[New-Poetry] Books a poet should own...

[JforJames at aol.com]

Wisdom & Metaphor
by Jan Zwicky
Gaspereau Press (Canada)
_http://www.gaspereau.com/1894031784.shtml_ 
(http://www.gaspereau.com/1894031784.shtml) 
 
A large compendium of quotes by poets and philosophers and  mathematicians
centering on the topic of metaphor.  Zwicky responds to their  assertions 
with answers
of her own. If you can find it, buy her earlier book _Lyric  Philosophy_, as 
well. Which 
has even more illustrations and musical notation than are in this  book. 
Wisdom &
Metaphor will remind you of deep beauty of math...which most of  us lost 
sight of somewhere 
before our finals in Algebra II. Two quotes fromt her book...
 
The phenomenological power of both metaphor and  thisness derives from an 
awareness of an extreme tension between being  and time. Thisness is the lyric 
comprehension of this tension; an instant  of time opens to embrace the 
resonance of all that is; time is present, but  suspended—held in balance. Metaphor, 
by contrast, is a from of domestic  understanding: wholeness overrides 
morality, but does not erase it. The  distinction of things remains the foundation of 
their resonant connexion. In  metaphor, gestalts glitter: those inflected by 
being and those inflected by  time, flashing back and forth over the hinge of 
what is common. 
–Jan Zwicky, Wisdom and Metaphor, #67
 
To defend poetry means to defend a fundamental gift of human nature,
that is, our capacity...to experience astonishment and to stop still  in
that astonishment for an extended moment or two.
 
--Adam Zagajewski, Another Beauty, translated by Clare Cavenaugh
 
Anny, that would be a good one for "Why poetry exists?" quote  category. 
 
Finnegan
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