Casey A. Gollan: Notes + Links

Not everything comes into the world with a tongue, it seems. The poet Miriam Levine,who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in New Jersey, tells me that her family used to speak of articulate men and women as having been “born with a mouthpiece.” Those who can express themselves in speech have been given that mysterious something, like the mouthpiece of a trumpet or the reed of a wind instrument, through which experience is transmuted into sound.