essential things

Yeats saw the things of this world differently; he was an essentialist. In the men and the women he knew—both those he loved and those he hated—as well as in swans, hares, swords, and towers, he spied some changeless and irreducible essence. He was a Realist in the medieval sense. He believed that universals are real, that those abstract terms by which we categorize entities—Man or Woman, Beauty or Liberty, Swan or Goose—possess the fullest measure of genuine existence in sone suprasensual realm, and that the earthly embodiments of these transcendent archetypes are but momentary instantiations.

—Eric Ormsby, “Passionate Syntax,” Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (The Porcupine Quill, 2011)

begins in conflict

A poet's life begins in conflict with the whole of existence.

—Søren Kierkegaard

not luxury

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

—Audre Lorde, “Mapping,” Lofty Dogmas (U. of Arkansas Press, 2005), edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxim Kumin