Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.
Interpretation
Poetry connects people by allowing individuals to experience and share in the suffering and passion of others.
In this quote, Mary Karr highlights the transformative power of poetry, comparing it to the act of communion in the Eucharist. She suggests that poetry allows readers to absorb the feelings and struggles of others, creating a deep sense of community and shared experience through the art of words. This sharing not only fosters empathy but also unites people through their collective emotional experiences.
In practice
During a poetry reading event, I shared this quote to express the power of poetic connection.
There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.
Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.
Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.
What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.
Now I really make the little idea from clay, and I hold it in my hand. I can turn it, look at it from underneath, see it from one view, hold it against the sky, imagine it any size I like, and really be in control almost like God creating something.
Music must awaken people to do their duty as citizens and act.
I wanted my dad to be proud of me, and I fell into acting because there wasn't anything else I could do, and in it I found a discipline that I wanted to keep coming back to, that I love and I learn about every day.
If you shoot with a billion cameras, then there's no perspective. You want to use one shot at a time, so it's better to discover what that is before you shoot, rather than trying to make something in the cutting room, and then it just becomes generic.
All architecture has a public nature, I believe, so I would like to make a public space.
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