light to see by

The poem…is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life.

—Robert Penn Warren, Saturday Review (March 22, 1958)

window moment

Many good poems have a kind of window-moment in them—they change their direction of gaze in a way that suddenly opens a broadened landscape of meaning and feeling. Encountering such a moment, the reader breathes in some new infusion, as steeply perceptible as any physical window's increase of light, scent, sound, or air. The gesture is one of lifting, unlatching, releasing; mind and attention swing open to new-peeled vistas.

—Jane Hirshfield, "Close Reading: Windows," Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.)

perfectly cracked

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything—
that's how the light gets in.

—Leonard Cohen, from “Anthem”

mise en scène

Mise en scène is a French term and originates in the theater. It means, literally, "put in the scene." For film, it has a broader meaning, and refers to almost everything that goes into the composition of the shot, including the composition itself: framing, movement of the camera and characters, lighting, set design and general visual environment, even sound as it helps elaborate the composition. Mise-en-scène can be defined as the articulation of cinematic space, and it is precisely space that it is about.
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Mise en scène is a useful term when thinking about imagery in poetry and how the visualized environment is arrayed and apprehended via the resources of language. [JF]
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