slow reveal

Even if a poet doesn’t tend to be autobiographical or confessional, inevitably some personal characteristics will be revealed in her/his choice of observations and in the style of writing.

hardly a trail

A poem may reveal almost nothing of its path: a broken twig, a stone disturbed, with little else to follow.

reading time

Was I a slow reader or did poetry just reveal itself slowly?

come round again

I must reread poetry because poetry always has more to reveal.

word slathered

You have lavished language upon me but have revealed nothing.

found objects

My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc. ... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear. These objets trouvés of poetry are, of course, bits of language. The poem is the place where one hears what the language is really saying, where the full meaning of words begins to emerge. That's not quite right! It's not so much what the words mean that is crucial, but rather, what they show and reveal.

—Charles Simic, "Notes on Poetry and Philosophy," Wonderful Words, Silent Truth (Poets on Poetry series, U. of Michigan Press, 1990)