a brighter word than bright

  

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Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another's ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear's labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve's realm. 

The written word unfolds behind the eye into the world, world's image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see - thoughtfully.


—Dan Beachy-Quick

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A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

—Jorge Luis Borges
This Craft of Verse

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In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: 

a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out 

and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

—Czesław Miłosz
Ars Poetica

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In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

—Rumi

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