We could easily have evolved eyelids thick enough to keep out the light, but we still need to see the shadows fall across them. We're not yet safe.

The poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself ... Poetry is therefore primarily a commemorative act.

This capacity for oversignifying, for reading in, is precisely what poets tap into, both in their own practice and in the poem the give to the reader; and in doing so they turn language against its own project of conceptual division, and use it to heal itself - and in the process - paradoxically - to articulate new concepts that it can't yet accommodate.

Mediocre art is far worse than bad art. Bad art does not waste our time.

Lakoff's idea is that most of our thought is guided by underlying conceptual mappings between two domains that share some content, that overlap in the sets of their attributes. ... Contrary to the assertions of Lakoff and some of the cognitive metaphor theorists, people can read through to an underlying mapping, but only when the surface metaphor is new to them.

Inconveniently, books are all the pages in them, not just the ones you choose to read.

So we start with an oversignifying reader. Those texts that appear to reward this reader for this additional investment - text that we find exceptionally suggestive, apposite, or musical - are usually adjudged to be 'poetic'. ... The work of the poet is to contribute a text that will firstly invite such a reading; and secondly reward such a reading.