Can The Poet Be a Language Planner? A Personal Salute to Richard Ruiz

Abstract

This paper addresses one principal and several corollary questions. The main question is: Can the poet be a language planner? The paper explores the work of two poets. One lived several thousand years ago and was able to affect through her poetry, in a very profound way, the language planning needs of those times. The second is living today and potentially, through his work, can also affect his world in a profound way. The paper reaches two important conclusions: 1) The poet can be a productive and humanistic language planner, and 2) Life can be better if we use both types of language planning.