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.

voice over vanity

For me, poetry is the voice that supersedes vanity. To concentrate exclusively on “American poetry” can ignore the vast expanse of immigrant sounds bearing punctuated rhythms or haunting, free-floating tunes. Music introduces the meaning, and carries languages both harsh and melodious, its premonitions understood only in retrospect.

—Laura Manuelidis, "The XYZ of Hearing: The Squid’s Ink,” Poetry (July/August, 2013)