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