a recipe for its own reenactment

I myself don’t make that strong a distinction between looking at poetry as a writer and as a reader. Every serious writer needs also to read alertly, with a real depth of attention—both her or his own work, and the work of others; and every act of reading a poem is a recreation of the original energies of its writing—that is what a poem is: not a record of thought, experience, emotion, realization, but a recipe for its own reenactment.

- Jane Hirschfield, from an interview with Frogpond Journal about her 2011 essay The Heart of Haiku. You can read the whole interview here.