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According to Shklovsky, artistic texts use the exact same language as texts designed primarily to convey information, but do something different with it. The specific mechanism by which language becomes not merely a conduit to convey meaning, but something more, is called, in Russian, “ostraneniye,…

Whether or not the poet knew all this about the word “corridor,” I very much doubt she was consciously aware of it while writing this poem. When a poet writes, she feels instinctively if a word is correct. She could easily have written other words there: the daffodils could have brought themselves …

Reading poetry has the salutary effect on me of forcing me to read, and think, at a different pace than the rest of my life demands.

create a great penumbra of imagined difficulty and mystification throughout the whole poem

Language waits to be released in poetry. Poetry enacts the possibilities and powers that lie dormant in the nature of language itself. Poems are where contradictions and possibilities of the material of this meaning-making system are deliberately brought forth and celebrated, ultimately undistrac…