 Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition. |
| If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included. |
| I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change. |
| If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster. |
| Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. |
| A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction. |
| Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. |
| Only silence perfects silence. |
| Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience. |
| That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends. |
| In nature there are few sharp lines. |
| Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing. |
| Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values. |
| I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry. |
| Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful. |
| The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance. |
| You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind on, but what you can't keep your mind off. |
| Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same. |
| There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world. |
| Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without. |
