Journal

Reflectors

"That's something poetry can do for you..."

Jeffrey Overstreet

15 Nov 2017 • 1 min read

Filed under: Journal • Art and Entertainment • Poetry • Quotable • Seamus Heaney

I thinkthe poet who didn’t feel the pressureat a politically difficult timewould be eitherstupid orinsensitive. …Debate doesn’t really change things.It gets you bogged in deeper.If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle,then there is some hope. …People are suddenly gazingat something else andpausingfor a moment.And for the duration of that gaze and pause,they are likereflectorsof the totalityof their own knowledgeand/or ignorance.That’s something poetry can do for you,it canentrance youfor a momentabove the poolof your own consciousness andyour ownpossibilities.

(Seamus Heaney in an interview in The Paris Review)