"A good poem offers always some entrance into and reminder of the fact that genuine experience is unexpected. A good poem shocks us awake, one way or another — through its beauty, its insight, its music, it shakes or seduces the reader out of the common gaze and into a genuine looking. It breaks the sleepwalking habit in our eyes, in our ears, in our mouths, and sets us adrift in a small raft under a vast night-sky of stars. We feel ourselves moving, too, above a vast, cold-streaming current carrying inner-lit sea creatures, tangles of kelp strands, fishes. Thus we learn the deep clefts of the mid-ocean land-rifts; thus the wave-blanketed mountains rise up before us as islands, a new habitation for heart and mind."
—
Jane Hirshfield on the qualities of good contemporary poetry, from her introduction in the Spring 1998 issue of Ploughshares. (via pshares)
The first sentence of this quote is exactly why I love poetry—genuine experience is unexpected, and beautiful, and singular in its ability to hold us in a moment that’s already passed.
(via rachelmennies)
(via rachelmennies)
