Friday October 29, 2021; 10:40 AM EDT
- Poets know that muses rarely deliver polished work.#
- Many ways to say it, but our best thinking usually requires revision, and we need habits of mind and composing tools that incline toward rethinking and revision.#
- People sometimes ask poets to help us all imagine a better world (into existence). Denise Levertov's poem "Making Peace" honors those requests by trying to pin down what that would entail.#
. . . But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can't be imagined before it is made,
can't be known except
in the words of its making . . .
#- I believe she's asserting that we don't usually just think of a new idea. Instead, we think our way to a new idea, only really knowing it by doing the work of finding the words. That's why we need to incline ourselves toward revision, I'd say.#
- Another way of putting the urgency of all this talk of revision: As a society, what we're doing now isn't working. The ideas we're using now aren't working. The sentences we speak now aren't working. #