“… the feeling more than the awareness, the intuition that literary prose – in this case, I picture myself while I am writing – can manifest as pure communication and in a perfect style, but also with a certain structure, a certain syntactic architecture, a certain articulation of words, a rhythm in the use of punctuation or separation into sections, a cadence that the reader’s internal ear can recognize more or less clearly as a musical element.”
- Julio Cortazar, Literature Class
“And there was also something in his practice which corresponded to the poetics of Robert Frost, in so far as the thing that MacDiarmid was after in the deep Scottish ear resembled what Frost called ‘the sound of sense’, a phonetic patterning which preceded speech and authenticated it, a kind of pre-verbal register to which the poetic voice had to be tuned.”
- Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry
—
“That’s where the problem begins, because if he uses the language that expresses the world he is attacking, that language will betray him. How can he denounce something with the tools that are used by the enemy, that is, the stratified, codified language, a language already used by the masters and their disciples?”
- Julio Cortazar, Literature Class
“… knowledge of the oppressor
is the oppressor’s language
yet I need it to talk to you
(the fracture of order
the repair of speech
to overcome this suffering…)”
- Adrienne Rich, The Burning of Paper instead of Children
—
“At the beginning there appeared a poet like Mayakovsky. He destroyed the language of poetry and prose and created a new language, which isn’t easy to do. It wasn’t immediately understandable, and it contained dizzying and difficult images.”
- Julio Cortazar, Literature Class
“Bits of landscape melted into – burned themselves into – Mayakovsky’s poems.”
- Victor Shklovsky, Once Upon a Time
—
“… colonization, poverty, and goonish governments also mutilate us aesthetically.”
- Julio Cortazar, Literature Class
“It didn’t require great character at all
our refusal disagreement and resistance
we had a shred of necessary courage
but fundamentally it was a matter of taste
Yes taste
in which there are fibers of soul the cartilage of conscience
…
So aesthetics can be helpful in life
one should not neglect the study of beauty…
- Zbigniew Herbert, The Power of Taste
anenduringromantic 