Disembodied, the poem provokes longing. Its incorporeity is inscribed in myth: the severed head of Orpheus adrift on the Aegean Sea. Though separated, the head continues to sing. The song it sings is either a lament of exile from the body, or a celebration of freedom from its material prison, depending on the direction of the winds.
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Just as ideas do not precede words, content is inchoate before form, and experience is inchoate before memory. This Proustian maxim holds true for the poem. Like us, words are ever-changing relics fighting for continued relevance. The poet’s job is to preserve this “fossil language” (Emerson). In exchange, the poem returns the illusion of presence, the gift of the now.
Poetic form is the temporal conduit between the past, present, and future. It organizes the senses so that they do not hinder the intellect in its lonely quest toward understanding and, in some cases, unity with something greater than itself.
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What does it matter if there are poets or poems?
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IX
Poets whose readings lead us to believe ourselves part of a spontaneous and instinctive consensus have left poetry behind. Perhaps for the better.
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XI
In poetry, as elsewhere, nature isn’t what it used to be.
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XXV
Sometimes the poem has more friends than the poet.
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Poems demand a concentrated lingering to which we are unaccustomed. This is why they cause discomfort. When we stand still in one place, attempting to document and respect the details, we feel as vulnerable as a small creature in an open field beneath avian predators. Rapid and sequential page turning gives us a sense of progress and accomplishment, relieving us from the double threat of frustration and impatience.
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XXIX
Language has no weather, and therefore is not, strictly speaking, an environment.
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XXXIV
I once wrote, “those who think poetry is working, are laboring under a misconception.” By which I meant that the mental activity of writing a poem sabotages the mechanized reproduction of culturally programmed cognition: work-a-day thought is put to a stop.
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Poetry is play for very high stakes which, though the cause of an extremely competitive race, can never be collected.
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XXXVII
The trick with fashion is to sit it out.
