& holey, porous. meanwhile tide still tide.
& we: still washed for sounds to mark. & marked.

Franny Choi, “We Used Our Words We Used What Words We Had”

The original mistake in every sentence: metaphor. Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; “the presentation of facts of one category in the idiom appropriate to another.” The original sentence, the original metaphor: Tat Tvam Asi, Thou art that; or hoc est corpus meum, this is my body. Making this thing other: “We already and first of all discern him making this thing other.” Metaphor is mistake or impropriety; a faux pas, or slip of the tongue; a little madness; petit mal; a little seizure or inspiration.

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

“The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s Pensées?” [Swann] articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. “And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years,” he went on, showing that contempt for worldly matters which some men of the world like to affect, “we should read that the Queen arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Léon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at a happy medium.”

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: Swann’s Way, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin