felt again by language

Sensations fade but words tie us to existence by allowing us to recover the felt aspects of experience.

poem as brick

A poem made from mutable clay of human existence but solid as brick.

not really imperfect

…Japanese poets and painters might say with Yves Bonnefoy: imperfection is the acme of achievement. The imperfection, as has been noted, is not really imperfect: it is a voluntary act of leaving unfinished. Its true name is awareness of the fragility and precariousness of existence, an awareness of that which knows itself to be suspended between one abyss and another. Japanese art, in its most tense and transparent moments, reveals to us those instants—because each is only that, an instant—of perfect equilibrium between life and death. Vivacity: mortality.

—Octavio Paz, "The Tradition of the Haiku," Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), translation by Helen Lane

life index

A poem that was the index to your existence.

when it all fits

Strange—we are always inhabiting more than one realm of existence—but they all fit in if the art is right.

—Lorine Niedecker, in a letter to Cid Corman, quoted in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place edited by Elizabeth Willis.

is worth all

The poem doesn’t try to sell itself. Its improbable existence in this world gives it worth.

power source

The word that didn’t belong in the poem is now a node of energy driving its very existence.

little pieces

A long poem that lives on by its excerpts.

bright birds yet unseen

I hear a hitherto unknown species of bird has been found in the forests of Malaysia. Scanning my bookcases I feel certain there are bright and rare poems yet undiscovered behind those spines. But as wonderful as they are, only human encounter makes them existent.

less to nothing more

A poem revised right out of existence.

no artifact apart

The poem is by-product of existence. It has no value as artifact unless connected to a life.

extraordinary ordinary

"Astonishing" is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We're astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we've grown accustomed to. Granted, in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events." ... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

—Wislawa Szymborska (her acceptance address for the Nobel Prize in Literature)

existence elucidated

Poetry is existence elucidated by means of the imagination.