Connors on Poetry
I am a quiet person, but I revere words: their amazing power to translate the human experience, to connect the interior of one individual to the lives, thoughts, and feelings of others.
Poetry takes language and pushes it past the ordinary.
Poetry forces us to pay attention, and that is a way to worship the world.
Poetry can reach us far beyond the level of logic, revealing emotional truths.
Where does poetry come from?
You could say it comes from everything around us in the world. You could say it comes from within. Some claim that its source is external to this world, something mysterious, maybe even divine. All I know is that it can open a person to new discoveries, or help someone discover what she didn’t know she knew.
For those reasons and more, I spend part of each week reading and writing poetry. Some would say this practice hasn’t exactly made me rich. On the contrary, it has enriched me immensely.
Here are some comments on poetry worth thinking about:
I believe in the voice of experience, and in poetry that bears the smudge marks of having been in the human fire—time, failure, error, distress, loss, rage, attachment. I believe that the most joyful poem has to bear the logo of suffering, our sponsor. – Tony Hoagland
"For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History –Derek Walcott (from his 1992 Nobel Prize acceptance
speech)
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does. – Allen Ginsberg
Poetry takes language and pushes it past the ordinary.
Poetry forces us to pay attention, and that is a way to worship the world.
Poetry can reach us far beyond the level of logic, revealing emotional truths.
Where does poetry come from?
You could say it comes from everything around us in the world. You could say it comes from within. Some claim that its source is external to this world, something mysterious, maybe even divine. All I know is that it can open a person to new discoveries, or help someone discover what she didn’t know she knew.
For those reasons and more, I spend part of each week reading and writing poetry. Some would say this practice hasn’t exactly made me rich. On the contrary, it has enriched me immensely.
Here are some comments on poetry worth thinking about:
I believe in the voice of experience, and in poetry that bears the smudge marks of having been in the human fire—time, failure, error, distress, loss, rage, attachment. I believe that the most joyful poem has to bear the logo of suffering, our sponsor. – Tony Hoagland
"For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History –Derek Walcott (from his 1992 Nobel Prize acceptance
speech)
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does. – Allen Ginsberg