From Muriel Rukeyser, a little something for us all to munch on today ….

“The relations of poetry are, for our period, very close to the relations of science. It is not a matter of using the results of science, but of seeing that there is a meeting-place between all the kinds of imagination.  Poetry can provide that meeting-place.

“… a poem is not its words or its images, any more than as symphony is its notes or a river its drops on water.  Poetry depends on the moving relations within itself.  It is an art that lives in time, expressing and evoking the moving relations between the individual consciousness and the world.  The work that a poem does is a transfer of human energy, and I think human energy may be defined as consciousness, the capacity to make change in existing conditions.  It appears to me that to accept poetry in these meanings would make it possible for people to use it as an “exercise,” an enjoyment of the possibility of dealing with the meanings in the world and in their lives.”

Notes from the author, The Life of Poetry (recommended), Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), American poet and political activist