## Metadata - Author: [[Craig Morgan Teicher]] - Full Title: We Begin in Gladness - Category: #books ## Highlights - Poets are word fetishists, among other things, and their grounding belief is that language is humankind’s greatest technology, inexhaustible, endlessly adaptable, a mirror of a poet’s own time and, hopefully, of the endless unfolding of all time. ([Location 78](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GDDP7HB&location=78)) - Though it seems, at first, like an art of speaking, poetry is an art of listening. The poet trains to hear clearly and, as much as possible, without interruption, the voice of the mind, the voice that gathers, packs with meaning, and unpacks the language the poet knows. It can take a long time to learn to let this voice speak without getting in its way. This slow learning, the growth of this habit of inner attentiveness, is poetic development, and it is the substance of the poet’s art. Of course, this growth is rarely steady, never linear, and is sometimes not actually growth but diminishment—that’s all part of the compelling story of a poet’s way forward. ([Location 91](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GDDP7HB&location=91))