Wit & Attitude Quote by Diane Ackerman

Ackerman’s line is a quiet manifesto against the tyranny of being “articulate.” In ordinary speech, we’re trained to make feelings legible: name the emotion, give it a cause, keep it coherent. She argues that the most consequential inner weather doesn’t cooperate with that workflow. “Records” is doing double duty here: a poem is both a document and a device, a way to store what would otherwise evaporate, and a way to replay it with fidelity. But the fidelity she’s after isn’t factual; it’s atmospheric.

The key move is her refusal to treat language as a clean conduit. Instead, it’s a craft project: “patched together,” an image that demystifies inspiration and makes poetry sound like repair work. The mind comes in torn, frayed, contradictory; the poem is a stitched attempt to hold it in one piece. That metaphor also smuggles in a politics of vulnerability: if a poem is a patch, it’s admitting damage, incompletion, the fact that the self doesn’t arrive as a finished product.

Then she leans on “hinted at metaphorically,” which frames metaphor not as decoration but as strategy. When experience exceeds direct statement - grief that’s numb and sharp at once, desire that’s equal parts hunger and dread - metaphor lets you speak slant without lying. Contextually, this sits in a late-20th-century, science-literate lyric tradition Ackerman embodies: curious about the body and the senses, skeptical of neat categories, committed to precision that knows when precision has to be indirect. The subtext: poetry isn’t an escape from reality; it’s a technology for rendering what reality feels like when it refuses to be named.