William Sieghart, who founded the Forward prizes in 1991, said the writers on the shortlists "bring news that stays news, in fresh and startling language", and that their voices "remind readers that, in an age of shortened attention spans, good poetry can communicate insights and visions with a power other art forms can only envy".
The most significant part of this story comes without the startling language.
One scholar has argued that this startling new language helped to create a more "active" mode of listening, in which audiences learned to follow an instrumental narrative as they would the action of an opera.
The poets had set the tone for the exercise by reading a poem they had written together, which uses startling, offensive language and has in its first three lines the harshest slurs against blacks and gays.
Gautreaux describes the aftermath of war in startling and poetic language.
From about 450 bc onward, dithyrambic poets such as Timotheus, Melanippides, Cinesias, and Philoxenus employed ever more startling devices of language and music until for ancient literary critics dithyrambic acquired the connotations of "turgid" and "bombastic".
They found the language startling, with one – Priyanka Tikoo, editor and bureau chief of the Press Trust of India – saying it felt as though May wanted India to hand over trade liberalisation in return for little else.
Given how many poems are on display here, conscientious readers are themselves likely to become a species of hawk -- wheeling over the pages with a raptor's eye (though armed with a pencil rather than talons), seeking out choice twists of language, startling affinities.
Perhaps it is because the extremes of McGregor's language – its startling dislocations and eerie fluency – have become secondnature to the dancers.
Taken together, Kennedy's twenty-odd plays form a long and startling fugue, composed of language that is impactful and impacted but ever-moving, ever-shifting, as her protagonists, usually women of color, stand on the precipice of disaster, madness, or loss.
First of all, WS individuals' language, while startling in contrast with their level of mental retardation, is not normal; indeed, as we have seen, it is indistinguishable on some tests from that of language impaired individuals.
