Robert Duncan |
What I call the Divine is what I begin to divine in the poem…. The dream, the dance, the falling-in-love, and the poem seem to me of one kind. A seizure, given to us, overcoming the pose of the ego, commanding us to attend the need, enthralling us in the spell of a form we must achieve. To be a poet is to be prepared for that seizure, to have learned in the hand all the command one has of language, to have a tongue that is ready and true to the heart so that speech may come when the mind is not yours.
—qtd. in Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus, by Lisa Jarnot (pp. 228-229)
Reading this, I think immediately of the line by Pindar that Duncan quoted at the beginning of "A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar":<br /><br /><i>the light foot hears you and the brightness begins</i>