We have this project to / change our silence into the beautiful city of a voice.

— Alice Notley, "Millions of Us"
in Songs and Stories of the Ghouls
Wesleyan UP, 2011
pp. 167-170; 170.

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Notley.php

‘When human beings attempt to come to terms with who they are and who they wish to be, the most effective medium is verbal. Through words we represent ourselves to ourselves, we expand our awareness of the world, we step back, gain distance, on what it is we’ve said. And then we are in a position to change. Images, however exhilarating, do not generally function in this way. Words allow for a precision and nuance that images do not seem, for most people, to be able to provide. In a culture that changes at the velocity that ours does, the power of self-revision is centrally important. Self-aware self-revision is very difficult, if not impossible, outside of language.’

Mark Edmundson, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education. NY: Bloomsbury, 2013. 207

[...] in order to get the truth to speak, it is not enough to suspend the subject’s active intervention and let language itself speak — as Elfriede Jelinek put it with extraordinary clarity: “Language should be tortured to tell the truth.” 

from: 

The Poetic Torture-House of Language

How poetry relates to ethnic cleansing

BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK