Every poem is an island. To get to a poem requires sailing out from the mainland of routine language. Some poems are close to shore, others much further away; on every island it is possible to feel remote and at home. A poem is defined by the rugged shore of its right-hand margin, cutting it off from prose…All poems are connected, most simply through the shared cosmopolis of verse.
‘Verse’ means ‘turning’. Some of the ancients likened verse to the movement of oxen as they ploughed a furrow, then wheeled round to plough the next. In this sense every maker of verse is a ploughman poet, breaking open a field of silence. On its little journey, each verse line leads silence into sound, sound into silence. Unlike prose, verse marks a birth and death between every line and the next. Any line, at its centre, its wee acoustic cosmopolis, is moving from margin to margin, sea to sea. It is alert to the back of beyond.
Poetry, so central to human experience, always tends to gravitate beyond the end of the line. The poet winkingly truncates Wittgenstein: ‘About which we cannot speak we must.’
From Cosmopolibackofbeyondism found in Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (W.N. Herbert & Matthew Hollis (ed.), Bloodaxe Books; 2000)
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