Up: [[Poetry]] Created: 2025-09-13 Updated: 2026-03-04 > [!Orbit] Octavia Paz > Between what I see and what I say, > between what I say and what I keep silent, > between what I keep silent and what I dream, > between what I dream and what I forget: > poetry. > [!Orbit] Ted Hughes in *Poetry in the Making* > Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously… just look at it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves like magic. You do not look at the words either. You keep your eyes, your ears, your taste, your touch, your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and words about them…Then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. > [!Orbit] T.S. Eliot > Poets dislocate language into meaning > [!Orbit] [[David Whyte]] > Poetry is a language against which we have no defences. > [!Orbit] Hafiz > A poet is someone who can pour light into a cup, then raise it to nourish your beautiful parched, holy mouth. > [!Orbit] Louise Glück in *American Originality: Essays on Poetry* > Poetry survives because it haunts, and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious, because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted. (p. 162) > [!Orbit] Carl Sandberg > Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance. > [!Orbit] John Keats > A poem needs understanding through the [[Senses]]. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake; to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.