Tuesday, June 10, 2003

I do wonder exactly what a poet is supposed to do with his or her inevitable frustration with the clumsiness and inadequacy of words.

Words are all we got. The only question is what you're going to do with them.

My problem is that words are overadequate. They say more than I could want or need them to. Poetry's better than thought.

Charles Bernstein says somewhere that while both Derrida and Wittgenstein see language as the limit of our world, you can either despair (Derrida) or delight (Wittgenstein) in this fact. Not fair to either D or W, but a neat statement of the dilemma.

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