mime poet

His use of language left so much unsaid you felt he missed his calling as a mime.

attracted to ellipsis

What I share with [poets in my generation] is ambition; what I dispute is its definition. I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum. … It eems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power.

—Louise Glück, "Disruption, Hesitation, Silence," Proofs & Theories

what is not said

Reticence is a resource of poetry.

spaces between

What is important is what cannot be said, the white space between the words.

—Max Frisch

(Quote encountered in Marco Breuer's Line of Sight installation at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.)

this then and not that

A poet who unfailingly knew what to say and when to say it, and most of all what should be left unsaid.