I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
Interpretation
A poem's essence transcends explanation, aiming to evoke deep recognition rather than clarity.
A. R. Ammons emphasizes that poetry cannot be confined to rigid definitions or purposes. Instead, the true impact of poetry lies in its ability to elicit visceral emotions and experiences that cannot be verbalized, suggesting that the recognition of a poem's worth comes from an internal, almost primal understanding, rather than intellectual analysis.
In practice
During a literary discussion, one might use this quote to illustrate the profound nature of poetry.
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.
If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.
For though we often need to be restored to the small, concrete, limited, and certain, we as often need to be reminded of the large, vague, unlimited, unknown
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.
Art is the gift of God, and must be used unto His glory. That in art is highest which aims at this.
All architecture has a public nature, I believe, so I would like to make a public space.
At root, a pearl is a 'disturbance' a beauty caused by something that isn't supposed to be there, about which something needs to be done. It is the interruption of equilibrium that creates beauty. Beauty is a response to provocation, to intrusion. ... The pearl's beauty is made as a result of insult.
works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.
A friend of my mother's, Irene Lopez, was a Spanish dancer. She saw me bopping around the room and said to my mother, 'Rosita might have talent. Can I take her to my dance teacher?' There was no thought of a career at that time, but I knew I loved the attention, and that's so much a part of being a performer.
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