Mary Oliver
I have been reading Mary Oliver's handbook to poetry and this was one of the many underlinings I made.
I am a fairly concrete writer, and one of my challenges with poetry is to abstract a notion, to find ways to have a reader understand something that isn't simply told. To find a way for folk to discover a beautiful thing, by way of metaphor and abstraction.
Most of the time I am far too direct.
Here I think she is trying to say that poetry isn't just the words - it is somehow within the words, a small or precious notion that the words wrap around and suggest. That poetry is there, more with the feelings, associations and expressions of the words, than in the direct meaning of the words themselves.
The beginning of a public art poem by Evi Westmore, in Inverness.
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