How Great Poems Transform the World Ten Windows (Hardback) - Common

by Jane Hirshfield

A dazzling collection of essays on how the best poems work, from the master poet and popular essayist.

Jane Hirshfield offers ten lively and eminently readable explorations into how great poems transform our experience of the world. Touching on everything from the concept of "windows" in poems (the moments where a word, phrase, or shift in tone "opens" something for the reader) to the mechanisms of surprise and uncertainty, Jane uses particular poems (by Basho, Dickinson, Szymoborska, Gilbert, Cavafy and Creeley, to name a few) to show us how poetry works, word by charged word. Most of all, she captures the ways in which poems make something possible that is separate from and beyond our daily reality ("[Poetry's] seeing is not our usual seeing, its hearing is not our usual hearing"). Locating the border realm between inner and outer, what is known and what can only be apprehended in the realm of verse, Hirshfield's lucid understanding is gripping and transformative itself, showing us at every turn how poems restore us to and expand our sense of a broader humanity.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Essays, Writing, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Crafts

Unknown Binding

First published March 3, 2015

About the author

Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including the forthcoming Ledger (Knopf, March 2020), The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), longlisted for the National Book Award, Come Thief (Knopf, August 23, 2011), After (HarperCollins, 2006), which was named a “Best Book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times and shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award); as well as two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. She has also edited and co-translated three books collecting the work of women poets from the distant past, and one e-book on Basho and the development of haiku, The Heart of Haiku. Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 40th Annual Distinguished Achievement Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, an honor previously received by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. Her work has been featured in ten editions of The Best American Poems and appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement/TLS, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, Orion, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Hirshfield’s poems have also been featured many times on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac as well as two Bill Moyers’ PBS television specials. She has presented her poems and taught at festivals and universities throughout the U.S., in China, Japan, the Middle East, the U.K., Poland, and Ireland. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Hirshfield's appearance schedule can be found at:

Reviews

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

New notes from reading this a second time ….
Leaving a few notes I took for Adina:


Poetry’s work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music, new possibilities of perceiving. Distinctive realms appear to us when we look and hear by poem-light.
And these realms clearly are needed—there is no human culture that does not have its songs and poems” .

Poems do not simply express. They make, they find, they sound (in both meanings of that word) things undiscoverable by other means”.

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, / vaulty, voluminous. . . . stupendous
Evening strains to be time’s vast, / I womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west,/ her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height Waste; her earlist stars, earlstars, / stars principle, overbend us,
Fire-featuring heaven”.

“A work of art holds our lives as they are known, when fully engaged with multiple, crossing experience-strands of self, language, culture, emotion, senses, and mind”.

“Kaleidoscope mind— weather, flamboyant or subtle— is one marker for the poet, reaching actively toward a renewing perception”.



Original review:

I wanted to familiarize myself a little with the author Jane Hirshfield — inspired by the high regards Amy Boom shared of her in her recent memoir “In Love”.

Jane Hirshfield, born in New York in 1953, (a year after me), was a member of the first graduating class at Princeton to include women.
She is now a resident of Northern California (since 1974)…. living here in my neck of the woods.
Her books of poetry, and essays, etc. have been named Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, Financial Times and they have won California Book awards….and numerous other awards.

I had no idea about who Jane Hirshfield was —- but ‘feeling’ what Amy Bloom did about her, and being so deeply moved by her,
I wanted visit one of Bloom’s favorite authors.

I smiled when I learned Jane Hirshfield had once cooked at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco— (I’ve been), slept outdoors as often as possible by creeks and national forests, driven an 18 wheel truck, and had studied Soto Zen intensely for eight years, including three years at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in Big Sur…..(also have been)
Jane Hirshfield is a woman after my own heart….
just lots smarter!

The book I chose to read - as my first Hirshfield intro-
“Ten Windows” ….
‘How Great Poems Transform the World”….
was because I thought it might give me a great overview of how she thinks when she writes her own poetry.

I didn’t take lightly this sentence quoted by Jane….
“Poetry is the language that foments revolutions of being”….
I knew I wanted to explore and examine more of what this sentence means. (to me, to others, our relationship with each other, our pasts, our future, and our current days).

“Ten Windows” was not easy bedtime reading for me…much went over my head.
I was introduced to many other poets I didn’t know…
WAY TOO MANY - TOO MANY for me to fully resonate with - TOO FAST …for this essentially newbie poetry comprehension student.
I realized I shouldn’t have expected myself to easily master the art of understanding poetry from just one book…..(or the gall of me to think I could in a few days)
so….
I tried to be forgiving with my inner criticizing voice…. of not being good enough or able enough or smart enough.
But….
Isn’t this a human shared experience? Struggling with our limitations? Struggling with judging ourselves for all that we are ‘not’?
It helped that this exact book I was reading ‘about’ the value of poetry was having a direct affect on my own worthiness.
I noticed my inner voice shifted—from being critical of myself - to being more compassionate, kind, and peaceful with who I am. I wasn’t hammering out the flaws….I was loving myself— simply being at one and connected with nature.
Was this the magic of Jane Hirshfield?
Was she subtly transforming us without our even being aware of it ourselves?

Having only experienced one book by Wendall Berry…. but clearly came away with knowing how much nature was at the soul of who he was—-
He said this…..
“poems have the possibility of deepening our experience of humanity …. of nature …
Wendell Berry provided a simple useful definition of ‘nature poetry’…..
…..”as poetry that considers nature as subject matter and inspiration”.

So…. I struggled a little with the full depths of understanding this book … but I could clearly see -that by
“changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share”.

“Language wakes up in the morning. It has not yet washed its face, brushed its teeth, combed his hair. It does not remember whether or not, in the night, any dreams came. The light is the plain light of day, indirect—the window faces north— but strong enough to see nonetheless”.

“Sensibility in a poem or painting reflects individuality back into the world of larger
archetypes, impersonal forms, outward circumstances and currents. What the artist has been shaped by, moved by, soaked through with at some level deeper than consciousness or will, enters the poem as the edge of a metal printing press enters the paper. It is the touch of the actual meeting the actual: particularity’s
bite. In recent decades, the aesthetic of pure sensibility
has risen to apparent ascendance”.

“Entering a poem, a person steps at once into at least two rhetorical frames. There’s the frame of the particular poem’s particular speaking, and there’s also the deeper frame of poetry itself, shifted background knowledge that these words are a poem, and that in them a poems maker is speaking to a poem’s listener, within poetry‘s forms and intentions”.

So…..
I explored the depths of poetry OPENED THE WINDOW …via-Jane …
stepped into the unknown…
….learned who Matsuo Basho was (a Japanese writer and his Haiku gifts)….
etc.

I’m feeling a little more at peace - a little more joyful from this book…

I took away that poetry and conversations of poetry is a reminder of how paring language down to its simplest elements can provide an uplifting experience.
Opens the window to love.

4.5…..outstanding….not easy page turning reading - I had to ‘work’ it ….but at the same time it’s kinda m a s t e r f u l.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is going to be a strange statement: I really enjoyed reading this book; but if I'd known what was in it, I wouldn't have read it.

Hirshfield is tremendous poet and her prose is dazzling. I just couldn't help but be swept up in the language of each of these essays. The exception was the chapter on Haiku which went on far too long. So why the paradox? This is going to sound incredibly inelegant especially given how exquisite Hirshfield's writing is: there's not much actually being said here. I felt bad even writing that. I can't agree more with Hirshfield's central belief: that poetry (and art in general) expands who we are and expands the possibilities of the world. It does this through surprise, ambiguity, and withholding. I couldn't agree more. But these are commonly held beliefs among poets and they've also been said recently and with much clearer supporting evidence by other writers like Richard Hugo, Tony Hoagland, Robert Bly, and Stephen Dobyns. Which brings me back to my opening statement. BECAUSE Hirshfield's thesis is TRUE (at least to this reader) and because her writing is so wonderful, she's able to expand and contract these same ideas over and over again without saying anything new. The book is a like a jellyfish puffing and closing its way through a fish tank: it's pretty and you have to stare a while in awe. But it's not really going anywhere. This, of course, is part of Hirshfield's cosmic vision--the book goes INWARD and that certainly IS somewhere. Kind of. But for me, having read so many books about the same thing, though I enjoyed her writing and revisiting the beautiful landscapes, I have no desire to go back.

[Arjun Ravichandran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collection of diverse essays exploring the supra-sensuous, quasi-magical nature of poetry, focusing on the nature of image, metaphor, truth and paradox as experienced in the hands of master poets. The chapter on Basho was beautiful.

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote a review of this book, including a Jack Gilbert poem I found and enjoyed within it, on my poetry blog. If you're interested, you can take a look-see here:

https://kencraftpoetry.wordpress.com/...

[ulli_z · Rating 5 out of 5]

These essays are works of art in their own right. Every aspiring poet should read them!

[Catherine Ayres · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book. Hirshfield is herself a master poet, and she writes about other poets' work and how poetry functions and slits life open in a myriad of ways, using her own talents as a poet. I started to underline memorable phrases in this book but found that I was eventually underlining whole pages. I don't think I've ever read such a remarkable set of essays. Hirshfield has given me new perspectives, introduced me to new poets and poems, and given poetry back to me, wrapped up like a gift.
It's like she has shown me how to take a machine apart, turn over each cog in my hands, and reverently put it back together. And now I'm sitting with grease on my hands, feeling amazed.

[Joanna Chen]

I just started reading this. It's beautifully written, of course, because Jane Hirshfield thinks deeply and her writing is a series of intense reflections. Even if you are not a fan of poetry this is a book that should be read.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good analysis and in depth readings of a very diverse clutch of poems. I was more expecting a kind of world-viewing though, and this was centered almost entirely on the experience of an American reader of a specific class. Not really how poetry changes the world or windows of any larger importance than that of individual introspection- which didn't make the book as a whole bad, it just failed my expectations entirely.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

This whole book is one giant poem. It's verse, it's flow, it's energy, and its no nonsense organization, send brilliant blips of understanding and insight into the reader in powerful waves. I'll be rereading this book periodically throughout life, and I believe it had made me a better writer. The author is a woman who it totally in love and immersed in the topics of which she speaks, and her professionalism and wisdom come through on every page.

[Joan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book to savour, to read in small nibbles since it is so dense with ideas and intelligence. One of America's greatest living poets bases Ten Windows on essays about how poetry enlightens the reader using examples from poets of the world, some she translated. Her prose has a poet's evocative language, metaphor and syntax. I want to read this book many times.

[Mack · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoy a good quick exciting page-turner as well as the next reader, but for one that enriches your enjoyment of all literature, a deep, creative, positive, enlightening, joyous, introducing piece of writing like Hirshfield's, I'll take time, gladly.

[Mabel Ferragut · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great insights, beautifully written in prose which is at times as dense as poetry. I love the way Hirshfield makes manifest the importance of poetry and art, without concern for arguments against its utility. Poetry is important simply by the fact that it is.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a remarkable text that explores poetry with beautiful prose. Reading this was an experience.

[Carole Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating, and challenging, look at how poems work, their importance in our world.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is already on my reread list! What a beautiful, contemplative, scholarly book on poetry and poetics. Packed with a wide variety of poems that illustrate her points wonderfully. Brava!

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written and thought-through meditation on the nature and ways of poetry; a nearly impossible to pin-down (or pen-down?) literary art form. One of my favorite observations;

‘Many good poems have a kind of window-moment in them—they change their direction of gaze in a way that suddenly opens a broadened landscape of meaning and feeling. Encountering such a moment, the reader breathes in some new infusion, as steeply perceptible as any physical window’s increase of light, scent, sound, or air. The gesture is one of lifting, unlatching, releasing; mind and attention swing open to new-peeled vistas.’

[josé almeida · Rating 5 out of 5]

jane hirshfield explora o poder transformador da poesia em dez textos brilhantes, e dá-nos pistas para o modo como um poema o consegue fazer dentro de nós, leitores enfeitiçados: por tudo o que exclui e abarca, pelos paradoxos e surpresas, pelos limites (afinal infinitos) da linguagem ou pela simples musicalidade das palavras. e, ao convidar-nos a investigar essa capacidade redentora da poesia, faz de nós descobridores destemidos.
o ensaio sobre a poesia japonesa é absolutamente genial.

[Carolyn Crocker · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gem of a book for reader or writer, packed with beauty and wisdom.

“Only words that enlarge the realm of the possible merit borrowing our attention from the world of the actual and the living: the will return us to it restored to the knowledge of a malleability and amplitude we may have forgotten.” p. 104

“The mind that muses is modest and un-insistent, permeable to what lies beyond comprehension, amenable to some sense of proportion and the comic. Arrogance reserves itself for the more self-involved. Within the “muse” reside also of course, the nine Greek figures of Helicon….Between them the moods of historical narrative and epic wanderings;the poems of eros and feeling and landscape; the irreducible buoyancies of music, dance and laughter; the cautions of tragedy’s examples; the answers we make to the sacred; the questions we ask in awe of the shining stars.” p.27.”

Yet poetry comes into being by the fracture of knowing and sureness-- it begins not in understanding but in a willing, undefended meeting with whatever arrives.” p. 125

“Good writing will have points of view-- but they will be plural. No truly good work of literature faces in only one direction, is single in its allegiances, or looks at existence from only one angle, one theory. Theory -- including literary theory-- is the stance of argument, not of art. To live only in the socioeconomic self is to starve the self of its capacity for purposeless joy. To live only in the ideological is to deny ourselves uncertainty, fragility, loss. To live only in the emotional and autobiographical is to ignore what transcends the personal story and ego. To live only in the intellect or narrowly spiritual is to miss the saturation of the senses. P. 178

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the things I find most admirable in Hirshfield is her absolute belief, unwavering belief in the importance of poetry, in the process of reading and writing it. I feel it sometimes, but I go through long periods of doubt. Hirshfield appears to be untroubled by this doubt. It's beautiful and heartening to rediscover this belief whenever I read her.

The central premise of this book, the idea she keeps coming back to one way or another is: "A good poem is a through-passage, words that leave poet, reader, and themselves ineradicably changed." And she is convincing. Not this is not exactly the same thing as the subtitle of the book -- but I'm going to forgive that as a publisher's decision. Now there is nothing radically new in this idea, but Hirshfield's prose and passion are a new take on it. This is not an academic treatise on poetics, but a manual by a working poet who is looking at the things that have moved her to poetry. Sadly, she doesn't use herself as an example very often, and I would have loved that because I love her poems.

She illustrates her ideas with wonderful poems, most of them already known, but her explications under the umbrella of her thesis are great additions to my understanding of them. And I am convinced in the end -- although I am already convinced, even if filled with doubt. I have known Hirshfield's work for decades, but have been reading it carefully only for a little over ten years. Her poems, and her prose, enrich my life.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I review Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, by Jane Hirshfield

Hirshfield defines a good poem as “a through-passage, words that leave poet, reader, and themselves ineradicably changed.” They transform in innumerable ways, as Hirshfield ably demonstrates through the book’s many examples. Some transformations are wrought in sound, others in connotation. A bit more complicated, though, is her idea that the poem’s transformation on the page is retained, at least in part by the reader, so that the reader is transformed.

Go to my blog and then to The Daily Beast:

Have Words--Will Write 'Em

[Parvathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous exposition of what makes poetry work - why we turn to it instinctively in moments of despair, how it gives meaning to the everyday, how it asks the big questions even while acknowledging the inadequacy of the answers. Hirshfield does this through a series of 10 essays, taking us through some incredible poems - from Basho to Hopkins, Auden to Dickinson, Bishop to Szymborska. Her prose is incandescently lyrical - being a poet herself, that's no surprise. These 10 essays sharply remind me why it was I chose literature as a field of study all those years ago (and makes me wonder why I didn't persist). This book is a keeper - placed on a bedside table and dipped into, whenever your soul is in need of solace.

[Anima]

Kingfishers Catching Fire: Looking with Poetry’s Eyes

“The word “creative” shares its etymology with the word “creature,” and carries a similar sense of breathing aliveness, of an active, fine-grained, and multicellular making. What is creative is rooted in growth and rising, in the bringing into existence of new and autonomous being. We feel something stir, shiver, swim its way into the world when a good poem opens its eyes. Poetry’s work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving. Distinctive realms appear to us when we look and hear by poem-light.”

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprise, paradox, uncertainty, the hidden - Jane Hirshfield again invites us toward the depths of what it means to be human. Her unflinching invitation emerges from a practiced spiritual life: she is not merely an observer but has taken into her heart life's great mysteries and questions and filtered them into words, and she gifts us with an invitation to do the same. As she writes in the penultimate sentences of this collection: "Impossible to ponder. Done every day."

[MountainAshleah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always learn a great deal when experiencing how artists across many forms (visual, text, music) view the creation of their work. This book is a solid addition to that list and is especially recommended for readers of Hirshfield's poetry.

[Sigrun Hodne · Rating 4 out of 5]

blog:
https://omstreifer.wordpress.com/2015...

[Carol Fillmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing, a must read for aspiring poets. She inspires...might even be a muse. The essays showed the way to proceed with one poem in progress and provided inspiration for a new work.

[Laurens Trommel · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In the dark times
will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times"

"To live only in the socioeconomic self is to starve the self of its capacity for purposeless joy. To live only in the ideological is to deny ourselves uncertainty, fragility, loss. To live only in the emotional and autobiographical is to ignore what transcends the personal story and ego. To live only in the intellect or narrowly spiritual is to miss the saturation of the senses."

A great book. Hirsfield writes beautifully and introduced a new way of perceiving. That poetry can transform the world and myself, I do not doubt.

Some sentences and paragraphs I especially enjoyed:

"The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look. Within a summoned and hybrid awareness, the inner reaches out to transform the outer, and the outer reaches back to transform the one who sees."

"In whatever realm the artist’s discomfort arises, it tears open the fabric of psyche and universe, leaving a hole the creative impulse rushes then to repair."

"Basho’s haiku, taken as a whole, conduct an extended investigation into how much can be said and known by image. When the space between poet and object disappears, Basho taught, the object itself can begin to be fully perceived. Through this transparent seeing, our own existence is made larger."

"The reader who enters Basho’s perceptions fully can’t help but find in them a kind of liberation. They unfasten the mind from any single or absolute story, unshackle us from the clumsy dividing of world into subjective and objective, self and other, illness and blossom, freedom and capture. Some haiku seems to be reports of internal awareness, some seen to point at the external, but Basho’s work as a whole awakens us to the necessary permeability of all to all."

"Perhaps this is why riddles abound among the earliest poems in many traditions and why spiritual teaching so often partakes of the riddling: it is how the mind instructs itself in a more complex seeing."

"Hiddenness in itself has meaning and gives weight. In the psyche’s archetypal reaches, treasure and secret align."

"Perhaps one message to be taken from the many myths that speak of a broken concealment is the need for tact. In life, as in literature and myth, the desire to strip reality down to some bare and blunt truth reflects delusion, hubris, or reductionism’s inedible dust."

"To exchange certainty for praise of mystery and doubt is to step back from hubris and stand in the receptive, both vulnerable and exposed."

"Yet poetry comes into being by the fracture of knowing and sureness – it begins not in understanding but in a willing, undefended meeting with whatever arrives."

"The experience of an enlarged intimacy is not the only reason to want art in our lives, but it is a central reason. The windows that break open the boundaries of a poem, piece of music, or painting do the same work: they awaken and give entrance to what might otherwise not be recognized, felt, or known as inseparably part of the story."

"As evolution’s creatures, we align with goal attainment, self-protection, and the useful. The part of art which is art, and not device, unshackles us from usefulness almost entirely. It emplaces us far into those impractical conditions that nonetheless feel to us somehow essential: laughter, contemplation, wonder, tears."

"The transcending knowledge of poems is a singularly human liberation; that poetic epiphany, by loosening the psyche from the grip of expectation and purposeful pursuit, is a capacity of knowing entirely unique to our own kind. But something else seems possible as well – that the opposite is also true, that the peculiarly human phenomenon is the grip held on the heart by goal-seeking, end-wedded purpose, and that what good poems restore us to is something close to what is meant by “animal joy”."

"Poems are made of words that act beyond words’ own perimeter because what is infinite in them is not in the poem, but in what it unlocks in us."

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The essays in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World lead us from what is inherent in poetry (and the other arts) through metaphorical windows of language, image, sound/music, hidden/unsaid, ambiguity, surprise, transformation, and more. Throughout, Jane Hirshfield reminds us of the importance of poetry in our lives, how it reflects culture, and how it can even change cultural borders."

"In his poems and in his teaching of other poets, Bashō set forth a simple, deeply useful reminder: that if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you. “To learn about the pine tree,” he told his students, “go to the pine tree; to learn from the bamboo, study bamboo.” He found in every life and object an equal potential for insight and expansion. A good subject for haiku, he suggested, is a crow picking mud snails from between a rice paddy’s plants. Seen truly, he taught, all things are poetic, and there’s nothing that does not become a flower or moon. “But unless things are seen with fresh eyes,” he added, “nothing’s worth writing down.” A wanderer all his life, both in body and spirit, Bashō concerned himself less with destination than with the quality of the traveler’s attention. A poem, he said, exists only while it’s on the writing desk; by the time its ink has dried, it should be recognized as just a scrap of paper. In poetry as in life, he saw each moment as gate-latch. Permeability mattered more in this process than did product or will: “If we were to gain mastery over things, we would find their lives would vanish under us without a trace.”

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

Uhh, what? For a book about poetry, this one was terrible. It lacks clarity, its metaphors and analogies (of which it is chock full) sound dead and often feel unrelated, and Hirshfield often times rambles in sentences designed to look and feel profound, but in actuality are too abstract to really provide anything useful.
.
Hirshfield's use of vocabulary is . . . annoying? She combines words into hyphenated words, sometimes 5 or 6 per page, which is distracting and adds to the feeling of pseudo-intellectuality that this book attempts to sustain. A book about poetry should not try to feel poetic, and all Hirshfield succeeds at doing is confusing the reader (me, anyway) while she makes her "tours" through each window. Pretension masquerading as poetry/analysis, which unfortunately might describe quite a bit of what's out there anyway.
.
She also uses some version of the word "permeability" in each and every chapter and that drove me up the wall. It's hard to enjoy a book when I don't find the writer's word choices to be genuine, and for a poet that becomes doubly important.
.
I could rip this book a new one all day long, it is that bad (random pictures tossed in, some of which are not even mentioned in the text??). I only finished it because I'm trying to break my habit of starting and not finishing books. Avoid this one, beginners and veterans alike.

[Bertha · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4.5) Pact with great perspective on the many worlds and ways of poetry, along with poems that were thoroughly explored as great examples.

“Poetry's addition to our lives takes place in the border realm where inner and outer, actual and possible, experienced and imaginable, heard and silent, meet. The gift of poetry is that its seeing is not our usual seeing, its hearing is not our usual hearing, its knowing is not our usual knowing, its will is not our usual will. In a poem, everything travels both inward and outward”

“Our simplest acts of perception depend, then, upon an experiential and experimentally crafted knowledge. Perception is not passively given us; it is a continually expanding interaction and engagement, both mental and physical, with the world. Sound, temperature, motion enter the attention of an infant even before birth, and that cog-and-wheel conversation continues until the moment of death. A parallel process unfolds in the making of art. What a writer or painter undertakes in each work of art is an experiment whose hoped-for outcome is an expanded knowing.”