## Metadata - Author: [[Edward Hirsch]] - Full Title: How to Read a Poem - Category: #books ## Highlights - Rhythm is a form cut into time, as Ezra Pound said in ABC of Reading. ([Location 447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEQ&location=447)) - Like stanzas in a book / Or golden scales in the melodic brook.”—James ([Location 506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEQ&location=506)) - “Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will,” Shelley writes in his romantic defense of poetry:   A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness. ([Location 544](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEQ&location=544)) - In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino makes an insightful comment that enlarges on Cavalcanti’s lines, creating a statement about the experience of literature itself:   all “realities” and “fantasies” can take on form only by means of writing, in which outwardness and innerness, the world and I, experience and fantasy, appear composed of the same verbal material. The polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit are contained in uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses—pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-sided spectacle of the world as a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind.   I am reminded by Calvino’s description of the literal limits of art: that all the incitement and grace of literature has to take place in the lineup of written characters on the page. ([Location 581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEQ&location=581)) - Poetry alerts us to what is deepest in ourselves—it arouses a spiritual desire which it also gratifies. It attains what it avows. But it can only do so with the reader’s imaginative collaboration and even complicity. The writer creates through words a felt world which only the reader can vivify and internalize. Writing is embodiment. Reading is contact. In the preface to Obra poetica, Jorge Luis Borges writes:   The taste of the apple (states Berkeley) lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way (I would say) poetry lies in the meeting of the poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading. ([Location 590](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEQ&location=590)) - Borges continues on to suggest that poetry can work its magic by fulfilling our profound need to “recover a past or prefigure a future.” ([Location 596](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEQ&location=596)) - Poetry depends on the mutuality of writer and reader. The symbols on the page alone are insufficient. Borges was a fabulist and in the foreword to his first book of poems he went even further to suggest that poetry goes beyond mutuality, beyond identification, into identity itself:   If in the following pages there is some successful verse or other, may the reader forgive me the audacity of having written it before him. We are all one; our inconsequential minds are much alike, and circumstances so influence us that it is something of an accident that you are the reader and I the writer—the unsure, ardent writer—of my verses. ([Location 597](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEQ&location=597)) - Tags: [[favorite]] [[poetry]] - Open the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics to the entry for “Poesie” and you discover that in the Renaissance the word makers, as in “courtly makers,” was an exact equivalent for poets. The word poem became English in the sixteenth century and it has been with us ever since to designate a form of fabrication, a type of composition, a made thing. ([Location 632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEQ&location=632)) - What Picasso said about painting being more than an aesthetic operation is equally true of poetry. He declared that art is “a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.” ([Location 635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEQ&location=635))