pop, poetry, politics, and everything in-between.
After Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison died just a few days ago, I thought a lot about what her work meant to me, and I read a lot of tributes to her. The piece of writing that struck me most is this letter by nonbinary writer/ogbanje Akwaeke Emezi: The elderspirit of you leapt into my head …
Continue reading ““To Give a Being Like Me Language” – Akwaeke Emezi on Toni Morrison”
Every poem is a scene of language. It is a rite without a ceremony. Edward Hirsch How to Read A Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999)
Many men are intoxicated by what comes out of their mouths; what is extraordinary about Trump is how little it takes to get him drunk. More worrying is how little it takes to get his followers drunk. The riddle of Donald Trump: how a man of few words reached the pinnacle of power by Howard …
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all …
Language is fossil poetry. Ralph Waldo Emerson, from ‘The Poet’
This is not simply a war language; this is an American language. In Sharif’s rendering, “Look” is at once a command to see and to grieve the people these words describe — and also a means of implicating the reader in the violence delivered upon those people. A Poet Subverts the Defense Department’s Official Dictionary …
We operate all the time with language as if it says what we mean. Anne Carson, interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel for Writers & Company (via bostonpoetryslam)
What do I want to say with this new language that I can’t say in my native language—or any other language that currently exists? From The Lord of the Rings to A Game of Thrones, Josephine Livingstone explores the history of invented languages, over at The New Republic. (via millionsmillions)
We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both “what” we do (the name for the action that we characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act and its consequences. Judith …
nprbooks: If you’ve been following the Greek financial crisis, you’ve certainly seen that old cliché “it’s all Greek to me” in the headlines. Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer says Shakespeare probably popularized the phrase, but he didn’t actually come up with it. Its true origin is a bit of a mystery, though Zimmer …
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