Translating the language of things ...

Translating the language of things into that of humans entails not no other than translating silence into audibility; it means translating the nameless into the name.
- Walter Benjamin
undivided of my close friends, also a worker in the mine fields of the poetic, says to me "the lyric is dead." I cannot yet agree, if by lyric we mean that private self-regarding effusion of language, that romantic mea culpa at which a world is nostalgically recalled, privileged and measured against what is. Likewise, I would emphatically add, rhyme is dead or at least dying not at home of a swoon of