nemophilies:

“In the antigarden represented by the desert, the question accompanying the poet like her shadow under the sun is: Who am I to be so alone? Who am I if I am not with another? The demand for another is always mute but piercing. All these texts ask for another and all the poets ask for another language, even for a foreign language perhaps, because the essence of poetry is to find strangeness in language.”

— Hélène Cixous, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva

“We sleep in language,” writes Robert Kelly, “if language does not come to wake us with its strangeness.”

— Ilya Kaminsky, from Of Strangeness That Wakes Us: On mother tongues, fatherlands, and Paul Celan