Ardor and the Abyss

From James Longenbach at The Nation…

What makes a human being make a poem? Why does the language we employ every day—language suited equally as well to thank-you notes or parking tickets—ask to be liberated from its more workaday chores, its rhythmic vitality threatening to overpower its capacity for plain sense? Why do readers enjoy the feeling of being overpowered? We don’t reread great novels or poems because we can’t remember the story; we reread because we want to feel our familiar world becoming strange again.

A friend of your brother sends you a gift, a painting of Indian Pipes, which is your favorite flower. You write a thank-you note: “I know not how to thank you.” Because your brother’s wife is your closest friend, you have refused to meet the bearer of the gift: you know, as most people do not, that your brother’s friend is in fact his mistress. You know this because their assignations have taken place in your own house, in the dining room, on a black horse-hair sofa in front of the fire. The assignations have been facilitated by your sister, with whom you share the house your grandfather built. Your brother, his wife and their three children live next door in a house your father built for them. More…