Introduction From WITTGENSTEIN’S LADDER: POETIC LANGUAGE AND THE STRANGENESS OF THE ORDINARY University of Chicago Press, Copyright © 1996 by The University of Chicago Marjorie Perloff –Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel –Philosophy ought [...]
I never met Guy Davenport, but from the mid-seventies, when I first read his dazzling short-story collection Tatlin! (the title story partly inspired my book The Futurist Moment), I’ve been savoring his critical-creative, densely self-illustrated writings. It was a red-letter day, therefore, when, in the spring of 1994, I received a fan letter from Guy […]
Again and again, in the essays collected in The Geography of the Imagination (1981), Guy Davenport refers to a “renaissance” taking place “around 1910.” The clearest […]