Gelatinous sheen

Some thoughts on the texture of language...

Poetry needs its web, its texture, its spin of faintly disturbing sounds layered on associations and structures of meaning and emphasis.

Language poets use can be deceptively simple,

I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
where I used to buy milk and gas.

(Jane Kenyon, from "Back".)

richly discordant,

o brilliant kids, frisk with your dog
fondle your shells and sticks,
bleached by time and the elements,
but there is a line you must not cross,
nor ever trust beyond it
spry cordage of your body to caresses
too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.

(Hart Crane, from "Voyages".)

smoothly triumphant,

I am the daughter of earth and of water
and the nurseling of the sky
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores
I change, but I never die

(P.B. Shelley, from "The Cloud".)

and varying degrees of rough:

they never liked you
they are dancing and stamping on you
Daddy daddy you bastard I'm through

(Sylvia Plath, from "Daddy".)

But this sheer sound of language, used most deliberately and self-consciously in poetry, moves us without always realising why. Like reading Proust, whose long sentences wind and unwind in your brain (especially if like me you need to acclimatise to the long sentences and dense pages), but the delicate whiff of a language used to imply nostalgia without overpowering us with it builds from the back of your throat to the tip of your tongue.
This approach is much more effective than if he had talked directly about the loss of times he can never experience again, or even understand, since what he is doing is acknowledging his memory is a fiction. For a long time I used to...

In a similar way swear words need to be used carefully. Repetition, expectation, nulls their effect and they just become another word. Sometimes you can use this to comic effect, playing on the word 'fuck' for instance, breaking past that initial shock and possibly offence, getting us to see the word and it's use in a different light. (I had a vague memory of a poem here, but I haven't been able to locate it.)