How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.

A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.

Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it's always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn't work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence.

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds.

Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.