Ends of Calm Looking, Hearing, Feeling

Poetry always involves a motion toward reality on every level. The word manifests our situation, to ourselves and afterwards to others, and in poetry the word most nearly approaches its own reality. A poem, once created, stands before us as an enigmatic being which reveals that expression is a phenomenon of presence: its nature is not so much informative as sacramental. Like beings, words communicate not by imparting facts-about but by participating in the reality to which they also allude. The sector from which the poem emerges is that of the human: but at the same time it is composed of the human’s background and beyond, all the threads drawn from all aspects of being to make up the human person, just as all the elements and forces of nature compose the human body.