original gift

...I think some intensity of awareness must be lost, since it depends on contrast. And that intensity is impoverishment's aftermath, and blessing: what succeeds temporary darkness, what succeeds the void or the desert, is not the primary gift of the world but the essential secondary gift of knowledge, a sense of the significance of the original gift, the scale of our privilege.

—Louise Glück, “On Impoverishment,” Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco, 1994)

taking refuge in work

After reading a spate of flighty and off-the-top-of-the-head kind of poetry, all I want to do is to read some work. I want to see and feel the workmanship that went into a poem’s making.

figure / ground

Were there not a different aesthetic sensibility by which we could contrast our own, then how would we set our art apart? We can fight the background, but we shouldn’t wish it away. It is the necessary contrast, and we should respect it as such.