Quick Brown Fox

wwnorton:

“The music, the sound of words working together, has always mattered to me. But it’s not necessarily easy listening. It can be fractured, dissonant music, in the sense of Charles Mingus or Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde.” The poem “Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time” opens with the words, “Lurid, garish, gash.” I want the sense of physicality, flesh and blood, body language. I want the words to act physically on the reader or hearer.” —Adrienne Rich