5/12/2016

it's not an ability with language

I’m a proponent of the tradition of inspiration, like Octavio Paz and like Breton and the surrealists. To say I’m a “proponent” is, I suppose, a concession to civilized discourse, in which you’re supposed to admit your position may be arguable. It would be more honest of me to say I’m certain from direct experience that poetry is a mode of expression (which is to say a mode of existence) of the ongoingness, energy, essence of life and non-life. It’s not an ability with language. It’s a seizure of the substance and surface of language by language’s depth, which is simultaneously the depth of everything: “The everlasting Universe of things / Flows through the mind,” as Shelley puts it.

- A.F. Moritz, in interview with James W. Wood over at PRISM international. You can read the whole thing here.

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