Some people are led to the writing of poetry - or to painting, dance or music - on the promise that it will allow them to "express themselves." Insofar as you are a part of the older, richer, larger and more knowledgeable whole we call the world, and insofar as you are a student or apprentice of that world, expressing yourself may be worth the time and trouble. But if it is really only your self that you are interested in, I venture to think that performing someone else's poem - reciting it or reading it aloud - is likely better medicine that writing. Poetry, like science, is a way of finding out - by trying to state perceptively and clearly - what exists and what is going on. That is too much for the self to handle. That is why, when you go to work for the poem, you give yourself away. Composing a poem is a way of leaving the self behind and getting involved in something larger.
- Robert Bringhurst, from his lecture "Poetry and Thinking," delivered to Luther College, University of Regina in 2001 and published in Thinking and Singing: Poetry & the Practice of Philosophy (ed. Tim Lilburn, Cormorant Books, 2002).
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