lowered into the depths

Lines like a trawler's nets lowered into the depths of the psyche—no telling what they’ll dredge up.

shape-shifting wrestlers

The poem as the mat where language and the psyche twist and grapple.

digging and sifting

Less creativity and more archaeology; that is, less imagination and more psychic excavation.

attempts to revisit

To revise one attempts to revisit the original psychic space of the piece’s composition.

image inside

The psyche has an internal projector of remembered images.

not on the surface

Dredge the psyche for your deep images.

shift happens

After reading a great poem, something like a Kuhnian ‘paradigm shift’ occurs within the mind. Once you have read the poem your thought patterns are forever altered, your psychic response to events is deflected in an entirely new direction. The page is turned utterly, irrecoverably, so to speak. You will never again be the person you were in the minutes, hours, days and years before you encountered that poem.

unexpected turn

The poem turned down one of those alleys of the psyche where anything can happen.

dangerous business

Poet, be a sapper of the psyche.