7/24

i've been reading this book for a while
today everything made sense
so many loose ends got tied together


"The poet wants to drink from the well of origin: to write the poem that has not yet been written. In order to enter this level of originality, the poet must reach beyond the chattering voices that people the surface of a culture. Furthermore, the poet must reach deeper inward; go deeper than the private hoard of voices down to the root-voice. It is here that individuality has the taste of danger, vitality and vulnerability. Here the creative is not forced or appropriated from elsewhere. Here creativity has the necessity of inevitability; this is the threshold where imagination engages raw, unformed experience. This is the sense you have when you read a true poem. You know it could not be other than it is. Its self and its form are one, There is nothing predictable here. For the poet there is a sense of frightening vulnerability, for anything can come, anything can happen. The unknown outside and the unknown interior can conceive anything. The poet becomes the passing womb for something that wants to be born, wants to become visible and wants to live independently in the world. A true poem has a fully formed autonomous individuality."

John O'Donohue
Beauty: The Invisible Embrace