Why Poetry

Language leaps, impossibly and essentially, across the inescapable void between name and thing.

Clarity for me in poetry is a kind of generosity, a willingness to be together with the reader in the same place of uncertainty, striving for understanding.

Clarity for me in poetry is a kind of generosity, a willingness to be together with the reader in the same place of uncertainty, striving for understanding. T

The poetic symbol operates, as all language does, collectively. Yet it resonates in the mind of a particular reader.

You will be free. They say it will be cloudy tomorrow but

they

Are often wrong.

Negative capability is just one way of describing this feeling, of being in a place of possibility and freedom that is intimately related to the slippery, provisional, wondrously meaningful nature of language itself

It is as if what Stevens is proposing is a kind of environmentalism of the imagination, a call for us to actively carve out in our own minds and daily lives a space for imagination that is like a nature preserve or ecologically protected area.

But as a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, which is never the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed, which are never the same

To push away the accepted name of something, and to move, with careful literality, through the language, in a journey of renaming: this is a courageous act.

following what is beautiful and uncertain in language, we get to a truth that is beyond our ability to articulate when we are attempting to “use” language to convey our ideas or stories.