Benjamin Hollander > Quotes

“BERRI: “Yes,” I remember my first word in American English was “yes,” and I remember as a boy speaking quickly, effortlessly, without a trace of an accent in American English. And, just as swiftly, I remember losing my Hebrew vocabulary, as my parents spoke German at home, which I understood but never spoke.”
― Benjamin Hollander, In the House Un-American

“the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given even as an object of cognition or imagination and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known.”
― Benjamin Hollander, In the House Un-American

“If we sound fluency, and we write poetry which appears to articulate that condition—Carlos thinks hard about this—a reader will not acknowledge wires as nets in a poem as anything but metaphor for the mill.”
― Benjamin Hollander, In the House Un-American

“MORDICO: Yes, to speak of an “un-American poetry” is to be anti-modern, searching for an essence, not in words but among words—to help English grow a limb it does not have.”
― Benjamin Hollander, In the House Un-American

“Communist Party meetings into an opinion, as if he were standing in for another’s view, perhaps at one remove from what actually happened, which he remembers having once been told is the true significance of having, in the ancient Greek polis, an opinion,”
― Benjamin Hollander, In the House Un-American

“So what if I walked in with a copy of William Carlos Williams’s poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow,’ which begins so much depends upon a red wheel barrow”
― Benjamin Hollander, In the House Un-American

“The true power of language, its well of inspiration, for me, lie in its conscious or unconscious errors, cracks, imperfections. I am a poet, an American poet, because I have a defective ear.”
― Benjamin Hollander, In the House Un-American

“like any outsider, you cope, you try to copy to belong, you overcompensate for what you think you hear is the norm.”
― Benjamin Hollander, In the House Un-American