Perhaps poetry, or at least lyric poetry, may be characterized by the two central illusions that define the nature of a boule de neige: the still moment disturbed into being (a wash of images across the reader’s eye), and the following slow contraction of time as consciousness settles back into place (for what does the snowfall signify, except the poignant rhythms of a dreaming mind?).
Looking back, I suspect it’s a similar experience of time that first attracted me to poetry, and I doubt if over the years the original attraction has changed very much. What I loved then, I love now, is that aura of heightened animation with which poetry tends to surround itself (the syllables of a line of verse like the snowfall of the boule de neige)—as if, not the atmosphere, but the subject itself were momentarily stirred to life. As if the mind might actually sustain that life.
—Sherod Santos, “An Art of Poetry: Postscript to Abandoned Railway Station’,“ What Will Suffice: Contemporary American Poets on the Art of Poetry (Gibbs-Smith, 1995), edited by Christopher Buckley and Christopher Merrill
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