“Poets are supremely interested in what language can't do, in order to gesture outside, they use language in a way that flirts with its destruction.”

—  Don McKay

Baler Twine

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Poets are supremely interested in what language can't do, in order to gesture outside, they use language in a way that …" by Don McKay?
Don McKay photo
Don McKay 10
Canadian poet 1942

Related quotes

Antonin Artaud photo
William Carlos Williams photo

“The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

From A Note on Poetry (circa 1936) quoted in Modern American Poetry (1950) by Louis Untermeyer
General sources

Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned photo
John Zerzan photo
Thomas Merton photo

“The logic of the poet — that is, the logic of language or the experience itself — develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton (1959)
Context: There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. The former is supple and lifelike, it follows our experience. The latter is abstract and rigid, more ideal. The latter is perfectly necessary, perfectly reliable: the former is only sometimes reliable and hardly ever systematic. But the logic of mathematics achieves necessity at the expense of living truth, it is less real than the other, although more certain. It achieves certainty by a flight from the concrete into abstraction. Doubtless, to an idealist, this would seem to be a more perfect reality. I am not an idealist. The logic of the poet — that is, the logic of language or the experience itself — develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.

Frank Herbert photo

Related topics