“in human language”

Kathleen Hellen created “in human language” from Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber (1903). Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, Kathleen Hellen writes:

Focusing on his use of language, I selected two pages from the “Postscripts” of Schreber’s description of his psychotic delusions, then extracted from these a list of common prepositions and their phrases. The order of their appearance in the text was reversed, and I selected from these those that referenced in some way his relationship to the people around him. I retained capital letters if they started sentences.