Robert Bringhurst

In Wild Language, Robert Bringhurst twinned senses of ecology and of society want us to take language (and to be taken by language) somewhere new, somewhere wild. He says, “The wild is real, and the real is where we go for form and meaning. Meaning doesn’t originate within us. When we are actually speaking, what we say has form and meaning, and those, at root, are not man-made.” He itemizes many of the characteristics of wildness as its advocate: it is coexistive with time, simultaneously ancient and new, stable and ever-changing, rich, varied, extensive, complex, intertwined, beautiful, delicate, fragile, adaptable, strong, intelligent, attentive, responsive. “The wild remembers its past and dreams its future and speaks its immediate present.”

“Is language always a domesticated creature, or is it, or can it be, wild? And if so, in what sense? To answer that, we’ll have to know what wild means. We use the word in different ways, the historical baggage of accumulated viewpoints. Some people use it to mean undisciplined, unpredictable, savage, frightening, fierce, raw, crude— connotations that seem to stem from viewing the world as a great and intimidating unknown, or as a resource that humans are entitled and obliged to tame and tap. …In my own dialect of English, wild doesn’t have those implications. It means undomesticated, unmanaged, uncontrolled by human beings—but it rests on the assumption that there’s nothing wrong with that. More loosely, in my dialect of English, it’s a term of approbation. ‘That’s wild!’ means ‘that’s exciting; that stretches my sense of what-is.’

…. It appears to me that what wild actually means is the opposite of undisciplined and crude. It means extremely sophisticated. It means capable of living under the most demanding conditions, with minimal tools and housing and clothing. It means self-sufficient in a high degree, and yet part of the fabric, a full working member of the ecology. Could language live up to that standard? Survive at that level? If so, what kind of language would it be? Poetry maybe? I don’t mean polite, Neoclassical verse, or florid Romantic verse either, but how about poetry?”

Robert Bringhurst is a poet, cultural historian, typographer, translator, and linguist who studied linguistics, comparative literature at MIT, Indiana and Utah universities, as well as UBC. He has worked for many years with Native American texts and is the author of Story as Sharp as a Knife, Volume 1 of the trilogy: Masterworks of the Classical Haida. He also translated Nine Visits to the Mythworld from Haida. Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style is one a bible of typography and book design, translated into 10 languages in its third edition. He has won the Lieutenant Governor’s Award and the Wytter Bynner Fellowship.

Bringhurst is the author of the following works of poetry: Going Down Singing, Stopping B,  New World Suite Number Three, Ursa Major, The Book of Silences, Elements,The Calling, Conversations with a Toad; Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music, The Blue Roofs of Japan, Tending the Fire; The Beauty of the Weapons; Tzuhalem’s Mountain, Bergschrund; Eight Objects; Deuteronomy; Cadastre; and The Shipwright’s Log. His prose includes: Palatino, What Is Reading For?, The Surface of Meaning, Everywhere Being is Dancing, The Tree of Meaning, The Solid Form of Language, A Short History of the Printed Word, Native American Oral Literatures and the Unity of the Humanities, Boats Is Saintlier Than Captains; The Black Canoe; Shovels, Shoes and the Slow Rotation of Letters; The Raven Steals the Light; and Ocean/Paper/Stone.

Read an interview with Robert Bringhurst in Portal 2004