Presence.

When you hear a stone dislodge itself from the high river bluffs and watch it tumble down to rest again, or when the pine branches move slightly in the winter breeze, or when you hear the late winter ice fringe on the river swish and hiss quietly as it breaks up in the current, you know each of these events, together with the human response to it, contains a poem, a complete artistic occurrence. You don’t need to do anything to it. In fact, you have to resist adding. The poet’s job, then, becomes containing that event and its aura of feeling succinctly, without insertions of wordplay or cogitation. The whole task is that of conveying the individual atmosphere present. Often this aura is so delicate and indefinably itself that while the poet can sometimes tell if he has caught it, he doesn’t know what it is he has caught. He simply recognizes its presence. It always lies beyond the image presented—in the escaping hints of implication of the image.

Paul O. Williams

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