A Quote by Joy Williams
For centuries poets, some poets, have tried to give a voice to the animals, and readers, some readers, have felt empathy and sorrow. If animals did have voices, and they could speak with the tongues of angels-at the very least with the tongues of angels-they would be unable to save themselves from us. What good would language do? Their mysterious otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful songs and coats and skins and shells and eyes.
Related Quotes
I try to write each piece in the language of the piece, so that I'm not using the same language from piece to piece. I may be using ten or twenty languages. That multiplicity of language and the use of words is African in tradition. And black writers have definitely taken that up and taken it in. It's like speaking in tongues. It may sound like gibberish to somebody, but you know it's a tongue of some kind. Black people have this. We have the ability as a race to speak in tongues, to dream in tongues, to love in tongues.
I heard the tongues of angels and the tongues of men and it all sounded no different to me.
Nearly all men and women are poetical, to some extent, but very few can be called poets. There are great poets, small poets, and men and women who make verses. But all are not poets, nor even good versifiers. Poetasters are plentiful, but real poets are rare. Education can not make a poet, though it may polish and develop one.
If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.
Giraffes are fairytale animals, almost heraldic - as if from the land of fables. They have extremely beautiful faces, huge eyes, very sensitive nostrils and oh, blue tongues!
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
I have learned to interface - what I think would be the contemporary term - with various different lexicons, and people speak very different languages. I've learned to speak in a lot of tongues, and I can live with the bellicose language of some fervent, fire-breathing Christians, sure.
I just said let's get some poets on tv. And when they said that sounded unlikely, I made it worse. I said, no man, I want to put a bunch of black poets on stage, too. Some Latino poets who barely speak English and Asian poets who can't believe how discriminated against they are. It was luck nad being in the right place. I wasn't saying nothing somebody else wasn't saying but they wouldn't hear it from them.
Poetry is not a silent art. The poem must perform, unaided, in its reader's head. Educated readers give themselves a good performance. Educated listeners compare performance with text and with other performances. Good poets use the full resources of language.
At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues.
I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public. I'm looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death.
Angels are here and around us; perhaps all around us. But we have to have an ear for them and an eye for them, and that only comes when we have the courage and faith to open ourselves to a world inhabited by more than humans and animals. There are angels around us.
Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.
While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.
In the Bible angels speak and humans speak back to them. This is the case with Mary in Luke 1. The angel speaks, Mary questions, and it goes back and forth. Abraham speaks with angels. So I would contend the Bible has enough evidence of angels speaking and humans speaking that speaking with an angel today would be reasonable. I've heard enough stories and read such that confirm that Christians today do speak with angels.
Speaking as an outsider is the most authentic voice for a poet. Poets who have one hundred thousand or one million readers [as many South Korean poets do] might not be a real, authentic poet.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
German
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist