Deconstructive Subjectivities Book

The poet is incited to create a work that can outdistance time and surmount distance, that can bridge the gulf ' the chasm ' between people otherwise unknown to each other. It can survive changes of language and in language, changes in social norms and customs, the ravages of history. [...] The reader completes the poem, in the process bringing to it his or her own past experiences. You are reading poetry ' I mean really reading it'when you feel encountered and changed by a poem, when you feel its seismic vibrations, the sounding of your depths.
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We discover in poetry that we are participating in something which cannot be explained or apprehended by reason or understanding alone. We participate in the imaginary. We create a space for fantasy, we enter our dream life, dream time. We deepen our breathing, our mindfulness to being, our spiritual alertness.
Poetry is an animating force. It comes alive when the poet magically inscribes a wave and thereby creates a new thing, when the text immobilizes it, when the individual poem becomes part of the great sea, when the bottle washes ashore and the wanderer happens upon it, when the reader experiences its inexhaustible depths . . .