invitation to a voyage

The ideal place to teach creative writing is a used book store, says my friend Vava Hristić.
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My hunch that language is inadequate when speaking about experience is really a religious idea, what they call negative theology.
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Poetry tries to bridge the abyss lying between the name and the thing. That language is a problem is no news to poets.
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A New Hampshire high school student reading an ancient Chinese poem and being moved—A theory of literature that cannot account for that commonplace miracle is worthless.
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For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.
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Seeing the familiar with new eyes, that quintessential idea of modern art and literature, the exile and immigrant experience daily.
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A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.

—Charles Simic, The Poet’s Notebook (WW Norton & Co., 1995), edited by Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall and David Weiss.