corner of your eye

Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye. You can be too well prepared for poetry. A conscientious interest in it is worse than no interest at all....It's like a very faint star. If you look straight at it you can't see it, but if you look a little to one side it is there.

—William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl (U. of Michigan Press, 1978)