As a poet you are called to be absorbed and aroused and enchanted and intoxicated and beguiled. You embrace occasions that leave you seduced and transfixed, overpowered and enraptured.
There's a unitary circulation between poet and reader. The poet dwells in the gap between dream and waking, and the reader is offered entryway to become alive and enlivened.
While poetry reveals what is fantastic and dangerous, a poem is not a fairytale escape. The triumphs in a poem are foremost triumphs of the imagination more so than the soul.
The ritual of poetic discovery is a reanimation of the whole metaphor of human dream and reason, irrationality and rationality, the ancient and the contemporary, the organic and the artifice.
Every time you write a poem, you're learning to become a poet once again. Your writing imitates not the banal sequence from life to death, but instead imitates a descent into and out of a new womb of clarity.
Poetry Wire continues its exploration of how one might become a poet in the modern world, how one traverses between the creative realm and daily experience.
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