In a Transtromer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things, even concepts, are alive.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on how poetry alters one's perception of existence, merging the physical and conceptual realms.
In this quote, Teju Cole highlights the transformative power of poetry, particularly in the work of poet Tomas Tranströmer. It suggests that through poetry, individuals experience reality in a more profound way, where bodies and minds shift into new forms, and objects and abstract ideas come alive, encouraging deeper connections to the world around us.
In practice
This quote can be used to inspire students during a poetry workshop.
The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it reflects my reading.
The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
I'm not trying to be a poet on Twitter; I'm trying to be aware of the fact that a very simple sentence, well written, can have a very moving effect without that person knowing why. There's a deep genetic part of you that somehow, even without your permission, recognizes good language when it arrives.
To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.
We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
We are people with lives, not consumers with lifestyles.
Equality and self-determination should never be divided in the name of religious or ideological fervor.
Life is. I am. Anything might happen. And I believe I may invest my life with meaning. The uncertainty is a blessing in disguise. If I were absolutely certain about all things, I would spend my life in anxious misery, fearful of losing my way. But since everything and anything are always possible, the miraculous is always nearby and wonders shall never, ever cease.
Jim Crow segregation was bipartisan. The refusal of women suffrage was bipartisan. The denial of the basic dignity of members of the LGBTQ community has long been bipartisan. The Three-Fifths Compromise was the creation of a punitive national unity at the expense of black people's basic humanity.
I firmly believe that when you die you will enter immediately into another life. They who have gone before us are alive in one form of life and we in another.
The things of this world take up too much of my time, of which indeed I have too little left, to undertake anything like a reformation in religion.
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