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How the Earth Carries Us
- GenresPoetry
228 pages, Unknown Binding
Published January 1, 2015
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December 17, 2024
From the introduction:
“Poets are preservers and developers of language—of thought and feeling in language. They are, at their best, aware of the past, in touch with the present, and find new ways of putting this experience into words, thereby allowing to understand ourselves and our possibilities. As the critic William Meredith has argued, ‘This is why poets, in the large Greek sense of makers, are crucial to the culture. They respond newly, but in the familiar language of the tribe.’ Poets can change a culture by changing the way that people think about themselves and their place in the world. Lawrence Venuti, commenting on Derrida and translation, argues that ‘nationalism is not the empirical fact of national citizenship, but an identification with or self-recognition in a particular discourse of a nation.’ However, it is important to keep in mind that the discourse of poetry can, and often does, transcend national boundaries, that culture is itself porous, malleable and heterogeneous. So, if poets are makers of culture, a culture that can be both national and trans-national, what kind of culture are the new Lithuanian poets making now?”
“Lithuanian poetry, like the language itself, has been rooted in the countryside. In the words of literary scholar Rimvydas Šilbajoris, Lithuanian is ‘quintessentially a peasant language, grown from the soil, seasoned in the harshness and grace of the changing seasons, tempered by long endurance under enduring hardships.’”
“Poets are preservers and developers of language—of thought and feeling in language. They are, at their best, aware of the past, in touch with the present, and find new ways of putting this experience into words, thereby allowing to understand ourselves and our possibilities. As the critic William Meredith has argued, ‘This is why poets, in the large Greek sense of makers, are crucial to the culture. They respond newly, but in the familiar language of the tribe.’ Poets can change a culture by changing the way that people think about themselves and their place in the world. Lawrence Venuti, commenting on Derrida and translation, argues that ‘nationalism is not the empirical fact of national citizenship, but an identification with or self-recognition in a particular discourse of a nation.’ However, it is important to keep in mind that the discourse of poetry can, and often does, transcend national boundaries, that culture is itself porous, malleable and heterogeneous. So, if poets are makers of culture, a culture that can be both national and trans-national, what kind of culture are the new Lithuanian poets making now?”
“Lithuanian poetry, like the language itself, has been rooted in the countryside. In the words of literary scholar Rimvydas Šilbajoris, Lithuanian is ‘quintessentially a peasant language, grown from the soil, seasoned in the harshness and grace of the changing seasons, tempered by long endurance under enduring hardships.’”
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