## Metadata - Author: [[Stephen Dobyns]] - Full Title: Next Word, Better Word - Category: #books ## Highlights - The main problem with turning the world into language is that it’s, well, impossible. The word is always less than the thing it is meant to represent. No matter how complicated, exact, true, and beautiful the language may become, it is always a diminishment of the reality described. ([Location 104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=104)) - It also seemed back then that poetry was something I could pick up and use for my pleasure, in the same way I might pick up a cigarette or a glass of whiskey. But with any pastime that becomes a passion, it’s not your plaything; rather, you become its plaything. ([Location 109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=109)) - Dorothy Parker once rented a small office in which to write, and she grew so lonely that she hung a sign on the door that read “Men.” ([Location 118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=118)) - the poet needs a sense of his or her own totality, the sins and virtues, the faults and qualities altogether, rather than to have only a sense of one’s censored or improved or even dreadful self. To chip away at self-deception means to seek a sense of one’s totality. ([Location 131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=131)) - To see a faroff speck of light and walk toward it alone is far harder without companions and friends. The existence of a thousand minute groups is amply justified if in only one of them somebody finds himself and the words he needs.”2 ([Location 169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=169)) - Goethe, as quoted by Walter Jackson Bate, said that Shakespeare “‘gives us golden apples in silver dishes.’” By careful study we may acquire the silver dishes while discovering we have “only potatoes to put in them.” ([Location 229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=229)) - For many writers, the world isn’t real until they have put it into language. They have to translate it into a medium that, they think, promises to make sense of it. Then they look at what they have made—a thing that has become an object as much as a vase is an object—and even if they decide it is accurate, they see it is still incomplete. After all, language is a diminishment. And so, being hopeful creatures, they attack it again. ([Location 233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=233)) - One writes a poem because one is unable to remain silent and from a desire to create something beautiful, but one also writes out of a sense of play, which is a force behind all art. A sense of emotional need and a sense of play can exist side by side without contradiction. ([Location 400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=400)) - In life we are constantly attentive to the next moment, our elaborate systems of cause and effect, our never-ending watchfulness, our imagining, planning, worrying, evading, and anticipating of what’s coming next. The sequential arts—literature, dance, music—are metaphors for that process. We have a sense of how things should be and are attentive to anything out of the ordinary. This attentiveness to stimuli coming out of the future that we haven’t anticipated—art makes use of it as play, as seriousness, as medium, as matter. ([Location 492](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=492)) - We all have a body of definitions that seeks to fix the limits of how we are and how the world should be. These definitions and limits form the foundation of our complacency, and we have spent many years weaving these elements together. A good poem will challenge this. Most simply, our complacency allows us to be comfortable in the present with little concern about the future or the past. A poem, if only by presenting us with its underlying question of “How does one live?” can lead us to consider the entire arc of our lives. ([Location 522](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=522)) - “To have something to say; to say it under pretty strict limits of form and very strict ones of space; to say it forcibly; to say it beautifully: these are the four great requirements of the poet in general.”1 ([Location 590](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=590)) - Subject matter begins when something takes our attention, a word that derives from the Latin verb attendere, meaning to stretch toward, to give heed to. Before that, we may exist in a state of indifference, or stasis. For the early Greeks this was a person’s natural state, and when he or she was disturbed, it happened because of the intervention of a function god—separate gods of anger, fear, joy, desire, courage, ambition, grief, and so on—smaller deities who were directed by the more significant Olympian gods such as Zeus, Hera, or Apollo. When a person was touched by a function god, he or she became animated; that is, filled with breath. The disturbance moved that person from equilibrium through interest—which in Latin meant “to be between”—to a concern, which, again from Latin, for sifting, mixing together, and, by extension, scrutinizing or trying to comprehend. My emphasis on etymology is an attempt to get past my, or our, being so accustomed to a word that it becomes merely a sign, to try to reach the word’s more concrete beginning in metaphor. From a concerned state, we might return to indifference, equilibrium, or remain attentive; or we might move up the ladder of synonyms—concern, anxiety, fear, terror; or concern, liking, affection, love; or concern, desire, action, possession. This is the movement of our emotional and intellectual lives. Something takes our attention, whether from curiosity or from being hit over the head. At this point we might lapse back to equilibrium or move forward by attraction (or away through aversion). Clearly, if one is hit over the head, this process is very rapid, but so is the process of falling in love at first sight, or seeing an object—a book or ring—that one wants to possess. Many concerns stay with us over long periods of time, even our entire lives. Our personalities are defined by those concerns. ([Location 596](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=596)) - When I read the books by Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines and Vision and Revision, which lay out Yeats’s drafts of a dozen or so poems, I was amazed at Yeats’s patience and tenacity as he moved from clumsiness to grace. ([Location 623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=623)) - Here is “Insignificant Needs” by the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos (translated by Minas Sarras). The houses jammed one on top of the other, or face to face without exchanging glances. The elbows of the chimneys shove each other in the night. The bakery’s light is a sigh that allows a small passage on the street. A cat looks behind her. Vanishes. A man entered his room. On his blanket, over his iron bed, he found reclining the crowded desolation of the city. As he was undressing, he recalled that he hadn’t noticed if there was a moon. The bulks of the houses were shuffling in his memory like cards in a closed, secretive gambling room where all the players had lost. And he needed to imagine that someone must love him, within these numberless houses, so that he could sleep, so that he could wake up. But, yes, of course there was a moon—he remembered its illumination in a ditch with soapy water.2 ([Location 626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=626)) - What is this, and what does it mean? The mind engages with the question and remains engaged until the question is answered, or we decide it’s unanswerable, or we reach a place in between; that is, we reach a sense of meaning that we are unable to paraphrase but seem to grasp. This is a characteristic of a symbol. It continues to give back meaning, while a sign, like the glyphs signifying male and female restrooms, quickly reveal their entire significance. ([Location 649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=649)) - Every line, every sentence has to have within it a reason to read the next. It is energy that propels the reader down the page, and two major sources of energy are suspense and surprise. ([Location 696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=696)) - while a discursive argument proceeds in a linear manner, a nondiscursive argument defies linearity. Only at the end do we see the poem’s progression. Before that the poem’s juxtapositions and surprises keep us balanced between the hope it will successfully resolve itself and the worry it will fall apart. ([Location 722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=722)) - The information in literature, a sequential art, seems to stream toward us from out of the future. This is an illusion because the progression of the work of literature is already fixed; it has been written down. The reader or listener takes in this information and anticipates what is coming next. In this he or she is helped by elements of the form. In literature a major element is the structure of English sentences, the great majority of which precede subject-predicate-object. So we hear the subject and we know that the predicate is coming. (As we should know, in Yeats’s line “I have met them at close of day,” “I” is the subject, the verb “have met” is the predicate, and “them” is the object.) And we have our sense of logic, of cause and effect, of credibility, our knowledge of the world, and through this and more we sift the information on the page. As we engage in this illusion and try to guess what is approaching, the poet tries to surprise us with the unexpected. In art these unexpected events are safe, relatively. They are part of the play element, and in a small way they educate us. They keep us quick and light on our feet. They let us imagine the possible. Although their primary function is to make us want to read, they are also part of the game—a ball is being hit over the net. As in any game, we want to win, which, in reading a poem, is no more than understanding and drawing from the poem such pleasures as a poem provides. But with his twists and turns, his manipulation of tension and surprise, Berryman plays with us. He keeps us on the very line between pleasure and frustration. Will it come off or not? And so, along with the roles of poet, bon vivant, cultural icon, Berryman becomes our primary competitor. Our engagement with the poem and our interest in winning the game are a ritualization of the very passion to survive in life. That is our primary concern, and whatever else we might do, that concern, survival, comes first. We live not in this moment but in the next, and at any time our senses are busily absorbing data to determine the nature of that moment. We do this without thought until something unexpected happens, and then we see that we were really paying attention all along. But not only is our attention on the next second; we also spend many waking hours attempting to plot the trajectory of our lives—the next hours, days, years. We consider alternatives. We move between hope and despair. We study other people, analyzing and judging what they are doing, as we measure ourselves against them. As I said, we go to poetry and the other arts for knowledge, to expand our moral experience of the world, for sustenance, survival, and connection. ([Location 739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=739)) - “The poet’s mode of thought is the product of all sides of his personality: the intellectual, physiological, spiritual, and emotional, a synthesis of what he perceives through his senses, his instincts and desires, and the higher aspirations of his spirit. All these can be bound together only by some dominant idea which shapes the personality. If there is no such idea, one will have, at best, a clever craftsman, a ‘translator of ready-made ideas,’ a mechanical nightingale. The unifying idea can be located at any level of the personality—in its deep reaches or on the surface.” ([Location 814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=814)) - “We could in fact argue that the remorseless deepening of self-consciousness before the rich and intimidating legacy of the past, has become the single greatest problem that modern art . . . has had to face, and that it will become increasingly so in the future.” ([Location 976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=976)) - Our subject matter and its existence on the page come out of that divided nature. Is there someone of whom it can be said that he or she has no such flaw? Of course not. We need not flaunt our flaws on the page, but neither should they be excluded for reasons of modesty, ego, or political correctness. This can be difficult to do. Many reasons exist why we might mute or distort our voices out of psychological constraint, and where those constraints interfere with our work can be difficult to uncover. When one seeks the best word among many to put down in a poem, one must proceed by constantly challenging one’s own veracity. How else will I find my path between what might be truth and what might be rationalization? After all, my rationalizations may try to convince me that the psychological constraint is an aesthetic choice. If I accept that—and my rationalizations spring from my most dearly held opinions—then I am allowing the poem to have a moral purpose. ([Location 1459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=1459)) - As English speakers, we are blessed in our synonyms. Due to the Norman Conquest of 1066, thousands of Norman and Old French words were added to Old English, with the result that English has more synonyms than other Western languages. Another effect of the Conquest was the gradual loss of English inflections—all those word endings that one must memorize when learning other languages, which govern our sense of the subject, verb, and object by giving us information about gender, number, case, tense, and person. As Old English evolved into Middle English, these inflections began to disappear. Middle English was the language of the conquered people. It was spoken, rather than written down, and the word endings, the inflections, were gradually lopped off. The aristocracy spoke Norman and French, and until the Statute of Pleading in 1362 all court proceedings were written in Latin. After that date they were written in (Middle) English: Chaucer’s English. ([Location 1508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=1508)) - The effect of the loss of inflections is the unadorned syllable and the result that English has more word endings than other Western languages. Because the presence of inflections means fewer word endings, it is easier to rhyme in languages like French, Spanish, and Italian than in English. This was quickly made apparent to Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey, early in the sixteenth century when they began to adapt the Petrarchan sonnet form to English use. In the Petrarchan sonnet the rhyme scheme is the same in the first two quatrains, so the author has to come up with eight words to fit two rhymes. In the English sonnet, as it developed, the first two quatrains didn’t use the same rhymes, and the poet could use four rhymes with eight words. What is abba-abba in Petrarch became abab-cdcd in the English sonnet. This creates different expectations. When we hear a poem, it comes to us in a string of mostly uninflected syllables. The third person singular verb adds an -s, the past tenses will add an -ed or -en, and the present participles will add -ing, but this is small potatoes in the vast warehouse of possible word endings. When we read the first sentence of a poem on the page, rather than hearing it out loud, we have a more accurate idea of what might lie ahead because of the shape of the poem and because we might have noticed certain words farther on, but our basic experience is still syllable by syllable, and we ready ourselves for what is coming with our knowledge of word order and our sense of cause and effect. If you imagine a stream of sound coming from a person’s mouth, then syllables are junctures within that stream. The stream becomes segmented. Our word “word” derives from the proto-Indo-European for breaking off or biting off something. It goes back to the idea that we have a steady stream of preexisting sound, and we bite chunks out of it to make individual words. Well, what do we do with these chunks? We speak. The word “speak” derives from the proto-Indo-European for “strew,” “sprinkle,” “scatter,” which have the same root. We scatter words as we might scatter straw or sparks. To speak, then, is to bite off pieces of sound from a stream of sound and scatter them in front of other people. ([Location 1520](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=1520)) - Neurolinguists use the word “chunking” to describe what happens when we process syntax. The term was coined by George A. Miller in his 1956 paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” in which Miller wrote that our immediate or short-term memory has a capacity of “seven, plus or minus two, chunks” of information, a number which drops to about five when English monosyllabic words are used. As words come at us, we tend to process them in groups of five syllables, though we can teach ourselves to increase that number. ([Location 1537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=1537)) - A syllable can have up to three parts, which, as The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics will tell you, are “onset,” “nucleus” or “peak,” and “coda.”2 In a three-part syllable the nucleus or peak is the vowel, and the onset and coda “are consonants or consonant clusters.” Obviously a monosyllabic word is one syllable, while a polysyllabic word is made up of syllables which, by themselves, may or may not be words. A three-part syllable can be as different as the words “bit” and “through,” “known” or “cat.” A two-part syllable… ([Location 1542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=1542)) - A syllable may be closed or open. If it ends with a vowel sound, the syllable is open—one can sound it indefinitely—but that vowel sound need not be a vowel, as is the case with the word/syllable “through.” “Bit,” “peak,” and “root” are all closed syllables. We can’t keep sounding them. There is also an in-between group of syllables ending in consonants that are neither completely open nor closed. These are syllables ending in labials, nasals, and sibilants. The words “hill,” “shown,” and “bits” can… ([Location 1548](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=1548)) - Three intonational features form the basis for three different metrical systems throughout the world. The Germanic languages use a prosody based on a stress system; the Romance languages use a prosody based on duration, as does Arabic poetry; while two thousand of the world’s languages, many of them Asian, use a system based on pitch. As far as I know, there is no prosodic system based on timbre, but one can be imagined. ([Location 1606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=1606)) - Tags: [[writing]] - We read by anticipating what will happen next. If everything we anticipate turns out to be true, we grow bored. If nothing turns out true, we grow frustrated. Consequently, the writer learns to play with our expectations, moving between the possible frustrations of obviousness and excessive obscurity, while still holding out the hope that the poem will ultimately give us the sort of reward our reading experience has taught us to expect. ([Location 1966](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=1966)) - A poem, as we proceed down the page, moves back and forth between tension and rest. Enjambment creates tension; an end-stopped line creates rest. To establish a pattern and move away from it creates tension; to return to the pattern creates rest. ([Location 1979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=1979)) - the poet begins to write when something happens to move him or her to such a degree that he or she is unable to remain silent and so the poet, to paraphrase Philip Larkin, creates a small machine out of words which sets off this same emotion in another human being, anytime or anyplace. This causal event may be an actual event—for instance, a death. It may be a remembered event. It may be an idea or an abstraction. It may be entirely or partly invented. And, as Larkin says, it is the emotion, not the event, that is important, so the event that the poet uses to present the emotion may not in fact be the actual causal event. ([Location 2432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=2432)) - in both fiction and poetry the use of obscurity creates tension, while clarity creates a rest; a long sentence will create tension and a shorter sentence will create rest. ([Location 2748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=2748)) - Writing a poem is mostly the process of mining one’s unconscious; or, if you prefer, the left brain mining the right brain. It begins in various ways, but mostly it starts when the poet hits upon something that can be used as a metaphor, although at times even this is too precise; rather, there is a sudden alertness and one begins writing to discover why one is writing. After all, writing in both poetry and prose is a form of thought about things that can only be reached through writing. ([Location 3537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=3537)) - In letters Rilke condemned his early poetry, meaning poetry he wrote before 1900, saying the poems didn’t have enough patience in them. Instead of waiting when he felt stuck, he forced the poem in a certain direction with his intellect, while the language for the most part was a result of default moves; that is, language or ideas he had used in other poems. ([Location 3558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=3558)) - The danger is in cutting parts that seem rough or don’t make sense instead of investigating them and perhaps adding to them. Again, you can’t let the critical mind interfere with the creative. One needs to trust one’s intuition; if something is on the page, it is often there for a reason. To cut something out before discovering its originating cause can be a mistake, and is usually a result of impatience. ([Location 3612](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=3612)) - A poem uses its initial energy to move forward through patterns of tension and rest. This can be obvious, as might be the case with rhyme and meter, or it can be so subtle as to appear nonexistent. An enjambed line creates tension; an end-stopped line creates rest. A long sentence creates tension; a short sentence creates rest. Obscurity creates tension; clarity creates rest. ([Location 3712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=3712)) - The reason why polysyllabic words are less common in poetry is because most have one stressed and three or four unstressed syllables. A number of these together may make the line flaccid and turn it to prose. ([Location 3744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=3744)) - The Conquest gave us a French vocabulary to put beside the Old English, with the result that modern English has more synonyms than any other Western language. ([Location 4204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=4204)) - English words, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, tend to be more human and concrete; French words are more intellectual and abstract. Consider these English and French parings: freedom and liberty, friendship and amity, hatred and enmity, love and affection, likelihood and probability, truth and veracity, lying and mendacity. “Craftsmen,” says the Britannica, “bear names of English origin: baker, builder, fisherman, hedger, miller, shepherd, next word, better word shoemaker, wainwright and weaver; but names of skilled artisans are French: carpenter, draper, haberdasher, joiner, mason, painter, plumber and tailor.” ([Location 4211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=4211)) - When we look at the etymology of a word, we often find the descriptive action or metaphor that gave rise to it. To return to Wordsworth’s sonnet and the word “grief,” we now hear the word as an abstraction. It takes a poem like Wordsworth’s to give it sufficient specificity and to enable us to experience it. The word, however, derives from a Latin word—gravis—for heavy, coming from a PIE base—gwer—meaning heavy but also mill, as in heavy as a millstone. To grieve is to carry the weight of a millstone. Long ago to utter the abstraction was to experience the specificity of the metaphor. ([Location 4221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=4221)) - Consider “vicissitude” from Wordsworth’s fourth line, where he describes the tomb as “that spot which no vicissitude can find.” It derives from the Latin vix (genitive vices), meaning a change or alternation. The word “vicarious” has the same root, as does “vicar,” a person who acts in the place of someone else. The Latin word derives from the PIE word weik, meaning to bend or change. This is the source of the word “weak,” lacking in strength—but also of “week,” meaning a period of change. But the PIE word first meant a plant with thin, flexible branches. The word “wicker” has the same source, as does “willow,” so the word “weak” meant to bend as a reed bends. The condition of constant change, which is found in “vicissitude,” is, again, to bend as the reed bends. The original coining of the word formed a metaphor for weakness and changeability, ([Location 4226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=4226)) - The first thing to say is that the poet is a maker of poems, and that the maker is not the same as the person. The quality of the maker’s productions is not diminished by his or her personal shortcomings or failings in life, and conversely, the successes or social privilege of the person do not improve mediocre poetic production: all that is ad hominem. The person, in the course of coming into and passing through adulthood, forms a self out of life’s experiences, but the maker is formed specifically out of a decision to write poetry, to practice . . . , to learn technique, and to continue to write. . . . Thus the poet develops a second self, emergent from the first yet supersessive to it; from such augmentation comes enhanced opportunities for complex psychic relations. The maker is able to quarry the person (i.e., memory and sensibility) for experiences, reflections, insights, sensations, ambiguities, ambivalences, feelings, and thoughts—all potential threads to be woven into the emergent fabric of the poem. Most importantly, the maker can take advantage of these complex psychic interactions by creating a speaker for the poem, a persona that is quite distinct from the person. One may reasonably wonder if it is even possible to say when one is the one self and when the other. The person is a person ever, obviously, but the maker is only a maker in the act of composing verse. ([Location 4307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=4307)) - John Stuart Mill in his 1833 essay “What Is Poetry?” wrote, “Poetry is feeling confessing itself in moments of solitude.” When what is said “is not itself the end, but a means to an end . . . of making an impression on another mind, then it ceases to be poetry, and becomes eloquence.” ([Location 4323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=4323)) - The word “despair” comes from the Latin desperare, meaning to be without hope, from the word spes, “hope.” The Proto-Indo-European base, spei, means to prosper, expand, succeed, and seems to go back to the idea of sowing seeds, growing crops. If your crops grow, you prosper and have hope. If your crops fail, you don’t prosper—you despair. The word was coined as a metaphor—that hopeless feeling experienced when one’s crops fail. The person who coined the word was defining a feeling within himself or herself, and drew a construction from a not uncommon experience. The word entered the language because other people recognized the experience and felt this word expressed the feeling better than something else. If the experience had been idiosyncratic to the coiner, then it most likely wouldn’t have been embraced. The coiner was bearing witness to the world, and other people identified with his experience. They were able to empathize with it. ([Location 4343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=4343)) - Homer, like Odysseus, has come from nowhere and is probably dressed badly. He, too, is dependent on the hospitality of the lord to whom he sings his tale—the Greek word homeros means a pledge, hostage, one who is led and hence is blind. And Homer’s tale, like Odysseus’s, is a great tale. Among other things, it is the tale of lords who showed respect and kindness for the ragged singer who came to their house; who obeyed the laws of hospitality and achieved great honor and lasting fame by being bound up within the poem. It is also the tale of lords who violated the laws of hospitality and were punished. ([Location 4365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=4365)) - In his essay “On Obscure Writing,” which discusses the poetry of Paul Celan, Primo Levi wrote, “Talking to one’s fellowman in a language that he cannot understand may be the bad habit of some revolutionaries, but it is not at all a revolutionary instrument: it is on the contrary an ancient repressive artifice, known to all churches, the typical vice of our political class, the foundation of all colonial empires. It is a subtle way of imposing one’s rank.” ([Location 4435](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=4435)) - As noted in an earlier chapter, the word “word” goes back to an expression for breaking off or biting off something. The Proto-Indo-Europeans believed that we have a steady stream of preexisting sound and we bite off chunks to make the words we speak. The word “speak” derives from a word for strew, sprinkle, scatter, which have the same root. To speak, then, is to bite off pieces of sound from a stream of sound and scatter them in front of others. ([Location 5133](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=5133)) - The left side of the brain is the side that tells the truth; the right side is the side that lies. Or one could say, the left side is the side that describes what exists; the right side can describe what doesn’t exist. Or, more exactly, the right side has the ability to imagine, to hypothesize possibility; the left side doesn’t. ([Location 5210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=5210)) - As might be supposed, the right brain is the source of metaphor, simile, symbol, and so on. All are forms of hypothesis. Most brain researchers believe that the ability to dream is situated in the right brain. And hallucinations originate in the right brain. Studies have shown an unusual number of cases where one sibling is an artist and another is schizophrenic. This is a difference between controlled and uncontrolled creation. ([Location 5229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=5229)) - it might be said that one’s conscience speaks through the right brain, since one’s conscience hypothesizes the consequences of particular actions. The left brain turns them into rules. ([Location 5235](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=5235)) - One’s preoccupation and occupation as a writer is to pursue and increase one’s ability to construct metaphor. It is obvious that to be a writer one must also be a reader, but it is less obvious, though equally true, that a writer must expand his or her sense of consequence. Yet a writer has evident gifts with which to do this. To imagine is to hypothesize. One must educate the ability to hypothesize, to imagine consequence, which is not only the job of the right brain, but one of the functions of art. ([Location 5272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=5272)) - Formerly, the lyric poet chose one of a few recognized roles: lover, courtier, patriot, sage, or religious contemplative. “But,” as Hough writes, “Baudelaire . . . cannot be assigned to any of these roles, and when he claims kinship with his readers, which he does by means of a calculated insult, . . . it is through the shadow side of their lives . . . , [through] all that is unacknowledged or rejected by their social selves, that he professes to be at one with them. . . . Baudelaire . . . is the first to accept the declassed, disestablished position of the poet who is no longer the celebrant of the culture to which he belongs, the first to accept the squalor and baseness of the modern urban scene.” ([Location 5282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=5282)) - Hough concludes his essay on modernism by saying, “The fact that poetry is not of the slightest economic or political importance, that it has no attachment to any of the powers that control the modern world, may set it free to do the only thing that in this age it can do—to keep some neglected parts of the human experience alive until the weather changes; as in some unforeseeable way it may do.” ([Location 5309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004RCNSCO&location=5309))