Status Updates From Poems, Poets, Poetry: An In...

Reading through this anthology of beautiful poems and discussing them with a small group in a room at the library every Monday has been a highlight of my week. I had forgotten how much joy there is in group reading and discussing of poetry.

"It is clear that the back-and-forth pattern between concrete visualization and abstract contemplation in 'The Plain Sense of Things' mimics the way that a reflective mind tends to see a concrete piece of evidence and then to express it in intellectual ways."

"Then the poem makes its major change of shape, turning from one grammatical form (statements) to a different one (questions). We see now that it is basically a two-part poem, the parts distinguished by this central grammatical turn. [...] Part I is solely about the speaker; but Part II wonders whether there are 'other men' like the speaker, or even 'one other like me.'"

"One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways."