Introduction

      I. The Place of Poetry

      I have not extirpated all sentimental attachment from my affections, God help me. Eight now mine tend to collect with lapidary precision around a particular spot on earth, 45 degrees latitude, 67 degrees longitude, where all the addresses end with a ME and an US.

      But it is not THAT sense of place, the place of sentimental attachments, the place of literal topographies, I hold poetry answerable to. To be frank, the inevitable panel discussion on the “poetry of place” bores me: it takes place too literally.

      Poems take place as time takes it; and they address their object as an attention does. The place of poetry is nothing less than the place of love, for language; the place of shifting ground, for human song; the place of the made, for the moving. Like other loves it cannot be free of the terrible; it is barely dictable at times, certainly not predictable. It verges on unguaranteed domains: the unsayable, even the unspeakable. The place of the poem is the place of our homelessness, our groundlessness. A poem is untoward.

      In the field of positions, a passionate position is like a held fire. Robert Creeley opens “The Window” with the line “Position is where you put it…” Given the fire of language, exposition is (etymologically speaking) where you put it out.

      Exposition means to mean, mainly. Its language intends to dissolve in the service of its meaning. Exposition's means is its invisibility: it aims elsewhere; you look through it at its object. Exposition is a very windexed window.

      It is not itself the place where its ends are inscribed: its means mean nothing, next to its ends. It does not give itself as evidence, as inscription (or conscription); at its closest to its object, it offers description.

      That is why poetry is not exposition. It is the place that suffers inscription. It bears the mark or scar of what was seen and what was grasped. Its hand is script (felt, hammered, or quilled). Its eye cannot disappear in service: it fills with shades and shines. Everything moves in it (as everything moves in the mind); its glass is not transparent but is the sign of the seer's own slant. It takes upon itself, into itself, what it sees; the song is of insight. Whether out of joy or grief, it sings us in, and as it does, we are moved—from explication to implication, from ex-to im-position.

      For poetry is imposition and self-exposure, urgency and deferral. Its act is tenacious: and its hold can hurt. In me, that hurting place is locable moreorless where God used to be; but you must remember how illocable that is.

      The window of Creeley's “The Window” is a place where we hold the world, a place where we take in what took us in. It is a window that can weep (it's an eye), a window that can be beaten (it's a heart); it is a changeable, a perishable place. Poetry isn't made to make you forget the insecurity of its status, or our own: it is not for burying the terror, salving the sorrow, buying a balm. No salesman's music or easy analgesic, it is not in the comforter business. For its regards are not formalities: they require us to notice what we might otherwise most wish to overlook. Imagination isn't needed, says Valéry, to see what isn't; it is needed to see what is. That's what we most deeply miss.

      The position of poetry is THAT imposition: it requires you to face the difficulty, the unfathomability, of your life. When Rilke writes “You must change…,” you feel the force of that embrace. It's merciless. Says Creeley, “I can feel my eye breaking.” That brokenness, the broken