Minding the Gap
Contrapuntal Poems and Silence
When I’m composing poetry–contrapuntal, lyrical, or narrative, I often keep in mind the role of silence. Compression forces us to leave out so much– and for good reason. Jane Hirshfield says that silence is essential to any poem– she points us to Japanese masters such as Issa or Basho, and writes in her book Nine Gates: “Poetry’s fertility lives in the marriage of said and unsaid, of languaged self and unlanguaged other, of the knowable world and the gravitational pull of what lies beyond knowing.”
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