Flux has heightened us into knots of staid tension.
Things go away to return, brightened for the passage.
In nature there are few sharp lines.
Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
To be saved is here, local and mortal.
If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.
Thats a wonderful change thats taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can’t imagine ourselves living without.
For though we often need to be restored to the small, concrete, limited, and certain, we as often need to be reminded of the large, vague, unlimited, unknown.
Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.
It’s not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
If we ask a vague question, such as, ‘What is poetry?’ we expect a vague answer, such as, ‘Poetry is the music of words,’ or ‘Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.’
Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
I can’t tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can’t tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.
The white sun like a moth on a string circles the southpole.
If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.
Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.
Bees die with the burnt honey at their mouths, at least.