February 23, 2019 · 8:07 am
“Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?… And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
Few cups hold life more sturdily and splendidly than poetry. Understanding the wellspring of magic that grants the poetic form its power can only be done, must only be done, by plumbing the deepest groundwater from which all great art springs and tracing the rivulets that slake the most eternal thirsts of the human spirit.
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That is what Jane Hirshfield, who composes poems of contemplative beauty and unquiet wakefulness and who has limned the inner work of creativity with uncommon insight, accomplishes in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (public library). She frames the guiding spirit of her inquiry:
“How do poems — how does art — work? Under that question, inevitably, is another: How do we?”
Filed under Study
Tagged as Poetry
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