What Poets Do

There are some wonderful passages to lift from Guy Davenport The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays. One occurs in "Spinoza's Tulips" [an essay on Wallace Stevens] where the world nourishes the work of cogitation:

[O]nce it is understood [...] Stevens's use of landscape in practically every poem can be seen as the mundus eternally feeding the mind, the vital and proper traffic between reality and the imagination.

And that ethereal connection gets translated into a cornucopia in "Jonathan Williams"

The poet in our time does what poets have always done, given a tongue to dumbness, celebrated wonderments, complained of the government, told tales, found sense where none was to be perceived, found nonsense where we thought there was sense; in short, made a world for the mind (and occasionally the body too) to inhabit.

And to belabour succinctly I repurpose this quotation from Clint Burnham Be Labour Reading

a UFO lands and
we fight to give it
tourist brochures

As mundane as they may be "tourist brochures" take skill to write (and often to read). It's what poets do.

And so for day 901
01.06.2009