Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful ...
like a bouillon cube: You carry it around and then it nourishes you when you need it.
~ Rita Dove, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize Winner
GLASS
Words of a poem should be glass
But glass so simple-subtle its shape
Is nothing but the shape of what it holds.
A glass spun for itself is empty,
Brittle, at best Venetian trinket.
Embossed glass hides the poem or its absence.
Words should be looked through, should be windows.
The best word were invisible.
The poem is the thing the poet thinks.
If the possible were not,
And if the glass, only the glass,
Could be removed, the poem would remain.
— Robert Francis
Poet's Corner
