The words don’t seem to matter, only the act itself, the space of attention marked off in the road. This is poetry says Heaney, the power to concentrate “concentrated back on itself.”
Poverty Creek Journal/ Thomas Gardner / Aug 29, 2012
[Poetry] does not say to the accusing crowd or to the helpless accused, ‘Now a solution will take place’, it does not propose to be instrumental or effective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.
This is what gives poetry its governing power. At its greatest moments it would attempt, in Yeats’s phrase, to hold in a single thought reality and justice. Yet even then its function is not essentially supplicatory or transitive. Poetry is more a threshold than a path, one constantly approached and constantly departed from, at which reader and writer undergo in their different ways the experience of being at the same time summoned and released.
Seamus Heaney, from The Government of the Tongue (Faber, 1988), pp. 107-8
a Look! from a stranger
One of the nicest things about the lake where I like to walk is that there is nearly always someone on the trail saying, “Look!” Thanks to that natural human urge to share something wonderful, even with a stranger, I have learned this lake’s terrain over the years and know where to look for the well-disguised secrets I would miss on an unfamiliar path. I know that a barred owl frequently perches in a dead tree near a particular bridge. I know that a great blue heron often stand as still as a photograph on a submerged log in one cove. I know the rise whee wild turkeys drag their wing feathers on the ground and blend in with the leaf litter, and I know the bank where beavers climb soundlessly out of the lake. One summer I knew where to look for a hummingbird’s nest because of a stranger with better eyes than mine.
“Seeing” / Margaret Renkl
For me poetry is a moment of awe — that silence that travels from one human body to another by means of words. Gilgamesh was written 4,000 ago and it transforms us still. This is what poetry is: not a kind of public posturing but a private language of music and imagery that is strange and compelling enough that it can speak privately to thousands of people at the same time.
Ilya Kaminsky
Poetry can meet the mysterious and unknowable with curiosity, not denial. I think we all need to practice holding complexity, resisting binaries and the rush toward certainty. We all need to practice feeling deeply, listening deeply, and sitting in discomfort. Poetry can help with this practice.
Interview with Kemi Alabi