Looking back, I think I was too green to have more than an inkling of what I was reading. But that intimation — naive, inarticulate, confounding — approached the mystical. And I’m still after that as a reader, the place where meaning shimmers like a heat-haze over the world’s everyday presence; seeming, at once, to rise from the details of our lives and to exist beyond them; to almost and nearly say who we are, and why. Which seems to be as much as the world is willing to offer by way of explanation.
- Michael Crummey, on his first encounters with poetry, from his essay "Afterwords: An Introduction to Poetry" in the Spring 2015 issue (#134) of The New Quarterly. You can read the whole (retitled) thing here.