place and experience

When I read "Epic” by Patrick Kavanagh for the first time, I realized that documenting seemingly insignificant events and objects—buses included—are neither ridiculous nor melodramatic. The more I studied his poems and essays, the more I revered how Kavanagh sought to develop a praxis that is both inclusive and individual: not solely concerned with audience and legacy, but more aligned with place and experience.

—Roan Ellis-O’Neill, Hold Open the Door: The Ireland Chair of Poetry Commemorative Anthology 2022 (University College of Dublin Press), edited by M. McCann, S. Meline, N. Zak/Aria Eipe, M. Prince, and F. Ormsby.

bottomless feeling

In terms of language, leaping is the ability to associate fast. In a great poem, the considerable distance between associations, that is, the distance the spark has to leap, gives the lines their bottomless feeling, their space, and the speed (of association) increases the excitement of the poetry.
[…]
We often feel elation when reading Homer, Neruda, Dickinson, Vallejo, and Blake because the poet is following some arc of association that corresponds to the inner life of objects he or she speaks of, for example, the association between lids of eyes and the bark of stones [de Nerval’s poem "Golden Lines"]. The associative paths are not private to the poet, but are somehow inherent in the universe.
[…]
The poet who is “leaping” makes a jump from an object soaked in conscious psychic substance to an object soaked in latent or instinctive psychic substance. One real joy of poetry—not the only one—is to experience this leaping inside a poem.

—Robert Bly, “Looking for Dragon Smoke,” American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (Harper & Row, 1990)

public property

What else are poetry and thinking than someone making his own life into public property, into a life which everyone else can live and enjoy as their own too, making his essence into directly beholdable objects of not only himself, but also of others?

—Ludwig Feurbach, Abelard and Heloise, or: The Writer and the Human (Gegensatz Press, 2012), translated with introduction by Eric v. d. Luft, with a foreword by Angela Moreira.