Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that poetry has a unique power to transcend regular language using its own tools.
Joseph Brodsky emphasizes the distinctive nature of poetry as a form of expression that can effectively engage with and even surpass the limitations of everyday language. He asserts that poetry, through its artistic use of language, has the ability to convey deeper meanings and emotions that ordinary discourse often fails to articulate.
In practice
During a poetry reading, you might use this quote to highlight the transformative power of spoken word.
Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.
The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic.
Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those - in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed.
To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.
In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
It's wonderful when music is intellectually stimulating. But ultimately it has to be a visceral experience.
I'm not asking you to describe the rain falling the night the archangel arrived; I'm demanding that you get me wet. Make up your mind, Mr. Writer, and for once in your life be the flower that smells rather than the chronicler of the aroma. There's not much pleasure in writing what you live. The challenge is to live what you write.
To draw a tree, to pay such close attention to every aspect of a tree, is an act of reverence not only toward the tree, and toward the earth itself, but also our human connection to it. This is one of the magical things about drawing - it gives us almost visionary moments of connectedness.
If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
You adapt yourself to the contents of the paintbox.
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