Who knows if this will last, but I’ve decided to try and read and write at least a poem a day this month. This has given me an excuse to finally dig into The Making of a Poem, which I have had sitting on the bottom of a stack of books on my nightside stand. I plowed through the first poem in bleary-eyed sleepiness, mistakenly attributing it to Mark Strand before realizing it was actually by just the beginning of his essay “On Becoming a Poet”, and was actually by Archibald MacLeish. Anyway, I have a feeling this book will help me find some great poetry quotes for my collection. Like this one, from the end of Strand’s essay:
A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.