https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/why-i-write
“My interest can be defined by at least part of Charles Reznikoff‘s characterization of his poetry: “images clear but the meaning not stated but suggested by the objective details and the music of the verse.” As a reader, I look for such clarity of image and phrase, for a rhythmic pulse and a rich verbal texture, for a sense of shape and coherence even in the midst of apparent fracture. As a writer, I try to provide these things. But an overall “meaning” or “interpretation” isn’t the first or the main thing I seek, as either reader or writer. “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have one” (Stevens 914). Attend to the senses and sense will often attend to itself.
I respond to urgency, to a sense of felt necessity, to passion. The word passion derives from the Greek for “suffering, experience, emotion.” The word itself summons up the poem as an experience undergone by the writer and the reader alike. Passion is not just a passion for my lover or for botany or for history, but a passion for words, a passionate struggle to try to create verbal experience that would be as real as the rest of the world. Stevens insisted that “In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all” (902). Like any object of love, that also means that the poem will resist its creator, just as the world resists us. The struggle such passion entails is both joyous and painful. As Stevens also famously wrote, “Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully” (910). Of course, that presumes both an intelligence to be resisted and an intelligence that resists. The poet, the poem, and the reader must all be as intelligent as possible.”
How my heart sings 