She liked to say that poems are meeting-places, and certainly as one composes a poem there is a sense of seeing farther than usual into the connections of things, and then of bringing intense pressure to bear on those connections, until they rise into full consciousness for oneself and others. The farther out along the frontiers of awareness the original elements of the poem lie, or the more deeply they are hidden, the more strenuous the poet's task and the more essential the poem. Its order and music must be such as to create a new whole.

Choose your poet here. Or rather, do not choose. But remember what happened to you when you came to your poem, any poem whose truth overcame all inertia in you at that moment, so that your slow mortality took its proper place, and before it the light of a new awareness was not something new, but something you recognized.

That is the multiple time-sense in poetry, that is the ever new, which is recognized as something already in ourselves, but not discovered.

[...] Dead power is everywhere among us - in the forest, chopping down the songs; at night in the industrial landscape, wasting and stiffening the new life; in the street of the city, throwing away the day. We wanted something different for our people; not to find ourselves an old, reactionary republic, full of ghost-fears, the fears of death and the fears of birth. We want something else.

Let me tell some of the childhood elements that have come into these pages, into this night with its intense side-long moon and the fast seafog flying over the city, this brilliant day with its unique light in the streets and parks, its light shed down to the Bay and to the red bridge, the hours sloping again to evening, when I knew I must write these words to you.