Poetic Inquiry Quotes

Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky! Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound? Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?

I'm asking questions that most people are asking, but just putting a melody or a song to it.

I write poetry to figure things out. Any time I’m trying to wrap my head around something, poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me.

What is there in thee, Moon! That thou should'st move My heart so potently?

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

There are a lot of poems where I am questing for God. I don't think there is any finding of God.

But where are the snows of last year? That was the greatest concern of Villon, the Parisian poet.

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

Blue thou art, intensely blue; Flower, whence came thy dazzling hue?

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.

I write poems to find out why I write them

I define poetry as celebration and confrontation. When we witness something, are we responsible for what we witness? That's an on-going existential question. Perhaps we are and perhaps there's a kind of daring, a kind of necessary energetic questioning. Because often I say it's not what we know, it's what we can risk discovering.

Poets, if they're genuine, must keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvre.

For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.

I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.