it gives it thew and fires it and bloods it in

The critique of violence must begin with a critique of seeing, Butler wrote. What allows one life to be visible in its precariousness and its need for shelter and what keeps us from seeing other lives in that way? It is our inability to see what we see that is of critical concern.

CARSON ... I think that’s what poems are supposed to do, and I think it’s what the ancients mean by imitation. When they talk about poetry, they talk about mimesis as the action that the poem has, in reality, on the reader. Some people think that means the poet takes a snapshot of an event and on the page you have a perfect record. But I don’t think that’s right; I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference. INTERVIEWER So it’s an act. CARSON It’s an action. It’s a practice.

Celan … chose to protest from inside German, in “death-rattling,” “quarreling” words. Though he spoke numerous other languages (Romanian, Russian, French), and though he had written previously in Romanian, he nevertheless decided to remain in German, which he broke and reclaimed. German, for Celan, was the language that had to “pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.” Why break a language? To wake it up. “We sleep in language,” writes Robert Kelly, “if language does not come to wake us with its strangeness.”

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