“Be still not only in the room where you write, but in the place where you live, coming to know it by your unknowing relationship with it. In this way you will come to know the world.”
Wesley McNair
Making a poem intimate and individual but, ultimately, universal carries with it that sense of imaginative achievement which is a primary factor in life and in art. Equally vital is a need to have an uncharted relationship with the stillness of the place where the writing occurs.
Every poem is an enactment. As it unfolds, it suggests multiple meanings which can never be fully fathomed, although the poet cannot impede its true impulse.
There is never an answer in a poem, but the poet and the reader are there to discover what they did not know they knew, and to use that knowledge as a compass bearing.
Irene Mitchell
