Poet Jane Hirshfield said "... the feeling I have about poem-writing (is) that it is always an exploration, of discovering something I didn't already know. Who I am shifts from moment to moment, year to year. What I can perceive does as well. A new poem peers into mystery, into whatever lies just beyond the edge of knowable ground."
I bring a different poem to the writing classes each week, not only to inspire but to introduce new poets to the group members.
Writing by Howard Nemerov
The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters these by themselves delight, even without a meaning, in a foreign language, in Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve all day across the lake, scoring their white records on ice. Being intelligible, these winding ways with their audacities and delicate hesitations, they become miraculous, so intimately, out there at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist balance against great skeletons of stars exactly; the blind bat surveys his way by echo alone. Still, the point of style is character. The universe induces a different tremor in every hand, from the check-forger's to that of the Emperor Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on. Miraculous. It is as though the world were a great writing. Having said so much, let us allow there is more to the world than writing: continental faults are not bare convoluted fissures in the brain. Not only must the skaters soon go home; also the hard inscription of their skates is scored across the open water, which long remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake. ~ from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov University of Chicago Press, 1981