anything not everything

Anything can be a poem but not everything becomes a poem.

word bather

A poet who bathed in words, and words were nothing to him and everything all at once.

[Thinking of poet Peter Ganick.]

from everything

I took wild honey from the plants,
I took salt from the waters, I took light from the sky.
Listen, my brothers, I took poetry from everything.

—Jorge de Lima, opening lines of “The Distribution of Poetry, The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Ecco, 2010), edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris.