I’ve been contemplating a Bachelard quotation:

“The imagination is not, as its etymology suggests, the faculty for forming images of reality; it is the faculty for forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality. […] Primal poetry, poetry that allows us a taste of our inner destiny, is an adherence to the invisible. It give us the sense of youth and youthfulness by constantly replenishing our ability to be amazed. True poetry is a function of awakening.”

—Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay On the Imagination of Matter (Volume One in The Bachelard Translation Series, The Pegasus Foundation, The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture), p. 16.

Small wonder that poetry has such a small audience in a nation like ours, with its addiction to “reality” TV and the anxiety it seems to feel at the prospect of not being allowed to stay “asleep in the outward,” to borrow a phrase from Jacob Boehme (via Robert Bly—see Silence in the Snowy Fields).